Alpha intrusion?

[Lenny]

Hi All,

I had a sleep study done a while back. The strange part is about an hour and 45 minute period that shows I was awake. They didn't show the mixture of wave types in the report just a graph that plots the stages over time. Well, I can say with certainty that I definitely was not awake during that period. Does this sound like alpha intrusion? The only other thing remarkable about the study was that I didn't have that much stage 3 sleep (less than 10% of sleep time) and there was no stage 4 measured.

About a decade ago I started experiencing some strangeness. Especially early in the night, I am sometimes in a very light sleep. It's so light that I'm sort of teetering on the edge of sleep. It's sometimes sort of a weird dream-like state where it's almost like I'm thinking about something specific or working out a problem of some kind, although there is definitely not any useful thought going on. For example, in this weird state I might be thinking about working on a spreadsheet but the thinking is very repetitive and not going much of anywhere. At times I realize I am "asleep" and in this state. Time can skate by and next thing you know I come to and two or three hours have passed. That's when I usually give up and take a pill.

During the sleep study, though, I was not in this semi-conscious state. I don't recall anything during the period they recorded the alpha waves. Most of the time my main problem is unrefreshing sleep.

Does anyone have any ideas about this? I did find some old posts on this board before where someone described something similar to this but I've never been able to dig much up.

I see my GP on Wed. I am going to try to talk him into prescribing lyrica. Not totally confident I will be successful in this endeavor. I like this doc but if he doesn't start listening I might have to find a new one.

The other weird thing about my sleep that's sort of strange is that I ALWAYS have hypnagogic hallucinations as I am falling asleep. In fact, that's how I know that I'm getting close to falling asleep.

Over the past few years I have suffered from fatigue and many of the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. Oddly enough, the better I feel the more trouble I have sleeping. When I'm sicker for weeks or months I'm so exhausted all the time that I have no trouble sleeping, although it's still not refreshing. When I feel somewhat better, like now, I have a lot more energy but need pills a lot to either fall asleep or go back to sleep.

Wondering if anyone else is going through something similar.

[Lenny]

No thoughts on this?

I started Lyrica last week. My doctor agreed that it was a worthy experiment. So far it is going well. The first night did not go well. I felt very strange and disconnected. Tired but could not fall asleep and was very groggy the entire next day. But the second night I had no side effects and felt better the next day. The third day was even better. I feel much more normal so far (normal energy, less brain fog, etc).

I'm only taking 75mg at bed time. No plans to take any during the day.

[Norway]

On just this detail:

[Hamoth]