Difficulties with sleeping and waking up ?

Good evening everyone,

I told my T that I have severe problems waking up, and we both weren't quite sure if it could be due to dissociation. So I thought I could ask people here for their opinion and experiences, and maybe discover something collectively about dissociative disorders.

Basically, at the moment, I have a lot of difficulty falling asleep and waking up at socionormative times. However, if I follow my own rhythm, I usually go to sleep at approx. 2 am and wake up at noon, or at the last minute where I can meet social obligations. I don't have much difficulty falling asleep when going to bed at 2 am, but waking up can be quite a challenge. It feels like a battle everyday. Sometimes I'll be half-awake, telling myself "I must wake up", and telling the body "Go, move now!" (without success), and sometimes I can register that I'm awake and that's it. I'm often feeling really heavy, as if made of lead. I have put my phone in another room to ensure I must get up and walk to go to it and turn the alarm off. The alarm gets turned off everyday if in my room, although I/we may not hear it when it is in another room since the alarm was not always turned off this week; the phone always stops playing the alarm sound after a few minutes, but the notification stays there if the alarm wasn't turned off manually. It seems like I present many symptoms of delayed-phase sleep disorder (DSPD), but I wondered if other people with dissociative disorders experienced something similar outside of DSPD.

Thank you in advance for your answers !

Yes, I also put my phone far away from the bed so that I have to get up...Doesn't work!

I have strange sleeping patterns too. I always get up several times each night. The closer to the morning the more awake I feel each time I get up and walk around. But when it's actually time to wake up for real...then I'm dead tired....and I cannot get up when the alarm goes on.

I think waking up from sleep is a difficult process because sleep is almost like being unconsciouss. You cannot really control it at will. Suddenly you wake up and realize that you are consciouss again. How on earth could anyone "control" that process at will? Also, dreams make it worse. Dreams give you an illusion that you are awake. And the closer to the morning, the stronger the dreams may get.

Sometimes people with dissociated parts may have issues with sleep if different parts have different rhythm. Especially if some parts get active during the night time. If that happens it may feel like "Hey, why should I go to sleep? I just got up..."

Do you think you have any subconsciouss or passive parts who are afraid of the morning? Sometimes I experience huge difficulties with getting up if traumatized parts are active the first thing in the morning. It causes huge depression that is difficult to deal with at that time of the day.

Yea I can literally put 10 different alarms on my phone, set 5 minutes apart from each other, all of them play death metal music and snooze endlessly, all of them have to be turned off by solving minimum 5 math problems, and all of them can go off simultaneously. I sleep through all of them sometimes, well quite a lot really. At first my battery would run out cause of the alarms so now I keep it plugged in lol.
We also have a big (beep-beep) alarm clock in our bedroom and I sleep through that as well. Although sometimes I have those phases where I wake up at the first sound of the first alarm or even before any of them go off. And yea I can't usually fall asleep that easy lol. I also often have periods in which I wake up throughout the night a lot. I also have times of lots of sleepwalking/night terrors, basically all my sleep patterns shift all the time. Right now I'm at the- difficulty sleeping + nightmares + waking up a lot -phase. There's been times in which I fell asleep at 7.30 pm lol. I can't seem to figure out a pattern/trigger to set off the different patterns but heck there's always so much going on in my mind it might well be any thing.

Hi there


We have terriable time sleeping, just like the others here have said. I have fibromyagia which is also very common with people that have gone through long term abuse. Fibro comes hand in hand with constant fatique, however since we got the DID dx four months ago and all our parts started usng this forum we have noticed a log on trent with the internet on our phone.

We keep our phone next to our head, our parts love to constantly look on the forum and i have noticed that there is repeative log on's through out the nights. Also my littles are triggered by the night time so we are up and down up and down, they also like to eat sweets whilst i am not up front and in control, it calms them any excuse lol. I have also found that one alter will forget and also out of nerve constantly need to go to the loo/ wee. So all in all we are up and down every 45 minutes to and hours all through out the night.


So after 3 years of this , we finally gave up and started sleeping during day light and staying up during dark hours when the others were triggered. Which ment we got sleep.

That's good to know that I'm not alone in having problems with waking up. To my knowledge, I don't wake up often during the time I sleep, although I don't quite remember much about most of my evenings, so maybe it happens and I just don't know.

I have profited of the current week to sleep on a more "natural" (to me) schedule, but that is completely incompatible with any profession.

But yeah, at the moment I feel a lot like "Thank you life, for becoming increasingly even more #######5". Maybe I just have to resign myself because there is nothing I feel I can do ...

We have great difficulties with sleep too. We're so lucky we're no-where near as bad as you in the mornings. Maybe because it's only once or twice a week we actually have to get up at a certain time. Our sleeping pattern changes all the time which is frustrating when trying to arrange to do anything as i don't know if i'll be tired as it's nap time, or wide awake We get a lot of nightmares at the moment (they come and go) so we stay up as long as possible at night and sleep as long as we can in the morning (dad wakes us at midday if we're not up lol). sometimes i have a nap in the day. I've been told to get into a routine as its good for me, but the fear of sleep, lying there not able to sleep, the nightmares, the waking up all night means that i often completely wear myself out and will start falling asleep in front of the tv before i relent and let us go to sleep. Discussing medication with the dr soon and thinking I may try something which will help us sleep

I have weird sleeping patterns as well. Sometimes I sleep at 7am and wake up... Well, it varies. Sometimes I'm sleepy at 10pm already, most of the times, though, I sleep at 1-2am.

And yes, waking up is the problem. Sometimes I can't sleep properly and I don't know why. Then, sometimes I wake up at, for example, 2am, 3am and 4am, and in this last one I can't sleep anymore. Or sometimes I do sleep well, but still, I will wake up at 8am, 9am, and then at 11am, and just then I'm able to actually wake up.

I usually have weird dreams, things that are almost nightmares? But I guess I'm too used to most of them because I don't get anxious with some of them, but there are ones that still freak me out. But lately I'm not able to remember most of my dreams, unless is an actual nightmare.

Alarms doesn't really help at all either.

I thought this was somewhat common, though, but, well, we never have someone to compare those things with.

Hi ! A small update to a now long-buried thread ...

I've woken up from a particularly distressing nightmare today. It is definitely not trauma-related, but I still felt shook up upon waking up after it. I was quite tired yesterday so I went to sleep at approx. 10pm ...

I don't remember having other nightmares recently, but I wonder if the bad quality of my sleep could be from nightmares which I forget afterwards ... Could it be dissociative amnesia in action ?

I have had another nightmare of similar distressing quality about another thing entirely, still not trauma-related, a few months ago, at most 6 months ago.

On the last meeting with the psychiatrist, I suggested investigating more in my sleep issues, but he deemed it "unnecessary" and proposed a sleep pill (again -_-) ...

lifepuzzle wrote:On the last meeting with the psychiatrist, I suggested investigating more in my sleep issues, but he deemed it "unnecessary" and proposed a sleep pill (again -_-) ...

Hi LZ,

I would say that sleep issues do tell a lot about what we're are going through.

Don't know how to read them, though.

However, I would say that investigating more into them would certainly help. I also don't like pills. How about if you have some honey and milk before you sleep?

Sea

I've got to say, this sounds like a pretty normal problem and nothing to do with disassociation.

Look into the circadian rhythm. Our bodies' routines have a lot to with natural light. If you've trained your body to feel tired at a much later time than it naturally wants to sleep, you're going to have these problems. Some people can function with abnormal sleep cycles, but for a lot of us, you are not going to feel rested waking up at noon, no matter how much sleep you had.

But there are other factors as well, like diet, that might come into play in regards to how alert and energetic you generally feel. My point is that I very much doubt you can blame disassociation.

I'd suggest trying to sleep earlier and earlier each night until you break the habit, and then see how you feel with a more conventional cycle. If it does nothing, there's probably a different reason.