Very frightening thoughts when trying to sleep...

[Kellan38]

I’m 63, and am currently recovering from a bout of Winter Flu virus that has now kept me off work into this third week.

The physical symptoms of the flu are now, happily, receding, but I picked up an immensely worrying set of side symptoms along the way that are threatening to completely cripple me emotionally and mentally as well as completely wearing me out.

The flu - as well as being the worst I’ve ever had - left me very tired, with the result that I would often want to sleep at any point during the day. This was, I believed, quite normal, and just something that came along with the flu, but then I started to develop some very frightening disturbances to me sleep, that have now become even worse than anything I experienced with the actual flu.

The main problem is that I will decided to have a nap, and whilst all seems fine at first, any background mental images I have will suddenly distort into entirely random things, or any mental chatter that I might hear will suddenly become totally illogical with random words being dropped into my mind and causing me to suddenly wake again and struggle to try to control back of my mind.

I’m now in my second week of this and have been back to the doctors, who have simply put it down to anxiety and stress from the flu virus. I have been given Zopiclone to help me sleep at night, and was also given a low level (2mg) course of Diazepam, too, to try to calm me down throughout the day. However, although the Zopiclone has helped in every respect, the Diazepam didn’t seem to work at all, so I’ve stopped taking it completely now.

It shouldn’t be the case that sleep is something that I fear instead of looking forward to each night, and I am desperate for this to end, and to again have control of my mind. My fear now is that as I have lost control of my mind during sleeping hours I may now see the condition slip over into my waking hours, too, and render me completely insane.

Does anyone have any direct, recent or current experience of anything that sounds like this, and is there anything anyone can say to me that might help.

Any help that anyone could give me would be very gratefully received.

[Hidden]

Yes, that must be very frightening for you! I would look at Zopiclone as the culprit and would discuss this with your doctor ASAP!!! I am on it as well, to use as needed. So far so good for me, but since everyone is affected differently, you might be hyper-sensitive to this medicine.

There are many sleep meds out there.

Good luck!

[deborah27]

yes i have indeed. my suggestion is to 'run into the storm'... it worked for me. at the moment these images and words are controlling you and making you frightened. take the images and words, during the day when you are awake, dressed, fed and watered. get paper and pens and write the words one by one and re-think them. take the fear away and write down 'these are simply words' do the same with the random images, describe them on paper, is there colour or shapes or people? are they as frightening during the day as they are at night? i found that they weren't. now when it happens, i say to myself ' oh, here we go, a night at the movies! just when i need to get to sleep of course! ' these things are for me the manifestation of fatigue, real tiredness and the anxiety this can cause. thoughts and these weird movie reels can't harm us, they are just part of the workings of an over-tired mind. give me one of your words or images and i will write you a poem.