4/25/18 Sleep Paralysis and Interesting Article

I had a terrible case of sleep paralysis last night.  I was kind of half awake/half asleep laying in my bed. Someone was in my house and I was so scared. As hard as I tried, I couldn't move.  I was trying to scream, to wake up my dh but all I could make was this grunting sound because I couldn't move and it felt like my tongue was stuck in my throat. It felt like this went on forever. It was terrifying - someone was in my house and I couldn't do a thing about it.  Of course, I got up and started researching the causes.  Sleep deprivation is surely my cause. I don't think I have gotten more than 5 hours of sleep since last Saturday. This always seems to happen after a hangover and it only takes 3 drinks for me to have a hangover. Just another terrifying reason to quit drinking.

While looking around, I found this:   What It’s Really Like To Be An Alcoholic

I found myself reading about someone who is obviously an alcohol (unlike me) and finding so many similarities.  Some of these are:

Example: An alcoholic gets emotional: angry, sentimental, happy, etcetera. Those emotions emit via diatribes that don’t make sense, like when I got upset at my family because — from my drunk perspective — they didn’t care about the “state of world affairs” and were content to go on living their blissfully ignorant lives, la la la. Did I tell you that this occurred one year on Christmas night? I called my mom a bitch when she told me to shut up already.  The next morning I apologized to everyone, but this kind of damage goes unrepaired, really.

Alcohol withdrawal sucks. Your blood pressure spikes, and if you’re me you can actually feel it. It’s like the blood pumping up my carotid artery and into my brain vibrates against my skull so I hear the pulses in my ears and they won’t go away. You get night sweats. You have insomnia, because you’ve relied on alcohol to put yourself to sleep and either voluntarily or not you’ve now deprived yourself of your “sedative.” You lay awake reading and writing. This is excellent for your productivity, but not so good for getting to work the next day after a sleepless night.

Night terrors: these aren’t nightmares, as you don’t achieve REM sleep. That’s because, as previously mentioned, you cannot sleep. But you sometimes do get into a weird half-awake/half-asleep state in which you think you can see everything in the room in which you lie. The details are extraordinary. There’s the television, the coffee table, the remote. You feel the fabric of the couch beneath you. But you cannot move. You’re paralyzed. And what’s more awful is that you hear the footsteps (someone’s, but whose?) approaching from behind. Then you feel whoever that is touching your shoulder, pushing against you. You’re so goddamn scared because you cannot see who or what this is because you cannot move to see the person or to make him stop, or to get away, or to fight back. Then your eyes snap open to the living room, empty except for you laying there. You return to your book, the lines of prose running by like armies marching east. When you doze, repeat at this paragraph’s beginning. The process continues till morning.

Another thing that sucks is trying to find drinking time. Unfortunately, most people, myself included, are fairly responsible, have jobs and families, and work hard to maintain the personal and professional relationships that help perpetuate these scenarios. Because such work has to be put into such relationships, necessarily that time has not been diverted to drinking. But, if you’re an alcoholic (and don’t go fooling yourself thinking that only true alcoholics are the people who are f-cked up down at the park, in the ragged clothing, homeless, with the red wrinkled faces) then a good portion of your thinking per day goes into how you will get your drink on. You’ll think things like, if I go to the bar today, then I won’t get the emissions test done on the car, but I could get that done tomorrow. I mean, the registration’s already expired, so what does one more day matter? You’ll think: my wife leaves work at 5:30 p.m., so if I’ve got time after I’ve finished teaching, I can stop by the bar for a beer and a shot, then go to the grocery store to pick up the “casual” beers I’ll drink with dinner.

The good news is that there are millions of people like you! Most people can’t fess up to the fact of their alcohol abuse. Your own family is this way: they can’t admit that there’s a history of alcoholism on both your father’s and your mother’s sides, nor can they accept it when you tell them that you have a drinking problem. They say, You have a job! You’re responsible! However, you have at least accepted the truth and you’re able to at look yourself. Hence the sleepless nights: because I try so hard to not drink so much. 

Ok...I just realized I could relate to most of the article.  It either applies to me or I could see it happening not to far in the future.  Scary