NationStates Jolt Archive

A friend of mine is writing a book.One of the main characters in it has insomnia and she(my friend) hasn't been able to find anything helpful.
So two questions:
Is it plausible for an insomniac to go to sleep at about 4 every night for 6 months?
Is there anything else you think she should know about insomnia?

I have a friend who does this.

He apparently gets by on like 3-5 hours sleep, and yes, a good night's rest for him, is 5 hours. I've known him to stay up for days at a time, so, yes, going to bed extremely late is perfectly plausible.

Just before I say all this, I just want you to know that this only relates to MY experiences. Every Insomniac is different.

Anyway...
Totally possible. Sometimes much later than 4
In fact some nights we don't sleep.
Um... We don't really feel like we need sleep when it comes to going to bed. We just sort of lie in bed and just don't feel tired. Well, at least thats what I do.
Oh and if the character gets sleeping pills they send you to sleep, but you don't feel like you've actually had that much sleep anyway.

These sites are really good actually. They'll probably help you more than me just blabbing on about my health problems ^^

http://www.counselling.cam.ac.uk/insom.html

http://www.stanford.edu/~dement/insomnia.html

Good luck!

A friend of mine is writing a book.One of the main characters in it has insomnia and she(my friend) hasn't been able to find anything helpful.
So two questions:
Is it plausible for an insomniac to go to sleep at about 4 every night for 6 months?
Is there anything else you think she should know about insomnia?

I have no idea about insomnia. But I generally sleep for about 4 hours a night, and I haven't gone insane. So I'd say it's plausible.

Excellent.thank you all.

insomnia is a gift, i get my exstensive reading list done thanks to mine

im coping with around 2 hours a night and have done for about three years

My experience with insomnia was similar to Odinsvrede. For about three weeks, I was sleeping (at best) every two days. I felt as if I could collapse at any moment, yet I also felt like I could easily stay awake another day. It was very frustrating, largely due to the fact that no matter how tired I was, if I tried to go to sleep, I could only lie there wide awake.

I took Ambien, but it did little. I just knocked me out, and I felt no more rested than before. Thankfully it passed, but I've gotten by on roughly 5 hours a night since then, more than a year ago.

One important aspect of insomnia is that it eats at you slowly. You feel trapped between exhaustion and alertness every day for weeks/months at a time.

Stephen King's book 'Insomnia' is a good source... he talks in a rather in depth manner about the effects and the way it feels, though those characters are retired so I'm not sure how it would compare to younger people.

Did you try webmd.com? Its a much more reliable source for medical information than this board.

If something wakes me up in the night it's difficult, if not impossible to go back to sleep, no matter how little I've slept. I feel tired in the day, but when I go to bed at night I feel completely fresh and I just lay there with my eyes wide open. It's also completely impossible for me to sleep during the day, sleep when I'm even a little bit hungry, sleep if there's any noise or light to disturb me, no matter how miniscule. My condition was at its worst when I was about 15, and that's the only time I've gone through a night completely without sleep.

I consider my insomnia to be of a pretty mild variety. Someone whose suffered of a more serious version of it once said that Edward Norton put it well in Fight Club how it feels to be an insomniac.

"When you have insomnia, you're never really asleep... and you're never really awake. With insomnia, nothing is real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy."

One more detail: Nowadays I'm a bit better and I can usually get about 6-8 hours of sleep a night provided I can stick to my routine of going to bed at about 22:00 with a full stomach. Sometimes, very rarely, I have a really good night and I feel absolutely like a different person the next day. The downside is that the feeling won't fade before the next night, and then I'm awake again. Last night was one of those nights, I slept from 22:00 to 8:30, and right now I couldn't feel better. Unfortunately I know that tomorrow is gonna feel a lot worse, and that's when I happen to have a math midterm. Lucky me.