During my pdoc appointment today, while we were talking about my experiences, the conclusion seemed to be that I experience hypnagogia psychosis pretty easily. We noted a pattern of how most of my remaining issues/attacks are happening at night, often when I am tired but can’t fall asleep (it’s been taking 2-3 hours to fall asleep the past couple of weeks).
This didn’t give me a pass on her SZA theory, which she still thinks I have, but it seemed that at least the conclusion was that not everything is SZA, and that what I’ve been experiencing lately are essentially like nightmares while I am still awake.
She let me raise my dosage to 3mg from 2mg of Risperidone, and said she would consider 4mg if I adjust to 3mg okay over the next two weeks. The goal is to see if increasing the dosage will help me fall asleep faster/easier at night and get rid of the problem.
Yeah she actually didn’t even want to increase it yet, but I nagged her into letting me try. I think the fact that my blood work looked really good was what convinced her to let me try it. She had actually been planning to just leave me at 2mg. Inside I was like oh hell no, if you’re not gonna give me an AD, you at least have to give me a therapeutic dosage of the one med you WILL give me. Jesus.
When I first started taking it, for the first few days, it made me feel happy-drunk and I fell asleep easily. But then that disappeared, and ever since then it’s been very hard to fall asleep. It’s like the process is super drawn out to the point where I am starting to dream/nightmare before I am even fully asleep. I’ve had this problem in the past before, though, many times, so I don’t think the med is causing it. It’s more like the sedating effect I got from it just wore off really fast.
An interesting point. I am wondering how it might relate to my experience that invariably occurred late at night in bed. I, like you, would take ages to get off to sleep. I would have thoughts/inner voices(hard to tell which) in which random words and phrases would flash through my brain that seemed to have little connection with each other.
Whether it was due to hypnagogia or something else is hard to tell. What I do know is that a few brief exceptions aside it has stopped since being on the depot and getting much more regular medication.
I get mad hypogogic hallucinations! My Geodon doesn’t do much to stop them. After I “wake up” from one, I spend the rest of the day worried it is all still a dream. This has led to some awkward situations.