Introduction and purpose

My goal with this blog is to post my own experiences with parasomnias (such as hypnopompia) and insomnia and various medications or strategies I have tried. I am hoping for two positive outcomes: first, any mild successes I have had may help others who land here via google searching, and second, readers' comments may give me and others better ideas.

I could go on and on with my history of sleep "disorders", which are all pretty benign compared with the really bad stuff you can get such as night terrors and REM sleep disorders. Mostly they just affect my amount of sleep achieved and don't endanger me or others. Here is a list of sleep things:

• Insomnia starting at about 8 years old. Often awake until 3 or 4 am and having to wake up around 7 for school, making me quite crabby. Parents had me see doctor and allergist, with no help really. This evolved into a sort of skill, where in late high school and college and grad school I could easily pull all nighters studying. Basically, I adapted to be productive instead of just laying in bed. More recently, bad insomnia has seemingly been less common for me, but I also don't try to go to bed at normal times unless trying a sleep med or something.
• Sleep walking as a child. Don't remember how common. Remember peeing in a few places I wasn't supposed to. Usually didn't get to far before really waking up.
• Vivid dreams. I have had vivid memorable dreams for as long as I can remember. I may have made this worse by writing my dreams down when I was about 15 or so. Sometimes I have what I call "epic" dreams, which seem to go on and on and when I actually wrote them down it took over half an hour even when forgetting many of the details. As a young child I had a recurring nightmare about a bald-headed alien with an anesthesia gas mask that wanted to put me under. I can remember having this dream maybe half a dozen times over maybe several years, until finally having a different dream where the voice of the alien apologized to me from inside a tree and said he didn't mean to hurt me and then I haven't ever had that dream again. (Yes, I know this sounds hard to believe.)
• Lucid dreams. Despite efforts I made as a child, I can't intentionally have lucid dreams. I do have them maybe a few times per year, but usually or perhaps always cannot control them. Maybe 50% of these are nightmares where I am being attacked and I can't scream and am trying to scream "wake up" but can't. These usually end with me grunting out loud and waking myself up. Over the past few years I will become semi-lucid in dreams that my father is in (he has passed away), because I realize that he is not alive...but I don't wake up and these dreams go on and are sometimes pleasant, often depressing.
  
• Waking hallucinations, starting probably in teenage years. As far as I can tell this phenomena is called hypnopompia (found on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnopompic). What I remember as a teenager is that I would commonly wake up and see someone skirt off into the other room, and then be terrified. I also remember waking up and seeing a ray of light coming through the window across the room (like a red laser beam). I would see it for a while and then it would fade, this was maybe alarming but not scary. In both of these cases, I very rarely got out of bed to go investigate the intruder or light source. It's as if I'm too lazy/tired to do something even though I know I should...and then within a minute, I usually realize I was hallucinating. I also view this as "lazy sleep walking." These hallucinations mix in with the actual real objects in the room (superimposed).
  
• Waking hallucinations, later years and currently. Interestingly, I don't really remember hypnopompic problems during my undergraduate years. At the same time, I started exercising a lot and also drinking a lot (regular college binge drinking)...don't know if either of those tempered the problem. I also don't know if I'm just forgetting the symptoms. I probably pulled about two all-nighters per week, though, so I was usually really tired. I don't remember any sleep walking. I do remember vivid "epic" dreams. More recently (grad school and later), the hypnopompic hallucinations became more vivid, and probably longer lasting. I think also they became more frequently non-alarming but just absurd or bothersome. For example, a whole bunch of books stacked all over the room. I would usually blame these on my wife (as opposed to an intruder) and get a little irritated that she had done all this while I was sleeping. Then within a minute or so, the images fade and I realize it was just a hallucination. Usually after fully waking I'll go ahead and go to the bathroom since I'm awake anyway. I think these hallucinations usually occur between an hour and 3 hours after going to sleep.
  The absolutely most vivid hallucinations occurred after a multi-day rafting/camping trip through scenery that was absolutely amazing and completely new to me. These hallucinations were in a class of their own due to: (a) vividness and (b) long-duration, well past the point where I realized I was hallucinating. I could literally look around the room and examine features of landscape that I knew was an illusion. These were amazing and not at all unpleasant. I chalked this up to the fact that some parts of my brain were over-stimulated by so many new kinds of images reinforced over a few days. This ability faded over the course of several days, and hasn't returned.
  Within the last couple years, the hypnopompic hallucinations seemed to increase in frequency to the point where many days would go by where I felt like I had these every night and multiple times per night. Finally I went to see a sleep doctor who recommended clonazepam, which I will talk about later (and didn't work). Commonly, these hallucinations are extensions of dim lights in the room (such as light on smoke alarm, and LED displays on electronics, such as clocks). I believe I have these more in rooms I am accustomed to, versus hotel rooms, for example.
• Hypnogic hallucinations. As I understand it, these are very common--hallucinations while drifting off to sleep. I have mine with my eyes closed, and I know they are not real. Commonly they are faces, though I don't think recognizable. The only perhaps remarkable feature of mine are sometimes they are incredibly vivid, and sometimes I am able to control them slightly. Also remarkable are auditory hallucinations I have either at a similar time, or maybe slightly earlier than a visual hallucination would occur. These auditory hallucinations are always voices talking, usually in short phrases or single words (such as my name). They voices are not controllable, but seem "almost controllable," as if I think a phrase I may hear a voice say it, but can't pick the voice (I think often the voices are recognizable to me). These too I know are not real.
  
• Insomnia recently. I feel like my insomnia isn't as bad as it used to be, and I think I am better about (a) not trying to go to sleep too early and (b) not letting my mind race while falling asleep. I do still have trouble, and I dread when I know I have to wake up extra early the next day. This is what makes me really want a good sleeping aid, combined with the sense that now that I'm in my 30's I can't handle all-nighters nearly as well as I used to.
• Other relevant info: I actually seem to have little trouble staying asleep once I've passed the hypnopompic stage. So, if allowed, I could sleep 8 hours easily. Without any other constraints, I think my optimum sleep cycle would be to sleep 6 am to 12 pm, which I actually did successfully for a while in graduate school. I don't think I every have insomnia at 6 am.
  

OK, I think that is a good introduction, and in the following posts, I'm going to put a bit about treatments I've tried.