I have a big question for you. For DID survivors, how can you tell if you have been sleeping, or if you’ve switched and lost time. Sleeping or time loss? Resting, or amnesia?
I’ve been asked these questions, and since I’m not multiple, I can’t answer them from personal experience. I can only answer from what I’ve learned from listening to hundreds of dissociative folks.
So… of course, I’m happy to ask you, because I’m quite sure you can answer much more accurately than me.
Okay, first — think about when you are asleep and how that feels. 
I know there are lots of options for versions of sleep —
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Some parts are asleep, some parts are awake.
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The external body appears asleep, but in the internal world, behind that dissociative wall, inside people can be wide awake.
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Some parts may feel asleep and may genuinely be asleep on the inside, but the outside body is awake and someone else is out front doing stuff.
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Possibly the whole internal system is asleep at the same time.
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Maybe something else I haven’t thought of today….
And secondly — think about how time loss feels.
When there is dissociative time loss — that damnesia !! — the person is awake, the body is up, parts of the system are busy doing things, and yet other parts of the system have absolutely no idea what happened as their awareness is blocked behind that dissociative wall. 
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There is this lost or missing time on the clock, where you simply don’t know what happened in those preceding minutes / hours. You “wake up” or “come to” and you are suddenly there, and realize you haven’t been there.
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Or possibly you didn’t notice the missing time, but you can see some straightforward evidence that something has happened that you cannot recall, no matter how much you think about it. You know you don’t know how it’s possible, but there is “that thing”, and you simply cannot deny that it is there.
There may be more options to consider – and feel free to mention those in your comment.
Here is essence of my 2-fold question.
Have you, as a system, ever completely and totally fallen asleep?
And how does this feel differently (or the same) from time loss?
Because for non-DID people, real sleeping holds no real sense of time.
When a non-DID person is asleep, there is no specific awareness of time passing until you wake up and realize it’s a different point in time. There’s no real awareness of anything happening, except maybe a dream. And waking through the night is a clear waking up from sleep. There’s no doubt what you’ve been doing. You’ve been sleeping, and you know it.
You might know it’s been all night long because you remember what time you went to bed, and you can see on the clock what time it is when you wake up. Or you can tell by the morning light, or the morning sounds, etc. But there is not a specific awareness of the exact amount of time asleep or what happened while asleep. You just know you were asleep because that’s what you do.
So when you’re dissociative, when you and your system fall completely asleep, how does that feel compared to when you lose time?
Can you tell the difference?
Have you and your whole system ever actually fallen asleep at the same time?
Does sleep feel differently when EVERYone is asleep, or does that ever happen?
What about a medicated asleep? When you’re knocked out by medication, how does that feel differently from lost time?
What about a passing out from drunkenness? How does that feel differently from lost time?
You probably already can see where I’m going with this. This is the main question I have:
How do you tell when your system is completely and fully asleep (thus having no “time awareness”) versus when you think you are asleep, but someone in your system is up and awake?
How differently does that feel, and can you feel or tell the difference?
If you spend part of your sleep-time in one of the phases of body sleeping / inside awake places, do you think your sleeping time ever changes to EVERYone in the system sleeping? And if that happens, can you feel a difference in the quality of sleep you get, vs how tired you feel?
My guess is that these two options feel different in some sense.
So how do you know?
This clearly relates to safety issues. If a dissociative person is completely asleep, their sense of time may be gone, just like it feels for non-dissociative people who are asleep. So if there is a worry about whether you are actually dissociatively awake or completely asleep, how else do you tell?
I think by now, I’ve asked my questions a few times over. I’ll just go ahead and post this, and wait patiently for your response.
Thanks much!
I wish you all very solid nights of very deep and genuine, safe, restful sleep!
Warmly,
Kathy
Copyright © 2008-2020 Kathy Broady MSW and Discussing Dissociation
Well this is a really hard one for me because I am just not sure if I ever fall deeply into sleep especially at night. It used to take me hours to fall asleep. Now I just do not go to bed until I fall to sleep in my chair most nights. I know that I do not wander about because our bedroom door is alarmed but, more often then not, I am as tired in the morning as I was when I went to bed. That indicates to me that my mind was actively engaged in the night even if my body was not.
Sometimes I will wake up and find my body moving in ways that I know are one of my insiders (e.g., my feet twitching back and forth which is something that one of my insiders does) or I will hear myself making noises (e.g., moaning, panting or clicking noises … again noises my insiders make). So, I know that they are active but I do not know if they are dreaming or awake or what.
I do drink to put myself to sleep (something that I am not proud of but will be honest with you here). When I wake up, I feel like I have really been deeply asleep. There is nothing but waking with no thoughts of what was happening in my brain as there is usually. My insiders will also put me to sleep during the day when I am really stressed out or have done some hard system/trauma work or something like that. I cannot keep my eyes open. Then I know that my insiders need some quiet time from the outside world to regroup and integrate what has been happening.
Loosing time is when I am awake and then all of a sudden I am not aware or what has been happening, where I am, who I am talking to, what we are talking about, etc. Then I know that I went off somewhere or someone else was out and I do not know what just went on or how long I have been down the rabbit hole.
Hi! I have partial DID and I think that there are some hours where all parts are asleep, the first hours, but then they try to communicate something and that is when I get some remembering. First it happened nearly only at night, then also in the day. And in the morning my body hurts. Therefore the parts that are traumatised I think that revive the trauma at night. The torture and abuse. Therefore I feel in the nervous system changes after some hours sleep and when I get to sleep again this is when I have nightmares. I think that first, when the communication in the system is not good, the parts try to tell something at night, because there is less control and when the communication is better it happens at day. Or I realized it more at night than at day, before having the diagnosis.But I have to say that before knowing about partial DID I suddenly got very tired and had to lay down so I could manage the day better. (If it was possible). Generally I think that the parts are independent from what the body wants and act day and night. When I have taken sleeping pills (not very strong) what I personally don’t like, I still woke up if my system was very nervous. Or sometimes I felt very bad, like drunken with a very bad sensation.My conclusion: the parts do what they want.
Much of the time our sleep is medicated, which means, thankfully, we don’t remember our dreams.
What is ‘normal’ sleep? We have no frame of reference. Usually when we wake, whether it is after a night’s sleep, or worse, a nap during the day, there is a lingering moment during which we don’t know where or who we are.
Somebody has been, quite regularly, refilling the Brita water jug in the fridge, without our knowing. We think it happens when we are supposedly asleep.
Funny they would focus on that one task. We also think we might be eating during the night. We buy almond M&M’s, and they have been known to vanish.
It would certainly explain why we can wake up from nine hours of sleep and not feel at all rested.
Honestly, its somewhat of a mystery.
I’m not sure yet if I’m a singlet or a multiple, but I have lost time before (CPTSD) and I don’t understand how you can not tell the difference between time loss and sleeping.
When you’ve lost time, your body was still running actively during that lost time. You won’t notice that much has changed at all, maybe you don’t even notice anything changed at all.
When you wake up from being asleep, your body is usually still starting up, you have waste in the corners of your eyes, your movements are slow as you shake the stiffness of sleep. It’s very obvious to me when I’ve been asleep, vs when I’ve lost time.
I havent had restorative sleep in over 15 years, despite a lot of medication my husband says mu body runs amarathon every night in bed, despite me appearing asleep. I wake in pain and exhausted. My insiders come out to play each night as they feel safe to do so. In the morning sometimes, they tell me what happened. I am very new to talking to them but they are great at talking or shouting at me. If i go to sleep their voices are much quieter
Hello partsofme
Lori wears a Fitbit now it shows when you have been sleeping . It’s fun to look at the data with the sleep patterns on therapy day our sleep is the worst. Sometimes she will ask us ok who was doing what last night. Our husband bught is a GPS for two reason we can always find our way home and it shows we here we have been. Lori thinks all d.i.d people should have both of these tools.
we have had times, in a safe place, when we’ve all slept. most times, we have various parts awake, talking, playing with the dog, or up cleaning, coloring, or cooking. we know when it’s happening because we are tired and there is always evidence.
if parts drink, then others get us where we need to go, like home, or to bed. the little ones get sick if they are out.
when we’ve been medicated that’s always an interesting time. some parts are affected and others aren’t. recently i had a migraine, went to the doctor and was given an injection. i thought i was in bed sleeping the entire day, but a part of me was with a friend, using power tools, and doing a home project. this always surprises me, but i could swear i’ve been asleep. when we’ve had surgery we always get sick after because we get too much anesthesia in our body. parts are not always knocked out and show signs of awakening.
kay, i have journaled my sleep patterns,too. it’s very interesting and helpful. i know the feeling of sleeping 8 hrs, but being exhausted at the same time. when i dream, i am fairly positive it’s parts having nightmares or trying to share information. i’m always sharing this with my therapist and she walks through it with me and the others affected.
Thank you for this post, Kathy, as it is something I have been really confused by lately. One thing I am not confused by is that I am so exhuasted no matter what time I think I fall asleep and what time I know I wake up (based off of the alarm).
**TW** I have started having nightmares that wake me up questioning whether or not I was really awake or not. I’ll very explicitly remember doors in my current home being opened and closed, windows opened and closed, and water turned off and on. When I “wake up” I find that I (host) am terrified by what I saw in my “dream” but the inner chaos that I hear within my system is really loud. Leaves me wondering if some were awake during the time that I thought I was having a nightmare. Not really sure if I’m explaining this clearly. In the end, it’s just difficult to tell if it was a nightmare or something happened while others were awake with auditory / visual hallucinations. No idea.
I have started an excel spreadsheet to try and figure out any patterns in my life and hours of sleep as well as dreams are a part of the spreadsheet. The past 4 days, I have averaged 8 hours of sleep and I am so very tired. I also can’t tell if it is physical tiredness or emotional. No patterns have surfaced thus far, but it’s only been 10 days.
Hi Kay,
I just wanted to pop in here and say that I’m sorry you’re so tired and feeling a little confused about what’s going on? I’m sure it’s frustrating and weird to say the least. But just so you know, it doesn’t make YOU crazy or weird, these are just possible explanations for what is going on. Things to observe and notice like you’re doing with your Excel spreadsheet. Which, by the way, I am super impressed with how you are doing that! I try to journal my nightmares when I wake up. But I’ve never thought of doing that. I hear distinct voices telling me bad things after my dreams, almost like they were the ones making them happen. Not really sure how that would all work, but anyway, nightmares are horrible.
I hope you get some good, solid rest and feel your best self soon.
MultipleMe
10/3/18
I feel my husband of 27 yrs, is def’ dissociative. But honestly i did not truly see until a6 month stint of medical traumas , near death experiences, and a bad reaction to dilaudid. I think that he had an “AWAKENING”, like the closet door that held all the bad stuf seperate, suddenly came open dumping it all out at once… amd he cant close it back… things he seemed to have oveflooked , forgiven, or blew off as a joke… haunt him in this viscious cycle, swirling around and down! I feel helpless not being able to help him. Wht really makes it worse is he has chiari 1 had decompression surgery amd i believe he thinks it caused a memory problem… part of him… “ my husband “ is aware, but rately available , he runs hides dueto infidelity , which was a first in 25 yrs of a very happy honest marriage, so if theres confrontation im faced with , 😡angry , and all the mistakes i ever made in my life, thts why , he cant love me ! Its so exhausting, we have a 9 yr old. I dont work , but think i shpuld start… denial and control are alot of what i get, yet the eyes rolling back , noone can intentionAlly do tht likehe has , for two years., at wrk hes “ cardboard cutout”, going thru motions. I hav recorded him yet erased cause i felt so bad , i just couldnt bring myself. , bcuz it wasnt him! But it WAS HIM! An angry hurt part of him! Noone believes or wants to get involved so im left with , trying to help , yet im “crazy, bad guy”!
Oh wow Ang … you must really be scared, tired, confused … well, just a whole lot of not good feelings right now. I am so sorry that you and your husband are going through such a rough time. There is help, but your husband has to be willing to accept that help. Only he can work out his issues and do his healing. You cannot do it for him. You can just support him, believe him and help him to find the professional help that he needs.
It also is important for you to get an understanding of what DID is (if indeed that is what your husband is dealing with here). Obviously, he is (re)experiencing some trauma. The various articles that Kathy has posted will help in either case. If you have not done so already, go to the top of the webpage and scroll over to the title “Supportive Helpers”. In the drop down menu that appears, you will see several links including one that is called “Supportive Spouses”. There are a whole bunch of articles to be found there that I think may be helpful.
You need support and help too Ang. Certainly, there is help here in this place. Maybe your family doctor can assist as well (in getting help for your husband but also supportive help for you as well). Trusted family and friends can also be a resource. Reach out where ever you can to the safe people and places that can offer assistance. This is not a time to feel that you are alone. And, remember that, you are NOT the bad guy!
My positive energy and best wishes go out to you Ang.
WOW … that is big time scary Whomp. You handled that remarkably well. And a new insider … I really am scared when that happens. I really do not want to know but realize that, if I want to find cooperation and understanding with my system, I need to acknowledge the new parts and start communicating with them. But is always a big ARGH moment.
I know that I do not get up and wander about at night because our bedroom door is alarmed (i.e., I would set off the alarm if I tried to go out of the room). But I have always had huge issues trying to get to sleep. My doc prescribed sleeping pills but some times they work and then sometimes they don’t. One insider tries to knock us out with alcohol. If my littles appear on the scene, we get really sick. I know that, as a child, I played out the abuse scenario with my stuffed animals every night but a new insider eventually took over to distract things. That insider still takes over as there is a lot of fear of the darkness. If I cannot hear the clock ticking in the room, I will have panic attacks.
So, I know that I fall asleep eventually. But, why do I always wake up exhausted every morning?
For my system, I have a hard time with staying asleep. One of my parts that LOVES going to work at my factory job (she’s a workaholic) wakes me up at least 3 times a night and leaves me hand written notes saying its going to be a great day etc. Sometimes she clips job advertisements and tries to convince the rest of us that she can handle an additional 25 hours a week and how the extra money will make us all more happy…
A recent lost time happened after a small fire happened in my apartment. I was alarming to all my parts, as we all can agree on it and my core part sees it from outside myself, like im on the ceiling. I saw myself nonchalantly take a flaming towel and place it in the tub and turn on the water.
Then I come to several hours later. I’m walking to the emergency room, and I’m hearing one of my “Mothers” telling me to go and explain everything. Luckily, a doctor actually listened. I felt better, had arranged to meet a supportive local police officer to access my apartment and just help us all feel ok being alone again. When we got home, he took photos of the burn marks, checked my smoke alarms and the wiring. But while he was doing that, I looked at my cell phone and saw that one of my parts had called into my work, presumably to just say I was ill. But then I found a pack of cigarettes that were a brand I never smoked in my home. The officer was able to help me figure out that I did purchase them. This is how I realized I had another I wasn’t aware of.
This all happened recently. I’m still not all that jazzed to find I have another, and its a smoker, as I recently went through hell quitting.
My favourite and first ever alter I remember “making” was my little girl Elsie. She was the one there before me who had all the bad stuff happen to her.. We were going to try and remember who it was who hurt her and what happened.. She was 5 yrs old, and I was about 7 ..we lived in a little bright white room.. Til “He” came in and took full control.. “He” didn’t like her talking to me (incase she disclosed the abuse..) And then eventually she just stopped talking at all.. . it wasn’t long after that he took her, terrified, into the darkness… he said he killed her and left her in the deepest darkest part… I left my mind after that, and couldn’t get back in again for a few years.. When I did get back, “He” was gone, back to live in the darkness as well.. .
I still believed that little Elsie was dead… til about 2 years ago, when I woke suddenly sitting up in bed holding a pen and a poem… 14 yr old Roxie writes poems but never before while I’m sleeping. she wrote that little Elsie was still alive but stuck in a well and that she’s trying to get back to me. I was sooo happy…
Quite a few times in the last year and a half I’ve “woken up” at night and have been out of bed holding on to little Elsie’s new drawings… She drew “me” as a 2 yr old standing behind the cult who abused us… Next to that she drew a timeline of all the abusive relationships I’d had over the last 15 years…
But…., the weirdest part was …
…she drew me in bed looking really sick .. At the end of the bed was another drawing of me on all fours, with a newborn baby on the breast, and another baby at my feet, which looked to be dead. A dark spirit shadow was taking it away…
So here’s the crazy part… 4 months after little Elsie drew that picture, I found out I was 2 weeks pregnant… Then i found out it was twins.. .. I became so sick and was put on 20 hours a day of bed rest til the delivery date. Baby A sadly didn’t survive past 4 months into the pregnancy.. Just as little Elsie had predicted.
She sometimes sends me messages in my dreams too..
That went way off track.. Sorry… Must of needed a vent..
I also JUST learned SOME of my parts are Fragmented, please someone, anyone? what does this mean
When we experience trauma, we can split into different personalities, who hold the trauma, so we can function. They protect us and help us. Once i realised they were there and thanked them for taking care of me by carrying my trauma, they started telling me who they were. Some have ages, some have names, others just have job descriptions, some are male and some are female. So far i have been introduced to 17 insiders. Some are very vocal and shout but others keep me safe and others are just there, quietly in the background. I know i havent met them all yet, once i can cope wih more trauma work, i am sure i will meet them. Its ok to be fractured, its how you survived and continue to survive. Try wnd communicate with them or just introduce yourself and thank them for carrying your trauma so you could survive
I think parts do stuff when I should be sleeping. they HATE night and HATE sleep and don’t want to sleep, so they DO things when I am tired. One part always WANTS to make SURE that the house is clean before sleeping, she does NOT want a messy house incase we ever need medical help, she does NOT want the EMT to see a messy house, so she cleans at night, even if she has to get up at 2:00am she will clean until she drops
we dont never have all been sleeping at the same time.
we member some times when we be little we wake up during the nigt and we find arselfs busy playing or rocking dolls or curled up in a corner
we can stay awake a long long time and be way bisyer than any body else
becuse when we talking or playing some others be asleep
and then we get tired and go in
and then the 1s that was asleep come out to play or talk
we always have wared out other pepil
becuse they think we dont never get tired
we drive lots of pepil crazy becuse we ware them out and them think we get tired
but we switch so much and so fast and take turns being awake
today even caden be so tired from school she cant stay awake so her asleep now
but we be wide awake becuse we sleep inside wile she be at school
Learning about ways a non DID persons mind works is fascinating.
we have not ever, ever all been asleep.
thee are usually several kids up all night, many of them are too afraid to sleep at all.
when we wake up at night, we hear people in the middle of a conversation, or kids singing or playing.
and our dreams are very long, detailed, and involved- they always feel like we are still awake. i dont think we have ever just had a real, quiet, restful nights sleep, ever.
We dont sleep much and most people never see us tired. Do suspect on a long drive take turns driving while others sleep. If we all do it would only be for 30 minutes but the difference between sleeping and time loss is the peace not afraid, not wondering did we do something.
Lossing time is scary – having peole telling us what we said or did and not having any recollection, and sometimes not even knowing who this person is. Sometimes when people think we are sleeping because it is nighttime, which is high trigger, we arent cause that is when things get done that we couldnt figure out during day- sometimes that is nice. But there have been times in the morning we hear of stabbings or hit and runs and panic we did something, good news it was just a flashback to our parents taking us to ceremonies. Sleep there is none of that. Yes we get nightmares or so we call them that but suspect they are time loss cause lots time it throws the days off cause cant shake whether or not it happened or if it was a dream. As for drunk or medication we dont take. We have had surgery and our reaction to anethestic is all over the place – wake up hungry, and very lucid a lot, sometimes cant wake but that is more a hospital trigger. Pour us into a wheelchair and get us to the door and we can walk and need a diet coke. Basically with md you never know what you will get morning or afternoon or night
**this will be long, i’m sorry lol**
I’m not sure if my entire system has totally fallen asleep at the same time, i’m told no. There are always “sentinels” awake and listening even though the body’s eyes are shut and everyone else is asleep. They’re there and functioning, listening but not watching. This results in a very light sleeper lol. The rest of the time yeah, although adults do their chores, hold meetings and have a cuppa etc after all the teens and little’s are asleep, they too go to sleep, in that state, pretty much the entire system is asleep.
When we’re asleep, we all have no time awareness, it feels legit like sleep. I/we wake up with a start if we hear something or are prompted to by the sentinels. I can see others dreaming and i’m usually in the dream with them, but on the sidelines. Perspective shifts from first to third person, in that time, i have my own mind, they have theirs in the dream, sometimes i can wake ourselves up because i know its them dreaming even though we are both asleep. It feels weird, but i don’t know how to describe that sorry.
Sleep is no different to me than time loss, only that like you said, when i go to sleep i know the time and i know where i am. Time loss on the other hand, goes almost completely unnoticed by me because its so rare for us. We are almost all co-con all the time. Usually my hubby tells me what we said or did and then i get a wave through my body of Adrenalin accompanied with “omg” and i feel totally out of control for a few seconds until i remind myself the others are trustworthy and never going to hurt me or do anything bad…anymore lol.
When the little’s go to bed which is generally before i do as the host, it feels calmer and muuuuch quieter inside lol. It actually feels like part of me is missing and in the beginning i would feel lonely and once or twice i panicked because i couldn’t see, hear or feel them anymore. Turns out they’re just in bed LOL. Since then they show me the main little in her bed and she usually announces she’s going “nini”lol. Most times she goes to bed but “reads” (shes 3) quietly until i got to bed, then we all fall asleep. So i know that’s not time loss because i can still feel and see her etc. In time loss i have no awareness of the others, where as even in my dreams they’re usually still there somewhere.
I’ve not noticed any differences between when everyone is asleep or if only a few people get sleep, except for those few times where its extreme dissociation kicking in (eg, when the little’s go to bed in the day time i get extreme dissociation and lay down and it looks like i’m asleep too but i’m still awake, just warm and fuzzy and floaty- but still very much awake and aware of whats going on outside the body)… But sleep is a massive thing for us. If the little’s and teenage trauma holders don’t get good solid undisturbed sleep for at least 6-10 hrs we are all on the war path the following day, we switch in our sleep then and will verbally attack anyone and anything that annoys us. E.g a dog moving on the bed gets yelled at; hubby snoring gets told to shut up. These times i have no memory of this happening because i am asleep and they’ve switched out. Hubby says it’s not enjoyable in the least LOOOL. Again, i have no idea this has happened or that i’ve lost time till he tells me cos it happened while i was asleep, so the last things i remember is laying down at say, 11pm.
Medicated sleep results in everyone being knocked out (including sentinels at times) but also extreme hyper-vigilance because its a massive trigger for us. There’s only 1 medication we can take that is a drowsy pain killer and we only take that because we know if we need to, we can stay awake through it. Anything harder than that makes us all on edge, triggered and very unhappy. We don’t get restful sleep and we stop all natural switching which makes it worse coz we don’t feel safe. That feels very different upon waking to lost time because its not just “me’ feeling unsafe and having that ‘omg i’m out of control’ thoughts, its literally everyone. This amplifies it ten fold. Time loss i can tell that it’s only “MY” thoughts and feelings coz everyone else will usually say stuff like “wtf are you crying about get over it, as if we’re going to do something stupid and out ourselves” etc. When everyone is forcibly knocked out everyone is screaming and upset and doesn’t know where they are, what yr it is, if we are safe or not etc. Its pure panic. You can DEFINITELY tell in those cases haha
Drunkenness i wouldn’t know about coz we don’t drink.
In summary- I can’t tell if some of us are awake and others are not unless i see or hear them. When i go to sleep that’s it, i’m asleep. What happens after that is up to the others.
It feels no different if everyone else (bar sentinels) are asleep with me and if we switch while i’m asleep i have 0 memory or recognition of it. But it feels slightly different than regular time loss because in going to sleep you’re in control over it, you know where you are, what yr it is, what time it is, that you’re safe etc. Where as time loss you’re not in control and don’t often remember those things, then you just have to take other people’s word for it or evidence of what you’ve done.
To me at least, time loss legitimately feel like when you’re ridiculously tired and you’ve nodded off and then wake up a few moments later and someone says “you just fell asleep”. Its completely reliant on someone else noticing it and telling me. Sleeping is different coz you KNOW you lay down and tried to sleep.
Anyway i’m not sure this is even remotely helpful…Hope so. Sorry its so long.
*Can you tell the difference?
Yep. Our body knows when it’s had a full rest recently. It doesn’t have a very strong timesense, but things like how rested it is, and things like hunger level, bladder fullness, scent changes, and injury healing can give you a sense of time.
If there’s a time gap, we talk with each other and find out who was around and what happened. It’s about safety, making sure the shared memory works well, and making sure everyone’s needs are being tended to. Don’t play the blame game, find out the whys and change things.
If someone’s been joyriding without updating the shared memory, there’s usually both physical signs and a lot of internal upset. It almost never happens nowadays unless we’ve had a really bad reaction to a new medication. Everyone knows about the shared memory and to use the buddy system if they’re up front alone and unsure. There are a couple kids who do sometimes wake up in the middle of the night. They know where their favorite toys are and that they’re to ignore phones and not leave the house.
*Have you all fallen asleep at the same time?
Yep. In safe places that can work. At home we mostly sleep at the same time, but people do sometimes wake up while the body and others are sleeping. If someone’s awake while the body sleeps, we usually just think about things or meditate for a bit. If the body’s tired but we’re awake we might go read or watch tv for a bit with the body in a comfy chair and a blanket.
Dreaming can get weird if several of us are doing it at the same time. Several of us may be in the dream, or have that really confusing stuff where two different dreams mash into each other.
*Medicated? Drunken?
Been under anesthesia for surgery. That was like a switch had been flipped. I was thinking the first half of a word, and then was in the recovery room thinking the second half. For a time gap, your thoughts seem to have wrapped up, and then after the gap they start again. Think of it as the difference between hitting pause on a video, and a commercial break pause built into a show.
Medications that influence sleep we avoid, a lot of them don’t work as expected. We’ll end up wide awake, throwing up, or in sobbing fits. Not fun.
Never passed out from alcohol. One of our people seems unaffected? We’ve been drunk enough we couldn’t walk straight, and she stepped up and seemed fine, including to outside people. She beat Zuma (a reflex video game) while we were that drunk. I don’t understand how alcohol tolerance can be tied to who is in front, because science, but she’s done it several times. She doesn’t clear the alcohol from our body, the rest of us are still drunk if we take the front then.
Hmmmmm…
Let’s think. Time loss.. for us.. is a chunk of time (usually during daylight hours but pretty sure it happens at night too) there is absolutely no recall of what happened. Period. It is a LOT different than falling asleep when the eyes gently close.. and then wake up.
There is no memory there either but with time loss.. OMG.. lots of evidence that something happened.. suddenly there is a teddy bear in the hands, driving and suddenly arriving at a city no intention of arriving to.. heading west and find the city way north of where intended, coloring books on the floor, ewwww… what is that in the mouth, cat food? Gesh..
It’s not at all like dreaming for us. A dream.. we know isn’t real. Finding cat food in the mouth is very real and yucky .. just saying here. Not knowing how or why.. and Gesh… who made that mess.
Thinking for us the scariest time loss is finding the body on top of a bluff.. poised to jump off… not even thinking about that kind of thing. Suddenly there to find blood, or body injury not knowing what happened.. yikes.. not fun.
It isn’t like dreaming at all… all relaxed.. and drifting. When we wake from dreams.. even night mares.
Oh yes.. we’ve been through surgery more than once.. still in no way like loosing time. You go to sleep on a table and wake back up not knowing what they did.. but prepared the no knowledge thing.
We do know some people that anesthesia doesn’t work on too.. glad it works for us. That’s for sure.
The best way to explain it.. for us.. is that we know that we know. There just isn’t a question about it. It does get a little different at night.. because when we go to sleep then wake up to find building blocks in front of us.. or feeling like we didn’t we sleep at all.. we have to have an internal check.
Mostly we just know that someone was up to something during dark hours of the night…
Kathy:
We are not sure if this will help answer your questions but our system is at a point where some will come out when we are asleep because some will watch a video, some will play with toys, others have even cleaned our apartment. There is one part who turns on the news every morning at 4:30am and watches it until 7am. We are usually aware of this not only by the physical evidence but also by how much more tired we feel then when we went to bed when we wake up and try to start our day. Usually sometime during the week we are all so tired that we can barely keep our eyes open and this is the only time when the entire system is sleeping at the same time, but that usually last only about 30-45 minutes once or on rare occasions twice a week. We do use medications to help sleep but they have obviously proven ineffective for many of the parts. They will still continue to either stay up or get up to do their thing. It has been really discouraging for about the past year because it has increasingly gotten worse and with our host disappearing inside since mid-January, it has gotten more intense. We don’t feel like we are getting hardly any sleep at night. We have even been wearing one of those fitness monitors that tracks sleep but it doesn’t show when others are out and doing their own things. There has also been times when we have very intense flashbacks and memories and when we realize what is going on we are just so completely paralyzed that we just lay still and quietly to try to understand what we just saw and experienced and some of us even are afraid that the bad things will happen again if we move or indicate in some way that we are awake. They are not completely out of the flashback or memory. To me, the part running our hosts live right now, I don’t see a difference when this happens and when we loose time expect for the being more tired then before.
I don’t drink or do drugs so I can’t answer that part of your question.
I hope this helps answer your questions.
Amie