Quote:
Originally Posted by Monique723
I don't see how it can be narcolepsy, are you falling asleep during the day while wide awake?
|
I've done a lot of reading on narcolepsy. While randomly falling asleep during the day for no reason is the narcolepsy stereotype, it's not a symptom of everyone that has it.
The 4 major symptoms are:
excessive daytime sleepiness
temporary loss of muscle control while fully conscious, called cataplexy
vivid dream-like images when drifting off to sleep or waking up, called hypnagogic hallucination
sleep paralysis, where upon waking all your muscles are paralyzed and you can't move for a brief period of time
There are also other indicators of narcolepsy, such as going into REM sleep 5 minutes after you fall asleep (in normal people it takes 90 minutes to go into REM). This is usually one of the tests they use in sleep centers to diagnose narcolepsy because it's measurable (unlike the arbitrary "I feel tired").
Not every narcoleptic has every symptom, or to the same degree. I have daytime sleepiness (no matter how much sleep I get, if you give me 5 minutes of nothing to do I will fall asleep again...that was fun in college trying to pay attention to lectures ;P), hypnagogic hallucination, and the REM thing (I haven't been tested, but I know that I have dreams during a 15-minute nap). Once I had sleep paralysis, but it hasn't occured again.
I've never had any degree of cataplexy, thank goodness. That's the dangerous one, where if you get excited or mad or something your muscles just all stop working and you collapse; you can die if you're walking down stairs or driving a car.