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Sleep and fatigue

Vivid dreams and whether anyone else has them

Started 3 June 2025 · 22 replies · 210 hearts · read 3.4k times

BassCoventry, UK · 3 June 2025
about a year ago

Starting a thread on this because it keeps coming up in ones and twos: Vivid dreams and whether anyone else has them

I have avoided asking about this for six weeks out of pure embarrassment.

The physical part is manageable. What is wearing me down is the constant low-level monitoring of it, and I would like to stop doing that.

It is not severe. It is relentless, which turns out to be a different problem, and one I have found much harder to describe to anybody.

Squeamish subject, so I am going to be plain about it and get it over with. It has been going on for long enough now that I would like to know whether it is ordinary.

Not after remedies particularly. Mostly I want to know whether this is ordinary and how long it went on for.

70

RillaAberdeen, UK
#1

What helped was scheduling the tiredness rather than fighting it. I moved the demanding parts of my week to mornings and stopped pretending afternoons were productive.

10

BrunoMilan, IT
#2

My tiredness arrived without warning at about week five and lasted a month. It was not dramatic, it was just that everything took more out of me than it should have.

11

SunnivaBodø, NO
#3

Grateful you posted rather than kept it to yourself.

9

KikiFacilitatorGlasgow, UK
#4

A note for anybody arriving at this thread mid-way: if what you are experiencing is frightening rather than merely uncomfortable, that is a reason to ask somebody qualified this week rather than to read further.

15

SamPortland, OR
#5

Sleep got better for me before it got worse. Two good months, then a strange stretch, then it settled at something new.

6

KezWigan, UK
#6

Coming back to what Kiki wrote further up, because it is the bit I keep thinking about.

The thing I would raise with somebody qualified is fatigue that is not improving over months rather than weeks. Mine was, so I did, and it was worth it.

10me too 3

HollisBath, UK
#7

I was waking at three or four, wide awake, for about six weeks. It stopped as suddenly as it started and I never worked out why.

4

SinéadCork, IE
#8

What I found was that eating something earlier in the evening changed my nights more than anything I did about sleep directly.

7

GigiNaples, IT
#9

Reading Kez, I recognised more of that than I expected to.

Mine was worst in winter and much better in summer, and I now think a good half of it was seasonal and would have happened anyway.

12

NettieBarrow, UK
#10

Agreed, and I have nothing to add to it.

5

RufusGuildford, UK
#11

I had assumed the fatigue was psychological and it turned out to be worth a set of bloods. Something unrelated came up and it was fixable.

13

Ollie OPeterhead, UK
#12

Mine was much worse for the first three days after each step up and then fine. Once I saw that pattern in my notes I planned around it.

9

LeifTrondheim, NO
#13

Gently disagreeing with Rufus, or rather adding the other half of it.

Coming back to say the fatigue lifted at about the four-month mark and has not come back. I wanted to leave that here for anybody currently in it.

11

OrrinGlasgow, UK
#14

The four o'clock waking was the thing I could not solve. I have found nothing that fixes it and I have found it helps to know I am not the only one.

7me too 2

TorinBelfast, NI
#15

Adding a name to the list of people this helped.

8me too 1

RuthieLeicester, UK
#16

The exhaustion is real and it is not laziness, and I spent a month calling it laziness before somebody here corrected me kindly.

10

RunaAarhus, DK
#17

My honest experience: my sleep is now noticeably better than it was before any of this, which was not something I expected or was aiming for.

11

GildaTrieste, IT
#18

Ruthie, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

Naps helped me and made things worse for somebody I talk to weekly, so I am reluctant to recommend them. Worth trying and worth abandoning.

6

NilsUppsala, SE
#19

I would say do not soldier on with this silently for months. I did five months and my GP's first response was to ask why I had not come sooner.

6

PeggyRotherham, UK
#20

Runa has already said most of this and I want to add the one part that was different for me.

What I noticed was that the tiredness came in a wave in the mid-afternoon and if I could get through forty minutes it passed. Trying to push through it never worked.

8

KikiFacilitatorGlasgow, UK
#21

Facilitator note: I am leaving this open rather than closing it, because the question has come round three times this year and this is the version I want people to find.

25

TobySwindon, UK
#22

Somebody here said to treat energy as a budget rather than a personal quality, and that single reframing changed how I planned my weeks.

7me too 3