#cataplexy

I've been half dead all day because I had to go to the pharmacy and then the supermarket around midday and that's enough to wreck me for the rest of the day at this point (thanks, long covid!), so I keep falling asleep at my desk or on the sofa for just like 10-15 minutes at a time, and I'm getting some real super wild dreams that seem to be coming absolutely from nothing.

Like I'm still groggy as I type this and I just dozed off at the computer and had a brief but vivid dream wherein I realized that I had a several-months-old baby that I'd set down in the other room in a vat of brightly colored chemicals and completely forgotten about. The baby needed to be in the chemicals in order to keep the computer running, and I was pretty sure it wasn't actually harming the baby, but I had one of those panicked moments of realizing I'd forgotten something important in the other room, and I wasn't sure how long the baby had been in the chemicals, and also the thought that I was an entire Parent and had just completely forgotten about that and was therefore a Bad Parent, and the spike of guilt from that woke me back up.

I haven't interacted with a child in years. I love kids but will never have any of my own. I have no idea where the concept "baby" even came from for this dream. I was asleep for like 7 minutes.

I have suspected for years that I may have narcolepsy because apparently it's not normal to dream when you're only asleep for a few minutes (not to mention it's not normal to randomly fall asleep during the day, although that happened a lot less frequently in the past before I caught covid a few years ago, and now it happens allll the time, unless I'm on my ADHD meds, which I didn't take today). I tried to do a sleep study but the equipment was strangling me and they wound up thinking I had sleep apnea (which I definitely don't have) and I will have to redo the test at some point and make sure the equipment is set up better so I'm not being gently choked all night, and given that a trip to the pharmacy wrecked me for the rest of the day and I have like, a job I need to do to keep a roof over my head and no one to help me with anything, I'm not likely to manage to find time/energy to set up a second entire sleep study anytime soon. Also the sleep specialists all seem obsessed with cataplexy and trying to determine whether I get that, which I can't really answer because yeah I get periods of muscle weakness and reduced control over my body all the time but it's impossible to determine whether it's cataplexy or shutdowns from autistic sensory overload or PEM or what. And I don't know why they obsess over cataplexy as a symptom anyway since it doesn't even appear in all cases of narcolepsy, but my lack of a clear "yes" when they ask about it makes it harder to get in for tests.

So now I'm just curious. Does long covid and/or ME/CFS cause people to randomly fall asleep for short periods of time when they're experiencing PEM, and do these brief periods of sleep contain dreams? Or is this just a worsening of the narcolepsy symptoms I've experienced since I was a teenager?