Strange REM

As I continue to prepare for doing some experiments (more on that in the next post) I had some strange brainwaves during my first REM period last night.  Check out the chart below:

(click for a bigger picture)

This is an image of the various frequencies streaming real-time out of the Zeo into our software during the period of interest in my sleep last night. The first section that looks domed, or a "fish eye" as I call it, is deep sleep, then comes the REM period, then another period of deep.  During the REM period there is some fairly regular Delta spikes while other brainwave frequencies dip.  I have not seen this before.  I do vaguely remember dreaming, something about "discovering cosmic rays in my brainwaves".  Funny-odd that I would dream about my brainwaves when in fact my brainwaves are doing something odd.  The spikes are not related to movement or waking.  I had an IR cam on me and I stepped through the frames.  There was a few movements during the time, but not at all at the times of the spikes or even having any regularity associated with them.  I probably had some arousal during the time, else I would probably not remember the "cosmic rays" thing.

The other thing that was odd last night is that I slept only 4 hours and awoke fairly refreshed and could sleep no longer.  I did have a "power nap" during the day before and I did not take any sleep aids before going to bed.  There's an interesting decrease in the depth and duration of deep sleep that goes on during my sleep cycles that I notice and when the deep cycles diminish to near nothing, I notice I awaken.  More on that in another post.

An Unusual Night

Last night is noteworthy because it was unusual.  Below you see an annotated chart showing the ResMed data (top chart), Pulse-Ox and Zeo brain waves (middle chart) and at the very bottom, the Zeo 5 minute sleep stages from the Zeo web site.  The "night" was unusual because I had some sort of metabolical "issue" at the beginning, then fell asleep for a while without my ResMed nor pulse-oximeter on, then woke up and put them on and went back to sleep.

The numbers with circles are some interesting points:

 (Click for a bigger image)

1. Before all this I think I had a "hypoglycemic" (diabetic type) episode.  I'm not diabetic, but I felt very strange, broke out in a sweat, felt "minty sweaty" all over my body and very light headed, almost passing out (buzzzz).  It was like I had food poisoning and was going to "pay the price".  I also felt hypotensive so I checked my blood pressure but it was normal.  I became very thirsty and craved sugar.  I drank a large glass of water and a bunch of Oreos and started feeling better.  Strange.

2. After all those Oreo cookies, I felt sleepy and laid down.  I fell asleep for about 3 hours without my xPAP.  I think I was probably snoring pretty good.  Oops. Not proper therapy.

3. I woke up at 12:30 AM, did this-n-that for about 45 minutes, then put on the pulse-oximeter and went to sleep again with the ResMed.

4. About 2 hours into that sleep, I can see in my data I had a cluster of apneas and some distress (breathing with some "excitement").  During this time I de-sated to 86% due to not only long duration apneas, but many in succession.

5. I notice in my Zeo brain wave data that the deeper sleep "fish eyes" that form in my brain waves are more pronounced during my untreated "nap" than during my "sleep".  I think it was because I had gotten that deeper rest first, then later I didn't need it so much.  Just a theory, because every night I see those deep sleep "fish eyes" progressively get smaller during the night, so this fits here as well.

6.  You can see from the brainwaves that I was getting sleepy, that on-set was coming even though I was still awake.  The waves were converging.

Just an odd night and it is interesting to me to see what was going on.