So, for a while now, I’ve been using melatonin. The reason for that is because I don’t really get tired in the evening unless I take it, so my options are: 1) Stay awake all night and let my sleep-deprived mental health deteriorate OR 2) take melatonin to remind my body that it’s time to sleep when it’s dark outside. I know, it’s a tough choice. Melatonin is essentially perfectly fine in itself. It’s essentially one of the hormones that make you sleepy. Your body produces it naturally. If you take in additional melatonin, you get sleepy because your body thinks that you should produce some melatonin… at least, that’s how my doctor and one of my friends explained it. Overall, it’s not a drug or anything that makes you sleep, though. It’s just a hormone that makes you sleepy so that you have a better time falling asleep or a higher chance or whatever.
On a side note: All nightmares suck btw.
Either way, I essentially have been taking that every now and then when I couldn’t sleep just to make sure that I could get some rest during the night and it worked okay but as of late, I’ve been having nightmares as well and it made me realise that melatonin is scary. The reason for that is that while there aren’t too many side effects if any… your dreams become more vivid. So, in the end, my current nightmares are very vivid and feel quite realistic and I woke up having an anxiety attack today. Last night, I had this terrifying dream of being gaslit by people I care about a lot and them essentially cutting me off completely for something I’m sure I didn’t say. The other night, I had this dream of my parents finding out that I’m bisexual… and that “finding out” thing had some consequences that I don’t wanna mention here… in the dream. I mean, my parents don’t know IRL but like in the dream they found out and stuff, is what I’m trying to say here. A few nights ago, I had this dream about spiders jumping at me and covering my whole body and it was absolutely horrible.
The weird thing is that most of these, apart from the spider dream, have been so “realistic” that I wasn’t sure if I’m actually awake or not. For the past two days, I’ve been feeling drained with my headache getting worse and with the occasional panic attack. My creative juices were dry as well so I didn’t really have many ideas for videos to post on YouTube and effectively, I’ll try to quit using melatonin on consecutive nights. I mean, it’s fine every now and then but I’m worried that I get more nightmares and that they break something in me.
My issue is mostly that I’ve been needing sleep these past few nights not only rest and function but also because my headache’s been getting worse. I’m going to the doctor again soon and hope that I can get a brain scan or something, maybe… Some things my parents, other relatives, and friends said worried me actually quite a bit and I had this one dream about there being a tumour in my head with a terminal diagnosis or something. Honestly, the more terrifying nightmares are the ones that could happen in my actual life or the ones that would make very boring TV shows… but because they’re so simple, they feel somewhat real and then I get scared because of other things that happen in those and my brain overthinks a lot more in my sleep and then I wake up and overthink more and suddenly, I get a panic attack first thing in the morning like on Sunday. Either way, I’ll get my head checked out soon and uh, hopefully, I’ll get some good rest.
For now, my solution is to try sleeping without melatonin (for now) and to rely on less of the stuff when I really can’t sleep aka tone down the dosage and minimize the usage. I hope that fixes things. The reason why I wanted to write about this topic is basically just to get it out of my head. I didn’t really want to talk to offline people about it is because I’m honestly a bit worried here and there that I’m bothering people with my problems when I can’t help other people as much. It’s silly, I know, but I’ve been getting this sort of “imposter syndrome” as of late, thinking that I’m not worth the attention or help or advice that other people give me and it’s weird as my self-esteem is actually quite good. It’s just a weird headspace thing, I guess, and I’ll get over it eventually.
Either way, I gotta sort out my stuff and hope that I can start chugging out videos on YT and I also gotta work on more posts for the upcoming few weeks as I want to post more reviews and stuff. I gotta push myself a bit this month! Hope you enjoyed this post.
Cheers!
This post is part of the Blaugust 2021 event. For more information on that, check out this post!
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!
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