dreams about falling

Do you know that feeling when you’re dreaming, and suddenly you’re falling, then you jerk awake like your whole body just snapped? I want to know if anyone else actually experiences this because lately it’s happening to me several times every single night, and it never used to be like this. I’m not talking about that occasional twitch most people joke about—you know, when your body jolts once and you laugh it off. This is constant, it’s repetitive, and it’s so intense that it feels like my brain has turned into some kind of defective machine that keeps hitting the emergency eject button. I wake up with my heart racing, drenched in sweat, like I just got thrown off a building mid-dream. And it’s not once, it’s not twice, but six, seven, sometimes eight times per night. It destroys any chance of real rest. I’ve done the basic checks: no late caffeine, no screens blasting in my face, no major stress spike, not even any alcohol. None of that matters. It still happens. I’ve been reading around—doctors and articles love to call it “hypnic jerk,” or they classify it under parasomnia or throw in phrases like “nocturnal myoclonus.” All that jargon does is dress up the fact that your body decides to violently boot you out of sleep like a system crash. One medical review I came across said, “most individuals report these episodes as harmless,” which is honestly insulting. Would you call it harmless if your own body tricked you into thinking you were dying by falling every night? That word doesn’t fit at all. It feels hostile, rude, and like my nervous system is playing a sick joke at my expense.

And the more I think about it, the angrier I get. On one hand, I can go all technical and detached: it’s probably my nervous system misfiring, some mix-up between the vestibular system in my inner ear and the brain’s perception of stillness. I could cite “Mahowald and Schenck (2005)” or the International Classification of Sleep Disorders, which catalog this crap like items on a warehouse shelf. But honestly, that doesn’t help me at 3 a.m. when I’m yanked awake for the fifth time in a row, staring at the ceiling and wondering if I’ll ever sleep like a normal human again. One paper described it as “heightened sympathetic activation,” which is medical speak for “your fight-or-flight system won’t shut the hell up.” Great, thanks, I already knew my body was panicking. What I want to know is: does anyone else deal with it this often? I don’t mean occasionally, I mean systemically, like it’s been programmed into your nights. Do you just accept it, or does it drive you as crazy as it drives me? I feel detached even as I write this, but the truth is that it’s wrecking me. It’s ruining my ability to get restorative sleep, wrecking my circadian rhythm, and making me wake up already exhausted. I’m not here to be sentimental or dramatic—I’m just being direct about how much this is screwing with me. And yet, it still feels absurd to even type this out, because how do you complain about your own body deciding to simulate free-fall every single night? But here I am, frustrated, pissed, and stuck with it. If you’ve felt the same, you know exactly why I had to vent it out here. And if you haven’t, lucky you. For me, the best I can sum it up in one image is this stupid emoji: 😑.

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