Sleep Labs and Studies

I haven't personally but I've been trying to get my husband to go for years. He snores a lot but he also stops breathing in his sleep several times a night and wakes up coughing and gagging. He refuses to go though, which I don't get because it's a free study through the military. What are hypnagogic hallucinations? Is it something that happens while you are half asleep like an out of body experience or something? Just curious. :) I've had what I mentioned about 3 times over the past few years and I thought I was crazy and I'm still not sure if I was awake or asleep. I think I would like to experience that again because it was pretty cool in retrospect, but every time it happens for real I get terrified for some reason.

Yes, I have had the sleep lab done twice. It is not at all bad. The only thing that I recommend is that you take your own pillow! They will put a lot of monitor-like things all over your head with connected wires and it looks really weird; but you feel nothing. The part that I loved the best is that I am a smoker, and had to leave my room and get on the elevator to go outside with all of these connections attached to me. Here I am, looking like this, in my jammies and robe (an old lady, mind you), and I am getting on the elevator where a young boy (10-12) is with his father. The boy was old enough to not want to appear afraid, but very quickly grabbed his father's hand - I loved that! Sometimes I guess I can have a warped sense of humor! LOL! It is also best if you have your own sweats, jammies, - something you are familiar with. You can take books, magazines, crafting items, etc. You will not know that anyone is watching you unless you look into the small camera eye that is placed in your room. The people monitoring are nowhere close to you. I must confess that one of my biggest fears was that I would have "an itch" and have it caught on tape. I did discuss that with the tech and was told to rest assurred, they had seen it all and were very discreet and nothing would ever be mentioned. I hope this helps to alleviate any stress you are feeling. It is really painless and if you are tired, it is a great night's sleep. Of course, the morning part of the sleep test is not as peaceful. They let you fall asleep only to wake you up and let you fall asleep to wake you up again several times - but it's over fairly early in the afternoon. Good luck if you decide to go ahead with it ~Donna

Yeah I have heard about this before. I have not participated but my roommate did. He said the first two days he was very uncomfortable with knowing that people were watching him but they had him in a setting where the monitoring was not so invasive. He was able to work it out by having a lot of exercise during the first week (Day ime) to make him exhausted by night. Good luck with that. :)

i have thought about doing this several times but just never ended up trying. i too wonder if sleeping under those conditions would traumatize me lol. i`m a very light sleeper as it is, so being woken up for test result collection every few hours would probably mean almost no sleep those nights. what exactly is a hypnagogic hallucination?