Worried about dying in my sleep. (rant)

Image by Midjourney

Lately, I have been worried about dying in my sleep. That's probably my preferred choice for how to die, but I am still a little nervous when it's bedtime now. 

I have really severe sleep apnea. But because I can't sleep with a BiPAP machine most of the time, I'm only being treated for it in minimally-invasive, minimally-effective ways. My health insurance won't cover the recommended operations to help me breathe while I sleep, so this is the best I can do. 

For the last couple of nights, I'll have dreams in which I stop breathing. 

In one, there was a pretty elaborate set up in the dream for why I stopped breathing. The set up seemed to take a while to unfold, which makes me wonder how time works as far as how long it takes for the brain to create a dream versus how one experiences the dream. My brain probably only had seconds to create a logical reason in the dream narrative to stop breathing. But it felt quite a bit longer in the dream than the couple of seconds in which I stopped breathing. 

But then, in a subsequent dream, I was shopping and then someone in the dream was just like, "There you go!" And that was the signal in the dream that I had stopped breathing. There was no logical lead up to it. 

It started to feel as though I was drowning. I think I'm really lucky that I don't get sleep paralysis demons on top of it. My mother used to get them, and it sounded terrifying. But my dreams about why I stopped breathing weren't scary. Only the sudden thought that I might suffocate to death was scary.