I have this reoccurring experience and I am curious to see if anyone else has dealt with it. For context, I had/have obstructive sleep apnea that I addressed semi-successfully with a tonsillectomy a few years ago. I don’t use a CPAP (though I am looking into it).
Any time that I get sick in a manner that swells my throat, i.e. bad cough, mono, covid, etc., I have very strange nights. Anyone I’ve shared a room with in this period tells me that I am choking, sputtering, and gasping the entire time (more than my regular). I don’t notice that at all. What I notice is a single persistent dream that is somehow explaining me waking up every 30 minutes. For example, when I experienced this in high school, I had dreamed that I was at my soccer practice, and my coach was really angry with my performance in a game. Even as I stood up from bed in the middle of the night, I was still thinking about how I could improve so that I could go back to sleep. Every time I laid down and closed my eyes, I’d continue to experience the dream through my sleep and after I was awoken 30 minutes later from an obstruction. For almost a week, I experienced similar dreams that “kept me awake”, until I went to a doctor and they prescribed me steroids to lower the swelling. That night the dreams went away and I slept like a baby. This doesn’t happen when I have my standard sleep apnea, just when I’m sick and it’s really bad.
Does anyone else experience this?