Thread by @BludVasilisa

Do NOT suddenly drop venlafaxine for 2 days
🧵

#mentalhealth #bipolardisorder #depression #antidepressants

I had the wildest night today.
It started with a really bad dream - an absolutely miserable experience. It was a wild mix between reality, warped cotton-like air and an extremely vivid feeling of being a complete failure as a professional and just as a decent human being.

All the wrong things I did were causing overwhelming pain. Sometimes I almost woke up and saw my real room through my closed eyelids.

I was dreaming about seeing a dream. I had to distinguish between reality and dream only to find out that reality wasn't real in the first place. I made a lot of attempts to escape and finally woke up at 4 am and tried to fall asleep again.

Every time I tried I went back to this dream, which always started with seeing through my closed eyelids. I always interrupted it in panic, my heartbeat was insane during these returns. But I wanted to sleep so much that I tried again and again.

When I wasn't asleep, I had trouble typing on my phone and reading texts. I read one Discord message, then I went back to this server and it turned out it was completely different from the first time I read it. I'm pretty sure I was awake both times.

My movements were also restricted. My limbs were swimming away from me when they were not moving for a minute.

Then the paralysis started. Every time I was falling asleep, I was unable to move. Same thing waking up. My dreams were the same each time, but at least I wasn't feeling this bad - just unable to endure them for long, so I woke up every hour.

I came to terms with being paralyzed, I wanted to sleep really bad.
Then I started seeing through my closed eyelids again. I didn't want to return to this bad dream but finally accepted it too.
Then someone sneezed behind my back, while I was paralyzed and hallucinating my room.

It was a little too much. I tried to scream to stop being paralyzed, but of course, I couldn't. I battled my paralysis really hard - after a ton of effort I was able to move again.

Then a cycle of trying to fall asleep and waking up because a dream is unbearable began. I saw dreams about having a dream again - I understood it was a dream, but I didn't understand that the second layer was a dream too.

My transitions between dreams and reality were almost seamless, my dreams always started and ended with me lying on my bed. Every time I woke up I had to move my body really hard to stop being paralyzed, sometimes had to do it twice - in a fake reality and in a real one.

Weird things were constantly happening - someone jumped on my head while I was falling asleep, I've heard white noise while trying to move my limbs, people were constantly entering my room and asking questions I couldn't understand

I couldn't even answer them because my mouth just didn't work (it was kind of annoying). When I woke up, I saw a wall where a ceiling should be twice.

An example of a dream:
Fell asleep while being paralyzed, and fell from my bed in a dream. Decided to see what comes next and didn't try to wake up. I crawled to an exit (remember, the air was cotton-like and my movements were restricted) and suddenly started flying.

"This dream isn't that bad this time" I thought, trying to fly to the outside. Then I woke up and to my surprise didn't even experience paralysis - the only thing is I had to wave away a flying Russian doll, but it was nothing. Then I woke up again through the paralysis of course

My dreams became a series of 10 minutes cycles of falling asleep and waking up. I started being interested in that and experimented every time I fell asleep.

I tried to turn on my pc, tried to fly (kind of worked, but I was paralyzed in the air), and a lot of other things out of curiosity. People were still coming to my room.

Of course, I wasn't rested after waking up every hour and then every ten minutes. I had extreme hypersomnia, I literally slept for a whole day after this. I finally got my meds (I just took them) but I still experience dizziness, auditory hallucinations, and disorientation.

I'm not even talking about brain zaps, feeling sick, and all the minor stuff like this - it's a given.

My dosage is 375 mg of venlafaxine.
Let it be a cautionary tale.