I’m a 25 year old woman from NZ, and I have had what seems to fit REM Sleep Disorder since I was probably 5 or 6.

When I was a kid I slept walked and talked a lot, more often when I was anxious or worried (I guess the dreams lent themselves more to movement than in other times). As I have gotten older I sleep walk less but I still move about a lot in bed and occasionally will leap out of bed, usually to wake up very confused.

For a while I went through a period of having terrifying dreams about spiders. Sometimes they were people sized spiders being lowered onto me, or other times they were fist sized on the wall behind the bed, or sometimes there were just hundreds of them. I have always had a phobia of spiders but I think the dreams have made that phobia worse.

After I had been with my boyfriend for a month of so, he heard me screaming “oh my god” over and over. I’m a great blasphemer when I’m asleep. I was dreaming that someone was pushing a grand piano over a precipice and it would soon fall on me.
Since then he has been well acquainted with my active sleeping. Usually I’m not violent, but I always wake him up, and as someone who struggles to get to sleep this is obviously very frustrating for him.

If I go to sleep naked I often have a dream that I am somewhere I shouldn’t be without clothes on, and my boyfriend will wake to me rummaging around on the floor for something to put on. I often wake in clothes when I feel asleep not wearing any.

Sometimes I also think my boyfriend is a stranger and try to push him out of the bed. So nothing too dangerous, just confusing and scary for me, and irritating and sometimes hurtful to him (there’s nothing like your girlfriend of four years telling you to get the f8ck out of the bed to make you feel good.)

I’d be really interested to hear from anyone else from NZ who suffers from this, if there are any on here and to hear if anyone has tried to get treatment.

Also I’m a writer and I’m thinking about writing an article on this, by tracking my own progress with a doctor, but I would love to talk to other NZ’ers with the same problem. Most people find it pretty funny, but obviously in a lot of cases it’s far from funny.