Hurting Oneself While Asleep?

[VeryFoggy]

I have a question.  Has anybody ever hurt themselves while asleep?  Over the last couple of months I have been doing some serious work on recovering some repressed memories. Some flashes of memory I have had involved being hit in the head as a child with some pretty severe blows. In any case I have come to believe strongly the blows to the head are an important part of a memory I am trying to recapture.

Three times over the course of the last month I have woken up and found that I have bruises with lumps on my head.  This was scary to me at first as I had NO MEMORY of hitting my head.  I would walk through the house over and over trying to figure out how it happened.  Finally in desperation I lay down on my bed and rolled towards my nightstand.  Bingo!  The corner of my nightstand is close enough to the bed that I could bang my head on it and the bruises and lumps matched the size and location of the nightstand corner.

What is troubling is I have NO MEMORY of banging my head hard enough to bruise and leave a lump.  So if that is how it is happening, why do I not wake up?  So I think I am doing it to myself in my sleep, but I don't wake up.  This bothers me.

Anybody else do things like this? Wake up with bruises and not know how it happened?

[Dutch Uncle]

I have woken up with pains that I attribute to a 'weird' sleeping position. Or sometimes I have a sour eye.

Excellent thing that you have identified the cause of your bumps and bruises. 
As far as not waking up: people sleep through burglaries, emergency services attending a fire just a bit further down the street (you would expect the sirens would wake them up) or even very loud snoring spouses right next to them.*

So probably there is nothing to worry about.

Any dreams that you recall, involving being hit on the head? Sometimes dreams get 'prompted' by physical experiences during sleep.
The most famous and very common is the one of falling into a void, usually very early after going to bed. You'll wake up with sudden tensioning of your muscles, resulting in a very tense 'wake up call'. You literally *shock* into being awake.
This is due to your muscles 'turning off' before your consciousness is asleep, and thus your consciousness doesn't sense 'firm ground' anymore and says: "Help! The body must be falling! Alert!" (On most days your consciousness goes to sleep first, after which your muscles get 'turned off'. No problem.)
Funny thing that, sleep.


*) I once read a true story on a woman who had her hearing impaired on one side. It most probably had to be caused by exposure to loud noise, but there was no obvious exposure to any such thing. It turned out her husband produced 'illegally' loud noise when snoring. 90dB  or so. In any work environment, she would have had to wear ear-protection. Try sleeping next to that, 8 hours a night.

Wishing you many bump-free awakenings,

[Trees]

VeryFoggy, that is very interesting!  (But I do hope you have moved the nightstand.)  That is a new wrinkle on brain activity.  It looks like your brain is wrestling with some complicated stuff.

[VeryFoggy]

Thanks for the supportive comment DU and Trees.  This is why I love the forum.  Nobody says, "OMG you must be crazy!  Go check yourself into the psych ward immediately."  No, you take me seriously and just accept.

No, I have no recall of dreams about being hit.  I have been trying hard to remember my dreams for a couple of months but honestly most of it is a bunch of garbage. Not literally, just jumbled up stuff that makes no sense. Example all I remember from last night is something about visiting a family, a man giving me a piggy back ride, a woman exercising on a beach, and a DVD we had rented that needed to be returned.  Garbage.

I have really been struggling to recover some memories.  My T says I just may not be able to handle it, the memories, and so my brain simply will not allow it, as my brain believes it would traumatize me.

So my laymen's take on what I think may be happening is: there is something very bad that happened to me which involved a blow to the head. But maybe the blow was so severe I was knocked unconscious.  So now, in a primitive way my brain is "making me" hit my head while I am sleeping, and then not allowing me to wake up, to "show" me how I could have had something happen to me that I simply cannot recall. A sort of a reenactment of NOT being able to recall something.

I know, that sounds silly, but I am going to run it by my T and see what she says.  I have not even dared to tell her about the bruises because FIRST I wanted to figure where they came from!  I believe I have found it - the nightstand.

And I have jammed a pillow upright between the bed and the nightstand to cover the corner so I could not do it anymore! So far 3 nights without new bruises!

[Dutch Uncle]

I know, that sounds silly, but I am going to run it by my T and see what she says.  I have not even dared to tell her about the bruises because FIRST I wanted to figure where they came from!  I believe I have found it - the nightstand.

And I have jammed a pillow upright between the bed and the nightstand to cover the corner so I could not do it anymore! So far 3 nights without new bruises!

[arpy1]

wise move, VeryFoggy!

i always reckon our souls can take a while to 'brew' stuff but in the end, the things you are looking for tend to bubble up to the surface of the mind all by themselves, when they're sufficiently brewed.
i guess what you've been doing is just the same as sleepwalking only with more bruises. here's to more bruise free nights of brewing

[Trees]

here's to more bruise free nights of brewing

That has a nice ring to it, arpy1.  And I like to think of it in a metaphorical way as well, because I wake up often emotionally bruised from a  night of brewing.