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[Vector]

I think there's also just special lightbulbs you can use, to help out.  Don't necessarily need Special Electronics.

[mikefictiti0us]

I've suffered from insomnia for years. It takes me anywhere between two to five hours to fall asleep, regardless of how physically tired I am. That's on a good night. More often than not, I simply cannot sleep at all. I lay in bed, wide awake, and wait until I see the first light of dawn through the curtains in my room. Sometimes I acknowledge the futility of trying to fall asleep and I'll get up and surf the net, exercise, play my guitar and piano or watch movies. Tonight is one of those nights. It's 3:12am and I'm wide awake, despite only having a bare two hours sleep last night. Which means I'll spend the rest of today feeling like a zombie.

It's nightmarish. Horrible. There are days where I feel like I'm disconnected from my own body due to lack of sleep. Everything seems wrong. It's like viewing the world through a particularly nasty set of drunk-goggles, except you can't fucking take them off and return to normality. Colors become overly vivid, odd little points of light randomly streak across my field of vision, people and objects seem to bulge and elongate in odd and unnatural ways (which is very disconcerting, to say the least), certain sounds are heightened to the point where they cause physical discomfort. List goes on.

I've tried a vast amount of products and various relaxation techniques to induce sleep. Some (a white noise generator, for one) worked for short periods of time before I habituated to them and they were rendered useless.
I went off the deep end at one point and randomly started purchasing various shady products which promised a good night's sleep. To say that there are large numbers of ineffective devices designed to prey on people with sleep disorders is an understatement. Technological snake oil abounds.

What works for me : heavy prescription sleeping tablets. I take these sparingly, usually when I haven't slept more than a handful of hours over the course of several days and the aforementioned visual and auditory anomalies begin to emerge. The price I pay is that I wake up feeling like a jackhammer has been running through my head and body.

So I understand how miserable it feels to live this way and I hope you manage to find relief.

[Sappho]

I understand completely what you're talking about, mikefictiti0us.  I suppose I should be grateful that my problem has shifted more towards not being able to wake up despite many hours of sleep, rather than not being able to sleep at all as used to happen.  But neither extreme is pleasant.

Speaking of which, I've been back in Prague for less than a week and last night I had my first trapped-in-a-dream episode since before I left for the States.  So it seems to be related to this location after all.  I'm looking for a new place to live but this is far easier said than done.  I'm broke, the rent in this place is dirt cheap, and I don't have anyone else to live with.

The seasonal depression is also getting much worse.  It's never been this bad (and only at the very start of winter!), presumably because even during the day I'm not exposed to much daylight because of the darkness in this place.  The fact that my flat is freezing (or nearly so - about 10 degrees Celsius at the moment) is not helping the sleep issues or the depression, either, and our electric space heaters, though expensive to run, don't do much good against this cold.

I looked into light therapy and it's ridiculously expensive.  The cheapest model I could find was 5000 kc (about $250, or half my monthly salary).  It would take me several months to save up enough money to buy one of these, and by then I'll hopefully be in a better situation anyway.  If I try to buy one now (which might be possible if I scrape together everything I have and only eat potatoes for the next month or so), I'll be financially crippling my ability to move into a new apartment.  So I guess that option is out.  Shame, too - I had high hopes for that doing me a lot of good.

[Vector]

Or you could just buy a lightbulb and put it in your study lamp.

[Sappho]

I don't think bulbs like that are available in this country. I also thought the lights for SAD treatment did more than just include all the colors in the spectrum - isn't there something to do with UV rays and other sciencey stuff which stimulates the seratonin production in your brain?

[Duke 2.0]

 If you have a laptop you could spend most of your day at a library or internet cafe, which would let you be near windows and spend a lot of time outside. Could do some good.

[Vector]

I don't think bulbs like that are available in this country. I also thought the lights for SAD treatment did more than just include all the colors in the spectrum - isn't there something to do with UV rays and other sciencey stuff which stimulates the seratonin production in your brain?

That would be exactly what it was referring to.

[Sappho]

That article says there's a difference between "full-spectrum" light which makes things look more natural, and actual full-spectrum light, though: "Products marketed as "full-spectrum" may produce light throughout the entire spectrum, but actually do not produce an even spectral distribution, and may not even differ substantially from lights not marketed as "full-spectrum"."

Edit: Also - "it is estimated that 10,000 lux is needed for effective treatment." - I think you need a special machine to produce light that powerful. I don't think standard lamps are able to do it. (According to the wikipedia article, the average family living room has only 50 lux, and office lighting is only 350-500 lux.) Also, the lights in my flat are all the industrial long ceiling-mounted fluorescent ones, the kind you see in supermarkets and high schools. I don't have a normal lamp with standard bulbs. I suppose if I could find an inexpensive light bulb that did help, though, I could find a lamp somewhere that isn't too expensive.

[Vector]

Yeah, I think I'm mostly meaning in terms of "slightly helping, maybe."  Obviously, it's not going to work as well as the full thing, but the woman I'm talking about seemed to be helped quite a bit just by that little measure.

[Sappho]

Yeah, it's certainly worth a try if I can find something. I don't think this sort of thing is easy to find in this country, though. I'll keep my eyes open.