Using the method detailed in this post I decided to see if 5-HTP had any effect on my snoring.
I was keen to try out 200mg of 5-HTP first, given that it had previously had such a positive effect on my AHI.
My thinking was that if 5-HTP had been able to reduce the gross movements of my airways that are responsible for obstructive sleep apnoea, then maybe it would also be able to reduce the smaller movements that are responsible for snoring. However, I suspected that as it hadn't been able to completely prevent airway restrictions that it wouldn't have an effect on the smaller movements.
It seems that I was wrong. The results were promising to say the least.
5-HTP was able to reduce my snoring further than that offered by just sleeping on my side.
Given that from my data alone there are two indications that 5-HTP is beneficial to sleep (AHI reduction and a reduction in snoring) I would love to see a larger scale experiment or trial take place, after all I am just "n=1".
Prior to taking 5-HTP I researched it in medical literature with regards to dosage and possible side-effects. After seeing my results I went back to the literature and started looking for a possible mechanism or explanation as to why 5-HTP might have this effect.
I'm working on a summary of what I've found and will post it in the near future.
For the future:
I'm curious as to whether the 5-HTP would reduce my supine snoring index, given that my snoring is at its loudest and most frequent when on my back so I will record a three-night mean of 5-HTP sleep when I will be free to move and produce supine and free-to-move snoring indexes via the Visi-Download software.
I'm also curious to see what different doses would achieve, so I'll carry out three night mean trials of side-sleep + 50mg, 100mg and 300mg of 5-HTP and measure the effect on my AHI, snoring profile and sleep stage data.
Snoring occurs when the tissues of the airways relax during sleep causing the air to vibrate as it passes over them, in a similar way that deflating a balloon causes the balloon's neck to vibrate and make that familiar raspberry sound.
What should have been nice smooth breaths like these...
...ended up becoming jagged saw-toothed breaths like these...
...resulting in a rasping snore.
To give you an idea of what the Visi-Download software allows me to see (and how the vibrations above actually sound) I've made a short video of a few snores that I recorded on one of my baseline nights:
Snoring can simply be just that - a noise, it can be a nuisance if it's too loud as it can wake others in the house, if it's loud enough it can actually wake the sleeper! However, it can also be much more than just a noise. Besides being the cause of much nocturnal anger and maybe even the cause of a relationship breakdown, it can also be a sign of a greater health issue such as sleep apnoea.
If only that were as as serious as it got, but my snoring is actually due to sleep apnoea. As documented in many posts on this blog, I have mild sleep apnoea.
I've found some ways to bring the apnoea to acceptable levels with a typical AHI of between 1 and 3, (an AHI of under 5 is considered normal if it doesn't cause symptoms such as daytime tiredness etc). The way that I did this was to keep off my back when I slept by using a Rematee belt. This also had a knock-on effect of reducing my snoring, but not eliminating it.
On the nights that I've recorded while using the Rematee to keep me off my back, my AHI has been stable and my snoring has reduced (the residual respiratory events are mainly hypopneas, although the lowest that my oxygen saturations drop to has improved, it still drops to around 79%).
Besides looking for other ways to bring my AHI down even more, I want to go further and eliminate my snoring. I guess that my long term quest is to see if it's possible to have the much hyped perfect night's sleep.
Many snoring remedies (and there are many) say that they are not suitable for snoring that is caused by sleep apnoea, so with my new found side-sleeping "normal" AHI and some residual snoring I now find myself in a good position to put them to the test.
Quantifying Snoring
The problem is that snoring is hard to quantify. Yes, you could ask a partner, but that answer would be fairly subjective. You could judge by how you felt in the morning, but again that is subjective. You could even place a Dictaphone beside the bed to record your snoring but besides but again, how do you score the recording?
One of the channels that Stowood's Black Shadow sleep monitor measures is snoring, and it does this via a calibrated microphone, allowing you to quantify how loud each snore actually is. It also derives a second channel from the sound to identify individual snores, thereby allowing you to actually have a snore-count. From there it calculates a snore-index (a number of snores per hour, grouped according to volume).
So, my method is this:
By keeping off my back I am essentially apnoea-free, leaving only the snoring to be addressed, so to ensure this and to eliminate the effects of a variable sleep position on my snoring (and to bring my AHI to normal), I'll be wearing the Rematee belt whilst putting a different snoring remedy to the test each night hoping to eliminate my remaining snoring.
I'll record sleep data for three nights per selected remedy and calculate the mean snoring profile for each by graphing each remedy according to:
Hourly snores between 55db and 65db
Hourly snores between 65db and 75db
Hourly snores greater than 75db
This "Snore Profile" will not only allow me to see if the total snores have been reduced, but it will allow me to see if the remaining snores are quieter.
This graph shows the mean snore profile for my Supine Baseline, Free-to-Move Baseline (calculated from the same nights), and my Rematee baseline.
The majority of my snores are louder than 75db regardless of whether I sleep on my side, back or am free to move around! Not unexpectedly then, it follows that the next largest chunk of my snoring falls between 65 and 75 db with hardly any under 65db.
The "Remedies"
There are plenty of "remedies" available. Some of these are traditional remedies (using the term loosely), and some are more modern commercially available remedies.
It's clear to see the positive effect that side-sleeping has on reducing my snoring. It reduces my snoring by over 50%, so it is likely that this in itself will be a clear leader in the remedy league table. I suspect that for many snorers (where their snoring is not caused by apnoea) that the Rematee and side-sleeping could eliminate snoring completely.
Mandibular Advancement Devices
Nasal dilation
Snore Spray
Humidifier by the bedside
Anti-Snore Ring (Acupressure)
Anti Snore strip (on roof of mouth)
Drinking a glass of water before bed
A night time garlic gargle
Toothpaste under the nose
Electric snore-shocker devices
Nasal irrigation
I also want to explore the following to see if they have an effect on my snoring.
5-HTP
Melatonin
L-Tryptophan
Blood sugar levels
Large dose of vitamin B6
I'll pick from this list (avoiding some completely) and put them to the test for three nights to get a mean snoring value. To avoid creating a very long post I intend to create a separate post introducing each remedy (and how well it performed). When I've finished I'll then chart the results together.
Besides bringing my AHI to an acceptable level to address the residual snoring, part of the reason for staying on my side for the entire night is that it will allow a fair comparison of snoring in all sleep stages (I typically spend around 2h10 minutes in REM and 45 minutes in Slow Wave Sleep). I'll also be keeping an eye on my Zeo stats to see if any of the methods have an effect on my sleep composition. I expect that the methods that rely on disturbing you during snoring episodes may have a negative effect on REM or Slow Wave Sleep.
Using the method detailed in this post I decided to see if 5-HTP had any effect on my snoring.
I was keen to try out 200mg of 5-HTP first, given that it had previously had such a positive effect on my AHI.
My thinking was that if 5-HTP had been able to reduce the gross movements of my airways that are responsible for obstructive sleep apnoea, then maybe it would also be able to reduce the smaller movements that are responsible for snoring. However, I suspected that as it hadn't been able to completely prevent airway restrictions that it wouldn't have an effect on the smaller movements.
It seems that I was wrong. The results were promising to say the least.
5-HTP was able to reduce my snoring further than that offered by just sleeping on my side.
Given that from my data alone there are two indications that 5-HTP is beneficial to sleep (AHI reduction and a reduction in snoring) I would love to see a larger scale experiment or trial take place, after all I am just "n=1".
Prior to taking 5-HTP I researched it in medical literature with regards to dosage and possible side-effects. After seeing my results I went back to the literature and started looking for a possible mechanism or explanation as to why 5-HTP might have this effect.
I'm working on a summary of what I've found and will post it in the near future.
For the future:
I'm curious as to whether the 5-HTP would reduce my supine snoring index, given that my snoring is at its loudest and most frequent when on my back so I will record a three-night mean of 5-HTP sleep when I will be free to move and produce supine and free-to-move snoring indexes via the Visi-Download software.
I'm also curious to see what different doses would achieve, so I'll carry out three night mean trials of side-sleep + 50mg, 100mg and 300mg of 5-HTP and measure the effect on my AHI, snoring profile and sleep stage data.
Lucid Dreaming seems to be a bridge between the waking and dream worlds. You are dreaming, yet you are conscious of dreaming and capable of having rational thoughts during a jumbled dream.
Being lucid doesn't mean that you have full control over your dreams, despite being aware that I'm dreaming I still find that I am compelled to "play along" with the dream that I'm given. So, for example, if I find myself dreaming of a street scene, I can't magically transform it into countryside. In order to change the scenery I have to make the change fit into the story somehow, even if the scene-change is something as crude opening a shop door and "knowing" that it takes me to the countryside.
All this is wrapped in the fact that (for me at least) lucid dreaming is a constant struggle to remain lucid, it doesn't take much to lose lucidity and slip back into a normal dream.
So when I suggested sending a signal from a dream in this blog-post, I thought it unlikely that I'd ever be able to remain lucid and have the presence of mind to consciously send a signal to the Zeo Raw Data (via ZeoScope) marking the lucid dream.
I'd been briefly practicing what sort of a signal to use before going to sleep every night, hoping that it'd stick inside my head if I was fortunate enough to have a lucid dream. Given that the signal has to be based on eye movements I was fairly limited in what I could do, but the practice sessions showed me that flicking my eyes from side to side just seemed to produce a very noisy signal and something that could be interpreted as EMG noise from my forehead, so I settled on eye movements to the right, then centre, which produced a nice peak on the raw EEG data (it is this type of peak that the Zeo filters to use for its EOG signal).
Because the eye movements were forced as far right as I could manage the amplitude of them rose above the normal eye movements of waking and REM.
(Normal eye movements during a period of REM (right to centre first, followed by left to centre)
On Wednesday night I became lucid in a dream and managed to stop and send a signal using my eyes that was picked up by the Zeo.
The first thing that I remember about the dream was that I was late to get to a party and I still had to stop off and buy a bottle of something to take along. I lifted up and flew along the coast of the Thames Estuary not far from where I live.
This was the thing that prompted me to become lucid. Flying is such a break from the everyday laws of physics that it jolted me into realising that I was dreaming.
So, I went along with the dream, flying to the party but stopping off at a small stone-clad Welsh off-licence (I have no idea why I ended up in Wales). As I landed and my feet touched the ground I remembered that I was wearing the Zeo headband and recording the raw data, so I darted my eyes sharply to the right and centred them again.
Then I thought, "That's just one, maybe it'll get lost in the other data", so I repeated it 5 more times, then bought my wine and Jaffa Cakes, lifted into the sky and headed for mainland Europe (where the party was apparently).
Shortly after arriving at the party (which turned out to be in a 1970s church hall), I woke up and glanced at the clock before falling asleep again.
In the morning I found it easy to see the signal that I'd recorded. The peaks were a lot larger than my typical eye movements. The first peak is my initial signal, then after a pause I gave 5 more right-eye movements.
So, not as significant as a signal picked up by SETI but still, this is a signal from the dream-world to the waking world. It actually reassures me because several people have asked me, "How do you know that you're not just dreaming that you know you're dreaming?" implying that lucid dreaming is itself a dream. This shows that it isn't. At the time of the signals, I remembered that I was actually asleep in bed and not outside an off-licence in Wales and although I was still standing on the cobbled street and not able to sense the waking world I was able to make an impact on it via this signal.
From the Zeo raw data it seems that a broken night played a part in triggering this dream, and I suspect that respiratory arousals were the cause again as I wasn't wearing the Rematee belt. A rough breakdown of the time surrounding lucidity is as follows...
04:34:45Woke from a long stable period of N1/N2 (light) sleep
04:39:15Entered REM (from wake)
Repeated awakenings and a mixture of N1/N2 and REM until...
05:00:15Entered stable REM
05:03:26Began to signal lucidity
05:03:37Gave last eye movement of lucidity
05:06:14Woke and looked at the clock before going back into REM again
I'm still not any closer to seeing a trademark brainwave pattern of lucid dreaming, but I suspect that this is due to the single site EEG.
I'd like to practice this further and if I'm fortunate enough to be able to do this again I'd like to try to repeat the signal every 60 seconds (as it appears to me in the dream), or at key points in the dream (such as taking off and landing, meeting a person etc etc) it would be interesting to see if these signals can be used as markers to chart the flow of time through a dream.
A few years ago I had three instances of sleep paralysis in the same night, leading to finally meeting "The Stranger In The Room". Since then I haven't been afraid of sleep paralysis, in fact I've welcomed it as it's a fairly easy way to initiate a lucid dream.
The other night I experienced sleep paralysis which progressed to an Out of Body Experience (OOBE) then to a Lucid Dream, and it's given me more of an insight into a possible mechanism, which seems to fit with the episode that occurred a few years ago, only this time I was wearing 2 sleep monitors so I've been able to "capture" some elements of it and piece together my theory of the events.
This has led me to realise that there are common factors in the events leading up to sleep paralysis and the subsequent spontaneous lucidity.
I'll begin by describing what happened several years ago. I'm well aware that it didn't happen literally, but bear with me as I think it's best to describe it as it appeared before taking it apart scientifically. I've put the account in a quote-box, so if you really can't bear hearing other people's dreams you can easily skip over it...
I briefly mentioned in this post that as far as getting over the fear of sleep paralysis goes, the turning point for me was a night several years ago when my son had a chest infection causing his nocturnal oxygen levels to drop lower and more frequently than usual meaning that I had to carry out assisted coughing and nasal suction several times. Needless to say our night was very disturbed and we were both very tired. This was the second such night in a row.
On three occasions when I returned to my bed I suffered from sleep paralysis. It was something that I'd grown used to because it had been occurring roughly once every couple of months from the age of around 13.
I'd be laying in bed listening out for his oximeter alarm, then I'd get the familiar whistle in my ears, a crackling noise, then my body would feel crushed and each muscle would feel as if someone had deflated it squashing me further into the bed. Then the familiar (but still frightening) feeling of someone watching me as I lay there struggling trying to talk but only managing a throaty "uugh" noise.
By the third time I almost found it funny (maybe because it had never happened to me so frequently, so this time it felt familiar, almost to the point that I knew I was safe). I kept telling myself that my body was effectively asleep. "Okay, so my body is asleep but somehow I (whatever makes me me) is awake, so that 'me' is going to get up".
"I" then rose above my sleeping self about a foot or two, rolled left (now facing the wall), then floated to the foot of the bed and ended up standing on the floor looking back at my sleeping-self.
This all seemed normal at the time.
It was then that I could finally see the person that had been watching me. He was standing next to me at the foot of the bed. He stepped aside, smiled and gestured towards the mirror at the end of my bed. Then I passed through the mirror, through the wardrobe and then through the wall into my son's room next door. A few moments later I was back in my bed, awake and able to move.
The feeling was incredible, even if it did leave me a bit confused as to whether I was really awake this time. From that moment on I have not been afraid of sleep paralysis.
Now here's a brief account of the episode I had the other night, then I'll draw some parallels between the two nights...
I'd had little sleep the previous night as I had to be awake around 3am for a journey to Manchester. When I got home I was tired, so after dinner I made a point of not staying up late (bed by 9pm). Keen to carry on my experiments with 5-HTP I took 200mg of 5-HTP, connected some channels of the Black Shadow sleep monitor (SPO2, Pulse, Airflow, Body Movement and Sound), put the Zeo headband on, started to record the raw Zeo data with ZeoScope and went to sleep. I was also wearing the Rematee belt (as is normal for me now).
I was asleep within 6 minutes (a fair indicator of sleep-debt). Another indicator of sleep-debt is the fact that I was briefly in REM sleep within 9 minutes of getting into bed!
At 4:02am (I know this from the raw data) I was woken from REM by a noise near my bedroom window. I woke suddenly thinking that I had an intruder. I shuffled round the bed a bit listening for more noises and then lay there replaying the noise in my head trying to make it fit with a known noise. At the time I also considered that it was a hypnagogic noise. It was a multiple banging noise, and I imagined it was probably a picture falling off the wall and bouncing on the wooden floor.
I'd spent around 10 minutes trying to work out a cause of the noise as I dozed in and out of sleep, then the familiar whistling noise of Sleep Paralysis stirred me. I got excited and tried to turn it into an OOBE by pushing "myself" from my head, but that just stopped the noise so I stopped too. Then the whistling returned and I tried rolling "myself" out of my body. It worked, I sat on the edge of the bed and felt sad that I'd actually woken myself up. It turned out to be a false-awakening because I then floated to the end of the bed, realised that I was still dreaming, and from that moment on was in a lucid dream (albeit of the out-of-body variety).
I went to my bedroom door, floated out into the hallway (something I've never been able to do before as doors usually take me to the wrong place).
It was dark, so I put my hand into the adjacent room and tried to put the light on except there wasn't a switch, just a lump of plastic. Again, this prompted me to stay lucid. So I went to the front door (in search of the cause of the noise). As I got to the front door I hesitated because I really wanted the door to take me outside and I was afraid that it would take me to the wrong place (despite the earlier door working correctly), so I "poured" myself through the letterbox and ended up outside on the driveway.
It was still dark outside, and I had trouble seeing, I imagined that this was because I knew that my eyes were shut because I was asleep, so I took my dream-hands and prised open my dream-eyelids in a way that only someone who has ever had conjunctivitis will know. Then it became daylight.
On my driveway was a postman in a bright red fleece. Instantly I was standing next to him and he acknowledged me. I was confused because I knew that this was a dream so expected that I was ghost-like and he wouldn't be able to see me. (I didn't realise it at the time but I was losing lucidity and becoming the observer of the dream again rather than the creator).
The postman apologised for the noise and said that he'd been trying to get a large parcel through the tiny letterbox.
I thanked him, took the parcel and opened my front-door, only to find myself back in bed and waking up.
I then pressed then event-marker on the Black Shadow Monitor and recorded what I remembered of the dream before getting out of bed.
There are a few key similarities that I think are worthwhile extracting from these accounts, and some I've only become aware of in light of the lucid-dream I had the other night.
Sleep debt from previous night
Disturbed Sleep that night
Waking and being fully alert during the night before returning to bed
Remaining alert for an anticipated noise
Sleep Paralysis leading to a dream which became lucid ending with me going off in search of the source of the noise.
In the morning I was keen to playback the audio recording of the night's sleep to see if the sound was real, or hypnagogic in nature. I also wanted to see what the various monitors managed to show of this experience.
It turned out the sound was real and the Black Shadow's microphone was sensitive enough to capture it. It was possible to hear a car driving past the house (causing me to stir) followed 6 seconds later by the sound that I heard: it sounded like a rat-a-tat-tat on the letterbox but I still couldn't identify the noise.
The first sound is much clearer through headphones or good speakers.
The next morning when I went to my car I found the cause of the noise. The passing car had lost a plastic hubcap which had hit the front of my house (my bedroom wall) and spun on the concrete before settling down, in a similar way to a spinning coin running out of energy on a tabletop.
Looking at the graphs from the Black Shadow and the Zeo, it became fairly clear that this wasn't the trigger for the dream, but it was a very important factor because it caused me to wake up fully. I was very alert as I listened out for the cause of the noise, I was anxious and to be honest a little afraid. This likely put me in a state of heightened awareness and self-consciousness, which on some level carried over for the next few minutes into the dream.
I've annotated the 30 minutes covering the noise and finally waking from the lucid dream (click for a larger version).
The raw single-channel EEG data is displayed at the top. I've selected the point that I first woke after hearing the noise. This section aligns with the marker in the brainwave frequency lines (coloured as indicated by the key).
The hypopneas were the likely cause of the sleep paralysis. I suspect the third one was the trigger as body movement is shown after the first and second along with the noise of bedclothes moving, so sleep paralysis had not set in by then.
I suspect the evening went something like this:
Initial car and hubcap noise occurred
I woke suddenly causing a rise in delta wave "noise" as I moved.
My heartrate more than doubled to 101 bpm (startled and fear) (in line with the delta increase)
I lay in bed listening for further sounds until...
I drifted to sleep and quickly went into REM
My respiratory issues are exacerbated by REM so hypopneas followed (yellow blocks)
I had micro-awakenings due to the hypopneas (shown by the blue blocks and reduced pleth)
Due to my heightened state I failed to go back into normal REM and became aware that I was asleep.
Possibly the final hypopnea ended the dream.
I laid still for a few moments before dictating the contents of the dream into the microphone
So I suspect that to reliably induce sleep paralysis and/or lucid dreaming two factors are required;
True wakefulness in the night, not just snoozing a 4am alarm
A cause of micro-arousals / micro-awakenings.
Wild speculation...
I was hoping for a clear indication of something on the EEG and frequency tracings.
The brainwave frequency analysis in more detail with the purple section believed to be the dream.
If I had to be pushed to look for a trend then I'd say that there was a slight increase in Alpha waves (blue) during the time identified as the dream-period also becoming nearly equal to the Theta wave activity (green) at one point, which declines as I wake, but that is possibly stretching things too far at the moment. However, this overlapping (or meeting) of Theta and Alpha occurs in other places in my sleep (and wake) without any memory of lucidity, so I imagine that finding a simple pattern from a single EEG site is unlikely as things are likely a lot more complicated than that.
For the future
I hope to record the events surrounding more sleep paralysis / lucid dreaming episodes and document any trends that arise rather than just basing my hypothesis on one night.
I'd like to learn to signal to the Zeo that I'm dreaming using eye movements, so that I can further pinpoint when lucidity occurs. Maybe this signal could be on a regular basis (or as regular as the dream permits) to help pinpoint when lucidity begins and ends and normal dreams take over.
Looking at my previous data for my 5-day mean AHI, you can see some variation on the day-by-day AHI measurements.
It makes sense that each night will be slightly different but I still wanted to identify and eliminate some of these variables. Now that I know that my sleep-apnoea is positional (mainly when supine) I can attribute some of the night-by-night changes to my sleeping position.
Using the Black Shadow sleep monitor, I am able to automatically record my body position during the night. This is a recording of my sleep position for a single night.
AHI = 9.30
As you can see from the above chart I spent a fair chunk of the night on either my right or left side. Those short spells on my back are when my sleep apnoea kicks in (or the snoring is so loud that it wakes me up). The reason that they are only short spells is that the apnoeas briefly wake me causing me to move onto my side for an hour or so before ending up on my back again (and beginning the cycle again). Towards the end of the sleep I remained on my back despite the apnoeas causing repeated micro awakenings (micro-arousals).
Prior to having access to accurate sleep position data I was aware that sleeping position (and other variables) could affect my AHI, so in my previous experiments I tried to eliminate its effects by recording 5 consecutive nights and calculating a mean AHI. Solely recording one night could have given a falsely low AHI because if by sheer chance I managed to spend the majority of the night on my side then my AHI would have been lower. This lower AHI would actually be masking my problem.
A recent paper by Sunnergren, Broström & Svanborg shows that "Position–dependent obstructive sleep apnea (POSA) was common both in subjects that by American Academy of Sleep Medicine classification had obstructive sleep apnea as well as those without. The severity of obstructive sleep apnea, as defined by American Academy of Sleep Medicine, could be dependent on supine time in a substantial amount of subjects".
This hints that people are slipping through the net and missing out on a diagnosis and treatment.
It is for this reason that a sleep-study conducted in a sleep-lab or a hospital tries to have at least part of the night recorded with the patient sleeping on their back (and with some REM sleep too).
The Visi-Download software allows me to include/exclude portions of the night based upon custom criteria, so I manually selected only the times that I slept on my back and re-ran the analysis.
Using this method, my Supine AHI for the 9.30 night shown above was actually 12.73, for which I snored at a level of above 55db for 95.5% of the time! For the record, my lowest oxygen desaturation took me to 79%.
Using this method, my supine AHI is more stable, (although not completely the same every night) this demonstrates that this is actually a more consistent method of calculating my night-time AHI, although for others with non positional apnoea it may well be a different story.
I plan to carry out some further monitoring without the Rematee, so this is the method I will use to ensure a fairer compaison between nights.
5-HTP, 
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)