A friend of mine who is a sufferer currently in cycle tried something I thought I'd pass on.

He is like me in the fact that he gets hit at night at a pretty specific interval. For him it is 1.5 hours after he goes to bed.

So he set his alarm clock for one hour after he goes to bed to wake him up. It woke him up, he got up, went to the bathroom, walk around a bit, and went back to bed. No hit that night.

He has been playing around with this for some time, and it seems to work for him. I think it would work for me as well thinking about my past experiences; for example waking up very early in a hit and having that being easy to abort as opposed to being waken up by the hit at full force and having those times impossible to abort.

I think I will try this next cycle.

Anyone else have any experience with something like this? It would be a neat experiment to try and keep some data on.

Of course it is not a cure, day hits are still to be dealt with but I am curious how effective it is for those of us who get night hits at specific intervals.

Thoughts?

If that was my pattern, I'd try the same thing.  It's possible that dropping into deep stage 4 sleep is what triggers your friend.  A disruption in sleep early on could break the cycle.

My 4 year old neice was suffering from night terrors, every night about 1.5 hours after bedtime.  My sister broke that cycle by waking her up evey night for a month 1/2 hour after she went to sleep.  She's wake up, walk around the house, and then go right back to sleep.  No more night terrors. 

On a similar note, "Night Terrors" would be a good name for cluster headaches.  It's too bad it's already being used.

Our night hits usually take place during REM sleep.  REM takes place a number of times during the night.  I think that for most, using the alarm clock would only postpone the night hit.
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This would be the case for me.  It doesn't matter how long I stay awake or how often I wake myself up.  As soon as I get tired enough to enter that stage of sleep, I get hit. 

Jeannie

As usual, something that works sometimes doesn't work all the time. I'm about a month and a half into my cycle. At first, if I went to bed after 1am I could avoid the beast. Alas, he caught on and started visiting 1 1/2 hours after bed regardless of what time I went to bed. I hate how crafty he thinks he is.

Yeah, I talked to my friend today and he is in his 4th week of his cycle, and the alarm clock trick only worked for a week or so.

Even though it wasn't a solution, I may try it next cycle. A PF week is a PF week and even better if I am not using up my O2 or meds during that time.