I've had a whole lot of trouble with my sleep lately. About two months ago, I had an episode of insomnia that rendered me unable to sleep for 68 hours. Ended up at the emergency room where they gave me some medication and I'm now taking medication to be able to sleep. Anyway, I was so sleep deprived that I hallucinated for several hours. Some of those hallucinations (patterns moving quickly and changing into other patterns) still show up when I've got my eyes closed and I'm about to drift off to sleep.

The patterns scare me. However, they are not the things I'm the most afraid of when going to bed. What's making me afraid is this new weird fear of my heart stopping. You see, right when I'm about to fall asleep, it feels like I either stop breathing or my heart stops beating, which then gives me a surge of anxiety and I jolt awake. Sometimes that's followed by a panic attack where I'm afraid of dying.

I'm tired but I'm afraid of going to bed. My sleeping pills haven't really helped that much the past couple of days but I don't know if that's because I just started with SSRI treatment (Sertraline) a couple of days ago or because I'm just too afraid to sleep.

I did manage to sleep a decent amount of hours last night but it took a long time to fall asleep and I woke up at 3:30am (and the day before that I woke up at 12:30am) unable to go back to sleep after that. It's almost 9pm right now and I'm getting more and more worried about going to bed. I'm really anxious right now. I don't want to die.

Any advice? Can anyone relate to what I'm feeling? I feel like I'm all alone in this.