Our work has shown insomniacs have some disturbance of perception. We have reported insomniacs have cognitive difficulties during the day. Their sleep is not different when compared to normals, but insomniacs report only half as much sleep as their normal controls. This suggests insomniacs have some misperception of their state of consciousness. In an earlier study, we used meaningful (subject's name) and meaningless (electronic tone) stimuli to arouse the subject from different stages of sleep (just after lights out, stage II, stage IV, REM, after a movement time). Subjects were most difficult to arouse from REM and stage IV. The subjects were insomniacs and their matched controls. In our current study, we are interested in the effects of hypnotics on this paradigm. Although the effects of hypnotic on subjective and objective measures of sleep is well documented for continuous sleep, little is known about their effects on sleep with forced awakenings. We found the hypnotic, flurazepam, raised the arousal threshold for all stages of sleep, but did not alter subjective measures of sleep when compared to placebo.
