I'm new here, but I've just recently happened across signs and symptoms of epilepsy and a lot of them hit home. Question first of all is it possible to have mild seizures that are confused with the anxiety they might could create to someone who doesn't know what is happening to them? I'll try to explain.

The majority of what I'm experiencing happens at night. It goes something like this:

-Wake up feeling nauseous, like I have to use the restroom, and just a general odd sense of detached or confused.
-Start to feel tingly and then just as my muscles start to tense up really hard I..
-Go into a very surreal lucid dream state, sometimes this is terrifying, other times it's blissful and happy.
-Wake up again about 50% of into sleep paralysis, but feel very tired and agitated.

Sometimes I wake up having realized that during whatever has just happened I have grabbed my own arm or head or leg or something and squeezed so hard I've bruised myself.

This happens to me a few times a week usually.

Today, I had my third non-sleeping episode right after waking up.

The first time I was getting a tattoo, and just assumed I had fainted as I do sometimes when confronted with a needle, but the tattoo artist told me that I didn't faint, I had tensed up and started shaking a little. I remember having to go to the bathroom really bad and tasting this metallic like taste in my mouth, and I got up and went to the bathroom and came back and sat down, only to realize I hadn't actually gotten up and went to the bathroom at all, I had actually started shaking and tensed up and was just staring into space.

The second time I had been feeling very detached all day and my roommate at the time was worried about me. He cooked some soup for us and as I was sitting on the couch waiting on the bowl in my lap to cool down, I felt kind of a rush of nausea that sort went from stomach straight to my head, and the next thing I know he's freaking out and I've burned my hand pretty bad. he said I just tensed up so hard that he couldn't get my hand out of the bowl, or lay me down or anything. I went off to some blissful forested place and there were all these roses everywhere during this one.

Third time was today I had just gotten up out of bed, ate, went to the restroom and sat down at the computer. Almost immediately after sitting down, I got that rush feeling again, and woke up sort of half off the chair sideways. While I was in this one I was in a very scary dark place being chased by something I didn't understand, it was terrifying.

My wife suggested it could be seizures, which for some reason I've never thought about. The aftermath is usually me feeling very tired, agitated, and a lot of anxiety, and I think anxiety has always overshadowed it. I wrote it off as fainting from panic attacks, but that doesn't really describe anything. I've sort of built up anxiety and various other problems to blame these episodes on before because seizures just never came to mind, even though they run in the family. My mother has grand mal and sometimes she just sort of checks out and starts going through the motions of driving or washing clothes or something with her hands and them comes back not realizing she ever left.

When I started looking more into epilepsy, a lot of these things are very familiar to me. What I've been blaming on sinus pressure might be more of a seizure. I'll be walking at walmart or somewhere, tends to happen when it's very bright or there's a lot of lights or something. Fluorescence is probably the worst besides a fair or something with tons of colors flashing. I get this rush in my face like something is falling inside my head (?) or something. Really hard to describe, and then I sort of blank out and feel like I'm falling. I grab onto my wife or the cart and then I have to leave, because I start feeling very tired, sick, and anxious. I've blamed that on sinuses triggering anxiety, but could it be a form of seizure. I also smell sulfur or something of the like sometimes, my jaw kind of tenses up, I get a quick flash, and then it's over. That's probably the most frequent.

I've always written all this off as various other things, but do these sound like some form of seizure? I've been to many doctors and been treated for depression when I tell them about anxiety, but those treatments don't ever really prevent the symptoms I'm getting at all. I've never really thought about the underlying cause being seizure activity and the subsequent anxiety overshadowing that. I've created a lot of anxiety over the places these have happened, and will have real panic attacks in those places, and the panic attacks are starkly different than the episodes I described.