sorry i got carried away - i did not intend to scare everybody
got carried away
and now it is 4 am

Bob, I went through exactly what you are experiencing months ago

5 mg valium 3-4 hours before bed, and 5 mg of ambien 1 hour before bed works for me..Can also add a Unisom

i stayed up all night many times when on sinemet and requip. no sleep aide. Once i stayed up for two nights and you do start to hallucinate. i jumped over an animal that i swear ran over the path on a nature trail during that time.......but there was no animal.

now i do use a sleep aide. Even a couple of tylenol pm could help.

Sleep experience now is much different for me than before tincture. I guess my life is in 2 categories now Before Tincture/ and After Tincture . Before...up most of night with grab a couple hours maybe between bathroom trips and staring at the clock. Now, I take tincture before bed and turn on the Sound Therapy CD for PD by Susan Jonas and usually sleep fairly well with one trip to the bathroom during the nite. The one thing that puzzels me is..if I have to get up before 3AM, which is the usual...I walk & feel totally unconnected and bent over like the hunch-back of Notre Dame . If it is 4 AM .. I am fairly
normal again. It is almost as if I start making alittle of my own l-dopa by then. Is this possible? It is really strange to have such a difference in a couple hours time.

Thought I'd share about my friend. 3 AM is the best time of the day for her...she feels it has something to do with the meridians and when you are the strongest or weakest in certain systems. She can do things at 3 am that there was no way to do them the rest of the day. She's incredible. several months ago she was up exercizing in the middle of the nite. This is when her greatest movement is..I also wondered with her case..was it when the sinemet she took in the preveious morning was completely worn off and her own dopamine producing cells were kicking into production???

if blueberries can instruct our genes to make their own antioxidants then just maybe fava beans can instruct our genes to make their own dopamine. I wonder how scientists differentiate between foods and supplements that have/don't have epigenetic influence....Rick?

md

I fear that scientists are still arguing about whether there is any value in supplements of any type and if epigenetics even exists. Another drawback of an overly conservative system. Instead of wasting money and endangering lives with fringe ideas we do the same thing by repeating experiments to reinforce the status quo. At least the fringe occasionally pays off in a big way.

Yes, I do see improved functioning at night. My low times are about 1 in the afternoon.

It has been a pattern of my days (nights?) that I function much better at night.
Remember doing quite a lot of digging into the reasons why this should be so a few years ago. Long and short of it then, from those ask your doctor experts and studies etc was that we are not programmed to need dopamine in the night and so we function quite well without it, somehow tied into melatonin, sleep-wake cycles, and the circadian rhythm thing, which in itself is a mysterious quantity...... not provable but observable, just like this night time thing is with us.

Also notable is functioning better with no sleep, in other words a missed nights sleep does not have me dysfunctional in the morning - no early morning off, but by ten am I am slipping into a bad cycle and starting to feel extremely off.

Lindy-
I think that was a "Go away little patient. The Doctor is busy." thing. We don't need dopamine at night???? Bull puckies!! I vote for the ebb and flow of hormones in the wee hours.