However, patients who report sleep onset insomnia invariably report taking much longer to fall asleep than their EEG findings indicate. In an initial study of sleep onset insomniacs, the insomniacs were found to overestimate their sleep onset latency whether their subjective estimates were made either on the following morning or at an awakening at the point of the first sleep spindle. A second experiment determined that the insomniacs do not simply misperceive all intervals of time. In fact, the only interval they misperceived was their nighttime sleep onset latency. A study currently in progress has used these findings to train sleep onset insomniacs to more correctly perceive their sleep onset by awakening them at discrete points during sleep and wake.
Initial results indicate that the patients can learn to identify sleep and wake periods.
After training the patients tend to have decreased overestimation of their sleep onset latency and feel that they will be significantly more likely to fall asleep within 30 minutes on a given night.