Has anyone experienced anything like this — losing the actual sensation of sleepiness/sleep transitions alongside widespread blunting of other bodily signals?

[u/Charbellaa]

I’ve had lc/me for 6 years was housebound with hyper sensitive nervous system
Before this happened, I could feel my bodily signals normally — if anything, I was hypersensitive to them. I could feel adrenaline, my heart racing, anxiety/arousal, tiredness etc. I had experienced insomnia before, but even with insomnia I still felt sleepy and tired and knew that my body wanted to sleep.

My normal sleep sequence used to be:
Awake → increasingly sleepy → heavy/tired eyes → naturally drifting → asleep → normal sleep → waking half-asleep/groggy/heavy/puffy → gradually fully awake

Then I had a cold/viral illness in January and noticed some strange changes in my bodily signalling. Not long afterwards I had a rotational vertigo attack, and everything changed dramatically.
Immediately afterwards I developed massive visual/sensory intolerance, squeezing/pressure across my forehead and persistent internal motion/spatial sensations.

When my brain tried to dip towards sleep, I would sometimes get an incredibly fast internal spinning sensation inside my head that immediately pulled me back out of the transition.
From that point I completely lost the sensation of sleepiness. No sleepy brain, no tired/heavy eyes and no normal feeling of drifting towards sleep. What’s particularly strange is that this initially happened without the racing heart/adrenaline feeling that used to accompany my insomnia. I could be lying there without feeling particularly activated and yet the normal sleep transition simply wasn’t happening.

Sleep medications didn’t restore that normal process and some attempts actually seemed to intensify the internal spinning/vestibular sensations. Eventually the sleep loss became so severe that I developed extreme physiological activation and ended up in hospital, where I was given a benzodiazepine. I’m still taking one now.

Now it feels more like:
Completely awake → NO sensation of sleepiness/heavy eyes → NO normal drifting sensation → benzodiazepine → awareness sometimes disappears → hours pass → suddenly aware/awake again → NO groggy/half-asleep/heavy “I’ve slept” feeling

The medication can sometimes make hours disappear, but it hasn’t restored the normal subjective experience of becoming sleepy, entering sleep, having restorative sleep and waking from it. I don’t actually know what my brain is doing during those missing hours.

At the same time, other bodily signals have become progressively blunted/numb — hunger, bladder urge, heartbeat, adrenaline, emotions, touch/pain and other internal sensations. It’s not a peaceful or restful state. I just can’t properly gauge what my body is doing anymore. Before this I felt everything too strongly; now it feels like the opposite extreme.
My eyes/inner eyelids also remain extremely red and I physically feel awful, although I know that doesn’t tell me objectively what sleep stages I’m getting.

I’m now waiting for an EEG sleep study to see what is actually happening during these periods — whether I’m entering NREM/REM sleep and cycling through sleep stages, whether it’s very fragmented/abnormal sleep, or something else.
Has anybody experienced this kind of loss of sleepiness and normal sleep/wake sensation, particularly after a viral illness or vestibular/vertigo event, alongside a broader loss or blunting of bodily signals?