Sorry for the micro-necro, but I'm super onto this topic right now.
It is a very common experience. When I was in boot camp, we would be required to drink a whole canteen of water right before bed, and we were very tired so we'd sleep all night and then wake up with a strong urge to pee. It was pretty universal. One time the final shift firewatch didn't get out of bed and the rest went to sleep so I was the only person on firewatch, I couldn't wake anyone until finally the DI found out and got everybody to get up and stand on the line, standing perfectly still while he chewed us out for the behavior. Within a few seconds, three of the guys wet themselves. I'm pretty sure I'd have been a fourth if I hadn't have already been awake for a while.
I think while you're asleep, your body relaxes your bladder and tightens your sphincter, thus making it easier to hold your urine. But when you wake up, the urgency increases as the sphincter relaxes and the bladder tightens. Then after a while it goes back to normal. Usually this just makes you rush to the bathroom when you get up, but if you have the right amount of desperation when you have the right amount of sleepiness, you can fit within a threshold in which you lose bladder control within a few seconds of waking.
I wish melatonin had the same diuretic effect that caffeine has. That way I could learn the right amount of melatonin and water to trigger a morning wetting. I love morning wettings but they are so rare. =(
I have experienced one morning wetting in boot camp and a couple more in my drinking/partying days, but with alcohol it has been much more common that I wake up drenched in pee. It is very difficult to measure and time the alcohol right primarily because it moves through you so fast. You have to get pretty drunk to get your bladder going repeatedly, so it'll keep going for long enough to sleep through it. Then you have to wait a while until you've begun to pee less frequently. Then you have to hope you didn't overdo the alcohol and cause excessive delirious sleep, which will just make you wet yourself without waking. And trying over and over again to get it right is quite hard on your liver.
Caffeine has a nice diuretic effect that works more slowly than alcohol and is a lot less drastic. It's more gentle on your system, and usually just gives you one single full bladder. I wonder if there's some non-stimulant similar diuretic I can combine with melatonin (or just normal sleep) to get the effect I am seeking. I tried diuretic tablets from the pharmacy (made to relieve feminine bloating) (I think it was called Diurex?) and I do not recommend these! They took days to take effect, they changed the taste of my saliva and the smell of my breath to the smell/flavor of a urinal cake. During the effect, my body couldn't retain water. I didn't have to pee suddenly, rather instead the water would just run through my intestine and give me painful diarrhea. I was constantly dehydrated for the next few weeks until it began to wear off. I didn't feel the slightest bit of bladder stress during this time.
If any of you know a better diuretic, please recommend it! And maybe someday I will write a fantasy story about a world in which melatonin is the perfect diuretic. I can think of several premises already:
- a chemist-y type goes for an experimental night while alone at home
- an unfortunate small-bladdered person takes melatonin without reading the info
- a slightly-creepster slips melatonin into peoples' drinks just to make them pee themselves when they fall asleep
- someone wakes up early, still groggy from the melatonin, and begins a desperate search for a place to pee, struggling against their drowsiness all the way
- a person on melatonin wakes up to pee but their sleepiness causes reality and dreams to merge, so they must analyze clues around them to make it to the bathroom without sleepwalk-peeing in the wrong place
- a woman has to get an ultrasound--she is told to arrive with a full bladder. She gets a crafty idea: holding pee is easier while sleepy, right? (she doesn't know melatonin is a diuretic in this universe)
- someone accidentally mixes up their pills and takes melatonin instead
Feel free to write a story with any of these prompts or your own, and if you write one about this, please PM me about it! ?