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My mother is 92 and she is in a home now. I have noticed that she sleeps more than she is awake. Also, she appears to be very confused. Is this some kind of sign?

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my dad slept a lot. from age 88-92?(in chair or bed) 
but when you woke him he was back to his regular Alzheimers self. when he got towards the end you really couldn't wake him up at all. He would wake up and look "blank". He fell asleep a lot, I never really worried about it. I figured it was his alzheimers and it was taking over. sorry.

my mom(dementia) is almost 89 and she "proudly" boasts "I NEVER TAKE NAPS" I think she acted like that because she wanted 'no part' of being similar to my dads sleeping condition.

now when I visit her in AL. I catch her with her eyes shut and mouth open.(zzzz) She doses off if we aren't engaged in conversation. then she wakes up and tells me she was just resting her eyes. ah huh
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I would think there could be all kinds of reasons. It's a funny thing there is a point it seems as we age that we need less sleep, tend to wake up earlier and then it changes again and the closer we get to the end of life the more we sleep again. But it seems to me that other things can be a play sometimes as well, depression (she recently moved into the NH? Maybe shes still adjusting), an infection, UIT for instance, stress or worry and probably when dementia is involved the work their brains must be doing to try and retrieve memories, understand things and function properly. If it happened fairly quickly especially combined with the confusion in a new and abrupt way I think it's very worth wile checking for UTI.
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Maybe. People do detach and sleep more as they near the end of life, but the timeline in the very old is different from younger people dying of a terminal illness. My own mother had been sleeping 12 or 13 hours through the night and napping 4 or 5 hours during the day for a few years before she went to the nursing home over a year ago - it makes it hard to know the significance now that she is sleeping even more than that.
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