For the past few weeks, I have been having very vivid dreams – several a night even. I wake up in between dreams. It’s leaving me a little disoriented in the morning and gives me an unsettling feeling when I think about it during the day.
I assume this is due to recent med changes. This isn’t the first time psychotropic medications have disturbed my sleep and dreams. Side effects like this make me feel like my medications are mysterious. I mean really, how do they do that?
My emotions in my dreams are so strong. I often dream of dead relatives. Sometimes I dream about things I really want to say to people – my anger tends to break through sometimes. Other dreams are just random and strange. Sometimes I wake up confused. Did that really happen? Was it really a dream?
I have had mental health issues and med changes that have caused nightmares before. Thankfully, my recent experiences aren’t like that.
My husband is encouraging me to write my dreams down. I used to keep a dream journal to use as inspiration, but I don’t like the way these dreams are making me feel. Plus sometimes I don’t remember the details. I’m just left with the unsettling feeling of knowing I had a weird dream.
Have you ever experienced this? Do you have vivid dreams? Do you remember your dreams? What are they like?
I’m getting ready for bed at the moment and I’m a little nervous to lie down.
Good night, FtB. Wish me luck.
Dreams are your second life. Not the real world, but still.
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Yes, I’ve had vivid dreams.
I will share one I had decades ago; I used to play a lot of D&D and one night I dreamt I was watching various low-level monsters from the manual manifest and make their way out. I remember thinking, “huh. Kinda look scary, even the kobolds, and I sure would not want to mess with them — it’s the difference between the game and reality”
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I suppose one more; I have a friend who was really haggard and pestered because she would keep dreaming the same dream over and over and over — being lost in a hospital with no way out. These were not always but generally lucid dreams, and her exhaustion was not being able to rest, having to live in the real world during the time and in the dream-world at night.
After a conversation with me (good friend) she realised hospitals — definitionally — have admission gates and exits, and that if she remembered during the dream to look for the exit, she would eventually find it.
She did. She no longer dreads going to sleep and dreaming.
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Cheers.
I think that everyone has several dreams every night, but most people don’t remember them.
I also think dreams mean nothing, but are just fiction based on what we were worried about that day. Do writing them or remembering them is meaningless.
But when people get tired or anxious from a dream, even though the dream wasn’t real, the tiredness and the anxiety are actually real and need to be addressed. But they need to be addressed as tiredness or anxiety, and not as clues to some sort of mysticism.
In short: don’t worry, be happy.
I take medication that causes vivid dreams also. Prior to the medication I very rarely remembered dreams. Now I remember dreams most days. They slip away if I don’t stop and think about them right after waking up. This is normal for dreams but feels weird with the vivid dreams because they are so intense when I wake and then all memory of them vanishes.
My dreams are entirely disconnected from my life and don’t follow any particular pattern. When I first started the medication I thought about the dreams a lot but now I usually just forget them unless they were particularly funny.
When taking pain medication after a car crash, I had some really vivid, bizarre dreams. I think medications mess with your body chemistry and make you maybe wake up more (thus more likely to remember dreams). I’ve also read that dreams are your brain’s way of sorting out things that have happened during the day and interlacing it with what’s on your mind (anxieties, fears, etc.) Can you speak to your doctor about the side effects you’re getting from your meds? It might be that they could find others that suit you better, or they could offer strategies to cope with what you are experiencing.
Also, for years I would occasionally have the dream where your teeth fall out/crumble in your mouth, until a friend said, “When this happens, just spit them out! You don’t need them!” The next time it happened, I spit out the crumbled teeth and said, “I don’t need you”…and I never had the dream again.
I do get vivid, weird dreams fairly often. A week or so ago, I dreamed I was about to be executed (by Hanging). A couple of nights later, I dreamed I was on trial. Perhaps next I’ll dream what the crime was!
Yes do I get vivid dreams, I have always had them from time to time, I once dreamed a whole day at school and ended up getting sent to the headmistress’s office because I was in the wrong class for each lesson, she believed my which was a huge relief. I also have a group of recurrent dreams which pop up ever now and then, one is definitely about the fact that I need to wake up and go to the loo, and one about needing to declutter, but I’ve no idea about the others. But also yes I am having vivid dreams more regularly because of the mirtazapine I take, I don’t much like it as I also find many of these dreams disorientating, but the mirtazapine is necessary so I try my best not to take too much notice of the upsetting ones – not at all easy.
I can go years without remembering a single dream. My spouse on the other hand, frequently remembers dreams. My spouse has been having very vivid dreams ever since increasing consumption of probiotic and prebiotic foods (started with resistant potato starch, has switched to kombucha and vegan kimchi). At some point we figured out which bacterial metabolites might be doing this, but I forgot. Neither prebiotics nor probiotics do anything for my dreams, likely because my inflammation markers are very low (spouse has psoriatic arthritis, and there might be an interaction between bacterial metabolites and the innate immune system).
Further to #5, I also had a very odd dream the night before last, in which I was commiserating with Donald Trump (!) over the death of his daughter (which daughter was not specified), who had been killed in an accident while crewing an experimental spaceship along with Richard Dawkins(!!). Did my subconscious set itself the task of coming up with a scenario in which I’d feel sorry for Trump? Even if so, why Dawkins?
I don’t often remember dreams; but I remember two that amused me:
I once dreamt that I was pregnant; and since I’m male, that was somewhat troubling. What amused me when I woke up was that my mother was in the dream, and she was upset that I was unmarried and pregnant.
I also once dreamt that I was a bird. I was mostly just looking for food, but it wasn’t boring because my bird brain had no memory of ever having looked for food before.