Reading in dreams is unusual - from what I’ve heard, most people don’t. It happens to me now and then (in non-lucid dreams) but, like you say, the words keep changing - and I’ve never read anything coherent or meaningful in a dream. Don’t recall ever seeing any numerals or mathematical signs in any dream - I wonder if mathematically inclined people sometimes do?
Backwards question: Anyone know good ways to increase nightmares? I personally find them more interesting than most of my other dreams, and almost never get to experience them.
Stop taking your antihistamine at night. Antihistamines tend to help you sleep, thus minimizing bad dreams.
Cyproheptadine is prescription-only, and you are likely to be disappointed if you took it. I found it to be a pretty good sleep aid (which is no surprise if you look at its formula - it looks like a tricyclic antidepressant with an extra ring on its tail, and tricyclic antidepressants are prescribed off-label as sleep aids).
Maybe depends on the specific drug? It's common knowledge that Benadryl specifically tends to cause pretty bad dreams due to the combo side effects of being a sedative, slightly hallucinogenic and increasing heart rate (which for many people seems to trigger anxiety). At higher doses it also may cause memory loss and confusion, which seems like the perfect cocktail of physiology nightmare fuel.
My bad, I should have worded this more carefully. I meant "maybe you're not getting bad dreams exactly because you're taking an antihistamine at night".
But he's either not taking Benadryl, or it's not having this effect on him.
Both times I took the supplement ZMA, I had nightmares. It is known for creating vivid dreams, but mine specifically were nightmares and I heard the same from a friend.
Yeah I took a ton of zinc and magnesium last fall for fun as an experiment when I found out I have HH and had daily nightmares.
Fun fact- Sweden tried to combat acid rain in the 80s by seeding vast swaths of agricultural land with calcium carbonate which only leeched molybdenum from the soils into the plants and into the intestines of moose where it blocked their absorption of copper and killed them slowly by really bizarre reproducible organ failure.
I just checked, and all of the top 4 ZMA supplements on Amazon also contain B6. That is probably the culprit. Take your B6 in the morning and you'll piss out the excess before it affects your sleep.
Nicotine patch every night at bedtime. They won't be nightmares at first (though vivid and often entertaining). Be persistent because after your first, nightmares will come with increasing regularity.
That's how I got on smoking in the first place, and I have finally stopped nicotine, lol. (Also it didn't work. But also the nicotine was great and did eventually lead to me realizing I had pretty severe ADHD, as the return of the symptoms when I'd try to quit were basically why it was hard to quit, it was difficult to readjust to not self-medicating.)
I found the dreams very entertaining for a couple of weeks, but there's something about growing dread following an intensely bad I've that just fuels the damn things.
It was probably the beta carbolines I ended up missing the most. I suspect that if they were added to the patch my dreams wouldn't have veered off in that direction, or at least not so dramatically.
I used nicotine patches as an ADHD treatment for a while. They work really well for that.
I usually used them during the day, but also left them on during the night a few times. (Mostly by accident.) I can confirm the vivid dreams! Don't remember getting nightmares from them, but I am not prone to those anyway.
I'm not particularly prone to nightmares either. But there is a positive feedback associated with dread, just like anticipatory frustration about not being able to sleep.
I'm not sure nicotine patches really do work that well for ADHD. They do probably work a bit better for associated conditions though (untreated sleep apnea, various metabolic issues, dysautonomia). But then, of course, there's the problem of, what the hell is ADHD anyway? The research on nicotine as an aid to concentration/cognitive performance was never very encouraging though.
That long-term smoking doesn't seem to cost much cognitively is interesting in it's own right because you'd expect it to, but even the putative protective factor for Parkinson's is probably an artifact arising from neurodegenerative loss and resulting diminishing desire to keep smoking.
Smoking also includes beta carbolines though, which are reversible maois. This means all the research on nicotine alone fails to account for another potentially important factor in tobacco.
I'm not sure how nicotine is supposed to help with sleep apnea. Are you supposed to keep them on while you sleep?
From what I can tell, nicotine during the day works about as well against ADHD as any other stimulant. Ie fairly well, but no magic bullet.
Nicotine seems to work well also for people who already have Parkinson's. (That sentence is based on some literature research long ago, and seeing my father-in-law with Parkinson's try some patches.)
Of course, individual results vary, yes.
I do not advocate inhaling burning tobacco smoke at all. That's bad for you, in general.
If you want nicotine, take a patch or perhaps vape.
Nicotine is primarily a selective agonist of acetylcholine receptors, so there's a nice consilience between that and all the lucid dreaming forums that recommend choline and AChEIs.
Even very small melatonin doses cause me to wake up over and over again with very rapid heart rate from intense dreams. They don't feel like nightmares in the sense that they lack "dread." Lot's of running and fighting but no emotional involvement. I guess it feels a bit like playing video games. The overall result is a really bad nights sleep.
I used to have that reaction to melatonin. I thought it was great. I remembered far more dreams, and I got to have the experience of being tired and getting to sleep many times, and it felt like I required less sleep. Unfortunately, I don't have the reaction anymore.
I also wake up soaking wet after taking too much melatonin - in addition to causing weird unpleasant dreams it also consistently causes fevers, which I have never heard of anyone else reporting.
You could try all of the stuff Scott mentions in #2:
"Dreams occur during REM sleep, a very light stage of sleep on the border of wakefulness. Although it's natural to have some REM sleep, anything that prevents deep sleep and pushes you towards more light sleep instead will give you more (and worse) dreams.
So: pain, discomfort, heat, caffeine, bright lights, alcohol, stimulant medications, a noisy environment, an uncomfortable bed. Of these, heat is an especially common culprit . Use windows, fans, and A/C, but also consider getting lighter sheets, wearing less clothing, and taking off your socks (it's socks in particular a surprising amount of the time!). Digestion is another common culprit; try not to eat too soon before bedtime, and try not to eat foods that make you feel bloated and give you indigestion."
Alcohol a few hours before bedtime deadens my dreaming. And I'm not sure why Scott says *more* dreaming will lead to *worse* dreams. Does he have any data to back up that statement?
Recall that this is in the treatment plan for someone trying to mitigate nightmares in the first place. If most of your dreams are nightmares to start with, then reducing dreams in general should also reduce your nightmares.
You have more interesting nightmares than mine. Mine mostly involve realizing I forgot to take a mandatory class in uni, or losing my bag and looking for it everywhere. (The rare exception involved a military base, a dragon and lots of tall grass going up in flames)
I think I've had / have all the "normal" nightmares. All my teeth falling out annoys me because I'll need to go get fitted for dentures; or I notice that my teeth falling out doesn't seem to be reducing the number of teeth in my mouth, and hey, apparently I'm a weird mutant who can grow new teeth, that's neat. Can't really get roused to much by the "Forgot to study for a test" or the "It's the last day of school and I forgot I signed up for an online course" things; I'm aware at too deep a level I'm done with education, so instead it got reinterpreted as "For some reason I decided to go back to school but I still don't care and this won't have any effect on my life". (Although the "Forgot I took an online course and all the work is due tomorrow" nightmare was rather visceral while I was actually in college.)
"Naked in public" dreams just make me politically annoyed while I'm asleep; it's not my fault I'm naked, why would I get punished for this, and also why is being naked even illegal? (My annoyance in these dreams has translated to fairly strong waking political opinions on this matter.)
Falling turns into flying, being chased turns into fighting. Dying in a dream was a weird one; not horrifying, just kind of confusing, because my brain clearly didn't know where to go from there, and just kind of did a prolonged freeze-frame. I experience myself as invulnerable in fistfights; those turn into weird stalemates.
I note these mostly to observe that my brain serves up mundane "nightmares", I just can't/don't experience them as nightmares.
It's the same with nightmares generally; my brain tries to set up nightmares for me, say a cult of people carrying bowling balls attached to chains are going around crushing people's heads in, or there are multiple tornadoes all closing in on the house I'm in, or an ill-defined amorphous thing with black teeth is trying to catch me, and then I react inappropriately, and then it's just a weird and interesting dream.
Even the straight-up nightmare - which necessarily cannot have anything concrete in it, because then I'll react inappropriately, and instead will just be, say, a rising sense of dread and disaster (literally just that - the entire dream experience has to be the experience of negative emotional experiences, without any visuals or audio for me to react to) - end up being "Oh hey that was a neat experience" when I wake up.
I can't really give you any advice, because I haven't really had a nightmare since I was about six years old. I was lucky enough as a little dreamer to encounter a "spirit" guardian (who appeared as a bird in my dreams), and who acted as my dream instructor. She showed me how to become what is commonly called a lucid dreamer (we didn't have that term back when I was a kid). Before she came along, I had horribly scary nightmares every night.
Because of her, I always know I'm dreaming in my dreams, and I seem to be able to manipulate my dreams so that anything scary that pops up in them becomes a fun challenge to overcome. I had a great dream the other night were a team of assassins came to kill me, and I used a series of Home Alone type tactics to defeat them. Then I located my dream pistol and it became first-person shooter game. One of the funnest dreams I've had in a while!
But if you're into having fun in your dreams, try to train yourself to be lucid dreamer. Dreams are one of my major forms of recreation.
I have no idea why this is supposed to work, but after seeing this advice several times in the comment section I decided to give it a try.
Eating plenty of cheddar right before bedtime seems to have caused waking after each sleep cycle. No change in dream quality nor quantity, but still pretty neat, even if it's just a placebo.
Lion's Mane Mushroom extract sharply increase my (and most anecdotal reporter's) dream intensity, or maybe recall. Nightmares are more frequent and more intense (or more likely to be remembered upon waking).
Those links are for adolescents who shouldn’t be using cannabis much at all imo. If I could paint I wish I could create some of the dream scenes I’ve enjoyed while withdrawing from thc.
Oddly that is one thing I kind of miss about having sleep apnea. I used to have the craziest, most vivid dreams. Sometimes they were upsetting but they were often just interesting and engaging
I think it seems like a great resource. As I was reading, all the questions I had (like, "is he going to include the thing about melatonin and B vitamins?") were answered very soon after I had them. Only two exceptions to this to consider: 1) I think putting the PTSD caveat up front in the first or second paragraph would be smart, given that many people suffering from PTSD have nightmares and their treatment will likely be different so you might as well put that info out there early, and 2) inositol is another supplement that can cause nightmares in folks (esp. those who get nightmares with B and melatonin), so maybe include that?
Yeah, one of my Complex PTSD pts had frequent and severe nightmares. We did years of trauma work, they reduced only somewhat. Then a very bad life event sent her into a spiral that ended in her having ECT for depression. Not only helped her depression, but the nightmares disappeared and never came back!
It's possible that one of the ways ECT works is by jolting the brain into allowing new learning. Apparently one of the reasons psychedelics can help w/PTSD as well.
I rarely dream and hadn't had nightmares since childhood, but started taking Singular after age 50. It triggered very bad nightmares for the first two weeks. One so vivid that I recall it in detail a year later. I was about to stop taking the medicine, but then the nightmares stopped with no recurrence in the last year. I recommend adding a reference to it as a possible trigger for nightmares.
As a young adult, I had a lot of flying dreams. They'd often start with me thinking, "Oh, hey, I can fly. Of course I can fly, why did I ever think I couldn't?" When I woke up I'd realize that I can't actually fly. Always disappointing.
This and the parent mirror my experience with flying dreams to a T. I'm curious, did you spend a lot of time in swimming pools as a child? I know I did, and the dreams seem to have waned since I've spent less and less time swimming.
Lifelong swimmer until Covid. Have always had infrequent but exhilarating flying dreams, though I know I had them during periods when I lived overseas and was rarely able to find places to swim. Some are the type you describe, where I have to concentrate and work really hard and I wake up kind of tired, but in others, I just soar above everyone else and wonder why no one is joining me and then remember only I can fly.
You can follow guidelines for lucid dreaming, and then once lucid 'just decide' that you want to fly.
As a shortcut: habits from your waking life carry over into your dreams. Dream physics is really, really wonky (for most people).
One common 'bug' is that your brain can't simulate light being switched on and off quickly. So light switches in dreams will not work light in waking life. Another common bug, and one that's relevant here, is that gravity is off in dreams: when jumping or running you will likely float down to the ground way too slow. (That's also one reason why people report not being able to run away properly in a dream.)
So the application is: get in the habit of jumping a bit every once in a while when you are awake. It's good exercise anyway.
Then you'll likely do that in your dreams as well, and will start floating. It's a short distance from there to flying.
Wow, is the light switch thing common for everyone? I have a recurring nightmare, in which I'm walking through a house in the faintest of lighting trying to turn a light on, none of the switches work, and of course the dark is terrifying - there's something bad in the dark. Does everyone have this same problem?
If I flip a light switch and the light doesn't go on (because e.g. the bulb burned out), I get an immediate sense of derealization, dread, and utter wrongness for a few moments while I think "wait, but I thought I was AWAKE!"
Another one that is very consistent is this: you can’t suffocate in dreams. You exploit this by pinching your nose and trying to breath through it (without opening your mouth). In a dream you will be able to breath normally through your closed nose. Benefit is you don’t need to be near a light switch or anything to check it, and it doesn’t look weird (like trying to float)
Long time ago, I got into a habit of doing this compulsively every 15 minutes, and it made dream lucid a lot. Have since lost the habit unfortunately
One time I did manage to get myself to lucid dream and immediately started trying to fly because that's what you do when you lucid dream, right?
My subconscious shut that down instantly. I remember feeling a distinct sense of arguing with an invisible power that was adamant humans cannot fly, that's against gravity, and how about we go for a nice walk in the park instead? Eventually I had to give up and accept a walk in an improbably-beautiful park.
When I woke up I had a chuckle about being so logical I couldn't even convince my dreams to break reality.
Meanwhile I am often aware that I'm in a dream and that gives me the power to change approximately nothing, which I've assumed is for the same reason. If I do manage to tweak the reality engine for myself, then anything I'm struggling with in the dream (if anything) just does the same thing. I make myself fly in a dream where I'm being chased? Pursuers do that same thing.
Ah, this explains my "flying" in dreams to a T. I can't ever actually fly, but I can jump in what feels like vastly reduced gravity and like, jump from the top of a big flight of stairs or the top of a hill and just coast along 4 or 5 feet off the ground, moving laterally more than vertically.
I've never gotten reality-check methods to work. My brain regularly serves me up dreams that are so fantastical and abstract and my brain goes along with it without a second thought. Usually it resolves it as "oh, this is a video game" or something stupid like that.
I've had much better luck with conscious-sleeping techniques. The most consistent lucid dreams are when I wake up in the middle of the night -- I can sometimes literally close my eyes and consciously daydream and it goes straight into a lucid dream from that within seconds.
I get dreams of flying pretty reliably whenever I spend too much time in Minecraft creative mode. I think it might have to do with instilling expectations, or something.
I noticed our toddler started having nightmares right around the time she hit the “imaginative play” milestone and could put together narratives. She’s an unusually verbal kid, and we tried to help her with what I didn’t know was a kind of image rehearsal therapy/lucid dream. We emphasized that these things were not real, and told her that whatever scared her came from her own imagination, so she could imagine something else more powerful to chase it away. We actually had pretty good luck with this.
My favorite was when she said she had a nightmare about a monster, so she summoned a version of *herself* that could fly and had magic powers to make it disappear.
What age did she hit the 'imaginative play' milestone and nightmares?
Our toddler had what seemed like one nightmare about 13 months of age, and also really got into imaginative play around a similar time. She's 18 months now. Not sure whether she even had another nightmare since then, they certainly haven't been common nor a problem.
I think when I say “imaginative play”, I mean telling verbal stories and role playing. My kid had enough language/theory of mind to pull this off sometime around age 2, but it was between 2.5 and 3 that the whole nightmare thing peaked.
Related anecdote: When I was a child, I was once in the middle of a nightmare when I heard my mother's voice saying, "It's okay, it's just a dream," or something to that effect. I then immediately understood that it was true, so I started laughing at the scary thing, then flew away, and had a glorious lucid dream. Ever since that night, basically any time a dream headed into nightmarish territory, that would trigger a lucid or semi-lucid state that enabled me to revise the dream to something less bad. The paradoxical result of this is that I now kinda wish I still had proper nightmares, just because the state of lucid dreaming they would enable was awesome.
Many years later I told my mom this story and explained how glad I was for intervening that one time while I was having a nightmare! (I'd always assumed she'd literally said the words "It's okay, it's just a dream" to me while I was flopping around in the middle of a nightmare, and that it had penetrated my dreaming mind.) She insisted, however, that that didn't sound at all like what she would have done in that situation, or like anything she would ever say. So probably my own brain came up with this strategy on its own.
Still, trying to teach lucid dreaming to children sounds like a great idea--they're presumably a lot closer to being able to do it naturally than an adult is.
Good call - I believe that's excellent advice. (When my kid was little, he spent lots of waking hours imagining himself as a superhero, so I guess he didn't need any extra encouragement on that score - and didn't have any trouble with nightmare either.) :-)
The one thing that might be relevant - the temperature thing. We noticed this spring that our four year old was suddenly crying out in the night without waking up, rolling out of his bed, etc. Switching away from pajamas with long sleeves and long bottoms helped (he insists on socks though).
I learned about the existence of lucid dreaming from one of my children, who was about 5 or 6 at the time. I have nightmares in which I shout and shout, waking my partner and often others in the house. She asked me why I don't just choose to dream something else. I was confused, so she said, "You know, if dinosaurs are chasing you, you make them get stuck in the mud or turn them into canaries so you can laugh at them." I didn't believe her, but I read up on it. She was a natural lucid dreamer. Unfortunately, I never mastered it.
It's such a foreign experience to me that most people have common themes in dreams, let alone nightmares. But I have a pretty strange central hypersomnia, so I think it makes my dreams more random and sort of hypnogogic-ish. Anyways, only real recommendation I might have is to give a good primer on sleep stages in general, both REM and NREM, but maybe that content belongs elsewhere.
There's actually a whole scientific study of formal dream analysis.
Not the Freudian kind, but just eg asking folks how many people where in their dreams, and who and what happened.
If I remember right, the number of people occurring in dreams is fairly stable, even amongst folks who see vastly different number of people in their waking life.
Yeah, people are usually in my dreams but they often morph and the things they are doing and saying don't make sense at least not in a describable way. I've described my dreams to my friends as robot chicken on extra drugs. I usually can't remember them well because they are such nonsense that I can't really synthesize them into an narrative.
It is; it's very fragile, however; personally it's a razor edge of being conscious enough to be aware I'm in a dream, but not so conscious as to actually wake up. I've had the best success when going back to sleep after waking up in the middle of a dream (I often lucid dream when returning to the dream), and some mixed success falling asleep while meditating.
"Dreams occur during REM sleep, a very light stage of sleep on the border of wakefulness" is relevant to this question, I suspect. I've only had a couple semi-lucid dreams in my life (in one I could fly, but only with effort - comparable to swimming, but in the air. I was consciously exerting effort, because flying is fun, but also realized I was dreaming because - duh - people can't really fly like that. Quite vivid: I was in the sideyard of an old church, about 12 feet off the ground.) More to the point: I've half-woken up from a bad dream, consciously imagined the scenario changing to a good dream (deliberately, to calm myself) and drifted back to sleep - with the dream taking up where it left off, in the more pleasant way my half-awake mind directed it to go. Finally, on a related note, I'll occasionally experience a "hypnic jerk" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnic_jerk) and wake up if I happen to dream of falling. So yeah, I think the border between "half-asleep" and "dreaming" is blurrier than is generally acknowledged, and this is relevant to the "lucid dreaming" thing.
Interesting. I've able to imagine and visualize long running narratives and scenarios both during the day and in bed, and consciously direct and experience the experiences of my proxy in that scenario, but I don't think I experience that in the same way I experience a dream.
Since I started to do a daily breathing meditation I can regularly hover in the liminal state between waking and sleeping. As I start to wake I can tune in to the sensation of my breath and kind of hover at the edge. It pleasurable and a good way to start lucid dreams.
That question is much more interesting than you might think!
First, people definitely report having lucid dreams. So they are real in that sense. But, of course, they could just be all lying, or more insidious: instead of actually having had a lucid dream, perhaps that's just their memory playing tricks on them when recounting their dream to a researcher after waking up?
The latter is actually a concern with basically all dream research, and lucid dreams are a way out of this philosophical conundrum!
See, when you are dreaming, your body generally shuts down the ways that normally allow you to move your body. When you are walking in a dream, you don't typically actually move your limbs and knee your spouse in the gonads. (When that paralysis mechanism goes wrong in a specific way, you can get an episode of 'sleep paralysis'. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis )
But not eyes! Eyes are weird. Anatomically they are almost a part of your brain. During REM sleep eyes are not paralysed. Hence the 'Rapid Eye Movements'.
It turns out, when lucid dreamers consciously move their eyes in their dreams, their actual eyes do the same movements.
Thus you can train people to send signals and messages out of their lucid dreams.
And researchers have come up with all kinds of weird and inventive ways to make use of that.
You are missing an alternative. All dreams are "lucid" if you don't require that the person be aware that they're dreaming. But I've noticed that if I wake slowly enough at some point I become aware that I can't remember why I'm doing whatever I'm dreaming about, even though I'm sure that I knew about it when I started. Perhaps all dreams *are* lucid, the the memory that you're dreaming isn't very persistent. In that case "lucidity" would be a gradient, depending on how persistent the memory of "I'm dreaming this" was.
FWIW, I rarely try to draw a boundary between "lucid dreams" and "the other kind". Such a boundary feels artificial.
Yes, I used to routinely get lucid dreams. The process was sort straightforward for me, but it wasn't really that fun, so I'm glad I don't get them anymore:
I have sleep apnea. I'd have trouble breathing while asleep. I'd have a dream about not breathing or holding my breath underwater. I'd sometimes realize that I could still breathe even if I was underwater. It would make me realize I was dreaming without waking me up. I would then be in a state of lucid dreaming.
The reasons it wasn't all that great:
1. Have you ever laid down in a quiet room, closed your eyes, and imagined your greatest fantasies as hard as you can? Lucid dreaming is only a little better than that.
2. I entered a state of lucid dreaming usually right after I'd basically been suffocating. Usually I was just happy to survive. And often I'd end the lucid dreaming just cuz I wanted to be sure that I was ok.
3. I'm a guy and one of the things my mind associated with a high heart rate (and maybe some adrenaline) is violence. I had multiple lucid dreams of incredibly violent scenarios. Knife fights, gunning down innocent political enemies (I was a dictator in that dream), brutal crashes, and all sorts of other things.
4. Staying in the lucid dream state often required what I would call "story continuity" (this is probably unique to me and I probably could have trained away from this problem). I had full control over my own actions and some level of input on the setting, but I couldn't just magic myself to whatever setting I wanted. If I started off drowning in the ocean I couldn't magically be on a plane the next second. A boat had to rescue me, then take me to an airport, and then I'd get on the plane. It was a bit like a dungeons and dragons game, but I was a player, not the dungeon master.
My memories of the lucid dreams were always crystal clear. Or at least as clear as you might remember something you did yesterday.
There are devices out there that can assist in helping you reach a lucid dreaming state. My guess is that they aren't that popular, because lucid dreaming is only a little better than what you can just imagine by yourself.
> 4. Staying in the lucid dream state often required what I would call "story continuity" (this is probably unique to me and I probably could have trained away from this problem). I had full control over my own actions and some level of input on the setting, but I couldn't just magic myself to whatever setting I wanted. If I started off drowning in the ocean I couldn't magically be on a plane the next second. A boat had to rescue me, then take me to an airport, and then I'd get on the plane. It was a bit like a dungeons and dragons game, but I was a player, not the dungeon master.
This is definitely not unique to you. Can attest to a similar dynamic.
I've often had lucid dreams, and the way Cole described it is perfect:
"It was a bit like a dungeons and dragons game, but I was a player, not the dungeon master."
When you're in that state, you know you are dreaming. You have conscious control over "your own" actions. But you don't control the world around you. You cannot "make things happen" around you. Your subconscious mind takes care of that.
It's just like playing an extremely convincing video game or a role-playing game.
In fact, it's like real life, except that there are no permanent consequences to anything you do, you can't get hurt, and you can safely tell people you don't like to fuck off.
Also, you can fly, but maybe it's just me. In fact, for me, attempting to float in the air is the foolproof test that it's a dream. Because there's no way you can in real life. If I can fly, I know it's a dream and then I can relax, knowing there's no consequence to anything I do.
Wow. I've never even been lucid enough in a dream to be able to contemplate whether I was dreaming. ~98% of nights I don't even have any dream I can remember unless I take a lot of B6 right before bed. Then the odds of having a dream I can remember go up from 2% to ~75%, but they're still not lucid.
This is also my experience lucid dreaming, but I've heard a lot of people say the opposite - that they *can* control what happens. I don't know if it's an individual difference or a matter of lucid dreaming "skill level".
I always thought lucid dreaming meant you control literally everything (like a daydream, or writing a story). But then my daughter said that in her dreams she has no control over even her own actions (like watching a movie, only much more immersive). So that made me wonder whether that's actually the norm, and whether my own ability to control my own actions in dreams but not my environment (like real life), which I've always taken for granted, might be what people mean by "lucid dreaming".
For me, the difference is that I know it's a dream. When you know it's a dream, everything changes; you're liberated; you know nothing can go wrong.
For example, if you are dreaming you're back in high school and haven't done your studying, you will feel afraid and uncomfortable.
But once you know it's just a dream, then there's nothing to fear any longer and you can do anything you want. You can slap the horrible teacher you hate. You can leave the school building and go somewhere else. You wouldn't even think of doing these thing unless you know it's a dream.
That feeling of freedom (which comes with the awareness that it's a dream) is what I personally call "lucid dreaming". Scott seems to agree.
The "player but not DM" analogy also matches my experience. I could gain control, but there were boundaries of what's allowed in the dream. If I attempted to break the boundaries, it will wake me up. With some practice, I was able to (metaphorically) lightly push against the boundaries to see if it destabilizes the dream, and then stop before waking if I feel it's causing problems.
Of course, I have no idea how much getting that idea reinforced itself, or how much that generalizes to other people's experiences.
There's nothing in my experience like "waking up because I'm breaking the boundaries". It's actually extremely difficult to wake up deliberately, even if I'm lucid and I know I'm dreaming.
One occasional failure mode is that, if I go in a direction my subconscious disagrees with, especially if I open a *door* that my subconscious doesn't want me to open, I may end up in an infinite maze where behind every door there are just more doors.
I hate that infinite maze!
But it doesn't wake me up.
Also, if I try to have dream sex with someone in the dream, I may have an orgasm and wake up because of it... but that's an entirely different phenomenon.
I've only had them a few times in my life, and I tried, so I'm not "skilled" at all. But when I did, I could control them. So, one point for "individual difference" I guess. For example, I generally can't really visualize things clearly when awake so while in a dream I realised I was dreaming, made appear some chess boards to play a bit, and it was shockingly easy and clear. My hands otoh were all weird and not clear at all (but I knew they might be so it could be just suggestion + lack of control). I always woke up fast.
I certainly can change some things about the world, if they're consistent with the general logic of the dream. If I'm running away from some people down a seemingly infinite road, it's pretty easy for me to magic up a skateboard and the skills to do fancy tricks on it to get away. If I'm running through a forest, that would be different; trying to make a skate board show up would probably lead to it tripping me (since that's the only notable way for a skateboard to plausibly interact with the story in a forest.)
This isn't what I experience when I lucid dream. I feel it more like "whatever I most expect to happen, will happen", regardless of whether that's affecting self or world.
For example in one part of the last lucid dream I can remember (faintly), I flew into a building and couldn't find my way out. I realized my previous failures were causing me to expect more failures, which was why going through doorways wasn't working. So I decided to phase through the wall, making sure to imagine outdoorsy things like sun and sky and grass awaiting me on the other side, and I was out. Control the dream logic, control the world.
(I do also use the "can I fly" test of dreaming, if I can even think to check that.)
Yeah, see eg http://www.lucidity.com/slbbs/index.html . I think there's room for a lot of debate about how strong/controllable they are, but not so much whether they exist.
I have been a "lucid" dreamer, in the sense of always being able to tell that I was dreaming, my entire life. My experience of this is somewhat different than what I usually hear described as "lucid dreaming", though, so YMMV.
My dreams lack a complete sensorium. The best metaphor I have for this is that it's like the difference between direct quotation and reported speech: if someone tells me something in a dream, I know what they communicated to me, but I generally don't know what specific words they used (because my brain didn't bother to generate the specific words; no 'ground truth' exists). The other senses are similar; I know what things look like, for example, but that's very different from actually seeing an image. (For example, I'm not restricted to a first-person view. I used to describe this to people as 'third-person', but it would be more accurate to say that I know where I and other objects in the scene are without necessarily 'seeing' it from one specific 'camera angle'. My most interesting dreams are often ones I'm not in, or am in only briefly in a frame narrative.) The result is very difficult to confuse with real life, which has a rich stream of sensory detail whether I am paying attention to it or not.
I'll skip the wild speculation about the perceptual mechanism of this and just note that I'm also aphantasic by most standards, although I have doubts about how this is usually measured and interpreted. See [1] and replies for similar misgivings, or [2] (which Scott linked in a previous post) for evidence I find suggestive (when I say that in dreams I "know what things look like", that's often quite literal, in that I compare them to things I've seen in real life that looked similar). However, as far as I know most aphantasics don't report this kind of lucid dreaming, so this may or may not be relevant.
I shared your skepticism, so I keep a mental lookout for times that the fact I'm dreaming specifically comes up within the dream. It's not impossible to have confabulated these after the fact, but it would definitely be harder than a simple 'oh, I knew it all along'. Here are some I can remember:
- I was being pursued by an evil djinn. I ran, but in a rather desultory fashion, and at one point he caught up and shouted at me for not taking him seriously. I explained that as it was only a dream he couldn't really hurt me, at which point he grew furious and told me that he would make sure I NEVER WOKE UP. This distressed me enormously until I did, in fact, wake up; it is the only post-toddlerhood nightmare I can say I've experienced. (I don't think that threat would work on me again.)
- I fell from a significant height and thought 'hm, this will be interesting; I've never died in a dream before'. (I did not die.)
- I went to a friend's party and had an encounter at a particular library along the way; at the party, relating what I had done that day, I got to the part about the library and apologized for the fact that it was nowhere near the route I had supposedly taken, adding in my defense that it was a dream and they couldn't expect the geography to be accurate.
I don't control what happens in my dreams (except for very occasional re-runs close to waking, similar to what McClain describes). I don't even feel like I particularly control what I do in my dreams—dream-me sometimes operates on dream-logic even when I think this is silly. (For example, during that last incident I was rather embarrassed because I'd come to the party in my pajamas. The fact that I clearly knew I was dreaming and my dream-avatar was clearly capable of acting on that information did not prevent this.) I'm not sure I could give eye-movement signals! It seems like that might require too much sensory specificity.
But I don't really feel like I'm missing out. I share Cole's perspective; since dreaming isn't "like real life" for me, even perfect control would leave it no better than waking fantasy.
I don't know about some of the claims people make about it, but there have been a few rare times in the middle of a dream where I became aware "oh, this is a dream". The dream usually changed after that, because once I was aware, it was no longer convincing, so my brain seems to have decided to change tack.
I did it naturaly as a kid before learning lucid dream was a thing. Basically, I found that the best way to escape a dream was to 'rewind', change a decision and replay the dream, taking a new tangent. If it fails, rewind further.
Example: open a door, being chased by zombies, rewind, open the other door instead.
A bit like these "choose your own adventure" books.
I tought it to my kids but don't remember if it worked for them or not
It is real, but I'm not sure it's advantageous. I tend to consider dreams as part of the brain's garbage collection mechanism. I.e., you need to check that something is really ready for disposal before you throw it out. Then you run it through the system and clear out all the pointers. (I believe that accessing a memory is required to enable it to be changed.) Lucid dreaming would seem to act to defeat this.
I was just learning about Glycine as a treatment for anxiety, which I didn't know about. I know a doctor who prescribes it for that. It comes as a powder and the dose recommended is 2,000mg up to 2x/day. Vital Nutrients - Glycine Powder sells on Amazon for $25 and the dose recommended on it is 2-4,000mg. I'm going to try it out for anxiety and will report back.
I had a terrible recurring nightmare as a teen to young adult -- that was clearly related to trauma -- and finally stopped it with lucid dreaming, which I'd done on occasion without knowing how to consistently do it. The dream never returned after that one time I intervened in the midst of it.
I think every client I've ever had who had consistent trouble with nightmares also had PTSD symptoms from earlier trauma, so I like that you encourage people to find treatment for trauma. You might consider making that even clearer earlier on (I think it comes in middle of paragraph under item 3).
Most of my practice is with people who have anxiety, and the folks with anxiety and not so much trauma don't talk so much about nightmares. Your framing above emphasizes anxiety a lot more than trauma, which makes me interested to know if you see people who have a lot of trouble with nightmares who have anxiety alone.
I rarely have nightmares, and when I do, I usually wake up quickly. When I try to lucid dream, the dream sometimes "resists" my attempts to change it and increasing my mental "effort" tends to wake me up.
I'm not sure what resources exist at Lorien or elsewhere w/r/t this problem, but I think it would be appropriate to link or otherwise reference some specific guidance regarding anxiety disorders generally.
Anecdotally, from a non-psychiatrists perspective, nightmares are closely linked in the popular consciousness to PTSD. This is referenced in the post in passing, but I imagine many readers will be especially concerned with differentiating PTSD-related nightmares from other nightmares. Not a huge change, but it might be helpful to link to somewhere with guidance re: PTSD signs and symptoms.
I have had regular bad dreams since I was in a young enough to be in a cot. I'm 37 now so it's been a while. Around 6 y/o I used to physically pull my eyelids open to wake myself up out of nightmares. I have gone in and out of periods where lucid dreaming was available to me. The older (and less stressed) I get, the less reoccurring the themes are - though the intensity, cruelness, and randomness has increased. I have committed to all the sleep hygiene elements, dark/cool room; no eating/drinking/caffeine; meditation helps me get to sleep and possibly enjoy a few hours before the madness begins. I have tried IRT with a Sleep Psychologist with little effect due to the random nature of my dreams. I trialled Prazosin for 3 and 2 months respectively, a couple of years apart, with disastrous results both times. My nightmares were SIGNIFICANTLY worse on this medication. I dream anywhere from 2am until the time I wake up. Yes sadly, sleeping-in means increasingly random and intense nightmares. I can recall a lot of them with stupid specificity. I gave up writing them down because it was taking too long. Occasionally I'll talk about a theme if it's relevant with a Psychologist (i.e. no brakes on a car - feeling out of control). I wake up from sleep feeling absolutely rubbish EVERY DAY. I'm exhausted. My jaw hurts. This brings on corresponding headaches. If the nightmare is particularly bad, I sometimes clench my hands. Cue ongoing joint pain. I wake up in sweats often. I used to wake up crying or distressed a lot. Now I just sleep through or go back to sleep through the most horrific of dreams. Because I'm legit exhausted. How am I functioning during the day? Poorly, at best. I'll stay on the lookout for any new techniques or medications that are being trialled. Because at this present state, I've got my doctors stumped. (Context: Childhood trauma, 15+ years of psychotherapy, current meds: duloxetine, amitriptyline).
If you've never had a sleep study, please get one. Familiar themes in your post, and a CPAP saved my life, I think.
None of my providers brought it up because I was a young, fit man who didn't have a large neck. The constellation I look for re osa is daytime tiredness, morning headache, breathing problems (asthma, if it's been going on a long time) and snoring. (Also arousal: enhancing compensations line massive caffeine intake, sugar, stim behaviours). Osa isn't the only type, however.
Apologies if none of this applies to you, and best wishes regardless.
Yes, I need to book another sleep study. I did one about 4 years ago. The result was no major apnea or restless leg syndrome which was good to cross off. They said I slept poorly (no surprises) and it showed I had no REM sleep ??? Interestingly, I noted that I still had a vivid dream that night.
Awesome that the CPAP made such a difference for you. Absolutely a lifesaver!
Some people don't fall deeply asleep during sleep studies, as they are always semi-aware of being hooked up to the machines (whether doing a home study or one in a sleep clinic). In that case, REM-only apnea may not be picked up. That could be the case for you, since they reported no REM sleep. This sub-category of apnea is fairly rare, but is a real thing! You definitely have the signs, even the waking up sweating can be bc of apnea.
Thanks Karen, you may be right. I struggled to sleep on my back there (as instructed) when I'm typically a side-sleeper. I wonder if an at-home test will be any better, perhaps not if the positioning is the same. I shall enquire!
You mention stimulants, either as prescription medication or caffeine or nicotine, as one of the things that might make people's sleep worse.
Anecdotally, from my own experience and talking to friends, for people with ADHD taking stimulants during the day can make their sleep at night better (compared to not taking any stimulants at all).
The first few times I took ADHD medication during the day, I fall asleep much, much quicker than normal in the evening and then slept like a log. I was up and about earlier than usual, because I had slept so well.
Some of these different experiences with psychostimulants can be affected by metabolic differences, as well as whether or not it's an extended release formulation or not. Brain chemistry variance, as well, of course, I knew one guy who would get hyperaggressive on benzos, but a massive dose of Dexedrine would put him almost immediately into 14 hr snooze fest. Some folks brains' have oversteer when external agonists or antagonists are introduced.
Also when any stimulant wears off, our energy, mood and focus drop BELOW our normal, before returning to normal. (That's one of main reasons stimulants are so addictive.)
So if you were going to sleep during that 'dip', it'd be much easier to get to sleep, and you'd likely get into a deeper sleep at the beginning.
Stimulants aren't particularly addictive. What makes you think they are?
You are right about the dip. The effect I described is independent of the dip, though. I had that effect even when my stimulants wore off at about 5pm, the dip done and over with by 7pm, and me going to bed by 10pm.
Hmm, that’s cool. Do you think it was because you were more tired, from getting more done in the day, or less stressed/frustrated at the end of the day?
Stimulants as a class (not specifically the meds used for ADHD) are extremely addictive. The percentages of people who experiment with or use different psychoactive substances and end up with habitual and/or compulsive use are well known. I’ll try to find the stats. Stimulants are the main reason coffee, tea and cigarettes are so popular all over the world.
Anecdotally, I have no problem taking breaks from various stimulants (that I use for ADHD treatment).
About why I could sleep better: I don't think it was because of something as high level as feeling productive. I suspect it was a more primordial corrective to my circadian rhythm. I didn't yawn nearly as much throughout the day.
(Also without meds I can sort-of power through with will power alone on a task for a while, but it's extremely tiring. The stimulants seem to remove the need for will power here.)
I used to have used dreams quite commonly. Usually when my sleep hygiene was bad, ie I slept irregular hours, went to bed late, stayed in bed late. That's also when I had more sleep paralysis, and weird dreams that could be nightmares for other people (but I wasn't afraid..)
In some sense, it's an irony of biology that bad sleep hygiene can cause both nightmares and one of the cures for them (lucid dreaming).
If it isn't too much off topic, I'd love to see a section added on night terrors/sleep paralysis. I've had the typical hypnagogic hallucinations for decades and am not particularly bothered by them, as I know what they are and have a fair bit of practice in lucid dreaming. (No, I've never been narcoleptic, and though it looks like a lot of the literature associates hypnagogic and hynopompic hallucinations with narcolepsy, I've never noticed a correlation between sleep paralysis and narcolepsy in people I've known that have this problem.)
I've seen two adults reduced to tears recounting their experiences of these things. If my experience is any guide, I think the (real but not really terrible) psychological trauma of these events would be minimized for others if the word got out that this is a pretty common experience for many people and has no "supernatural" significance, as many people seem to assume.
(Just for fun: One of my sleep paralysis experiences was actually published in a collection of ghost stories, as it happened in a notorious old "haunted" house and involved a hallucinated character that strangely resembled a real person that had died there many years before.)
Note for those unfamiliar with the topic, in layman's terms from a non-psychologist: this is a strange state some people occasionally get stuck in, somewhere between full sleep and being awake where a nightmare begins after your normal motor control is shut off for sleep... but you still feel like you're completely awake. You feel paralyzed and hallucinate in frightening ways; a stereotypical example is being unable to move as a witchy sort of character does something unpleasant to you, such as sitting on your chest, making it hard to breathe (probably a side effect of the inability to use motor control over your breath as you normally can). Funnily, it has even been called "Old Hag Syndrome", as this particular hallucination is apparently quite common.
I've never had any of the supernatural stuff. It is almost always that someone who is angry with me or wants to hurt me is banging on my front door*, and I know that not answering the door is making things worse and even that the person might break down the door and come attack me in my bed. I'm usually facing away from the bedroom door so I have no way of knowing when or if someone is coming in.
I'm usually lucid enough to realize that it is another bout of sleep paralysis (I understand why I can't move) but not lucid enough to filter out the fear of harm from whatever I'm hallucinating or the fear that this time the paralysis won't end.
Occasionally when I'm napping I'll get sleep paralysis without the hallucinations (or at least none that I notice) which is more annoying than frightening because I want to get up and do whatever I was going to do that day but I can't.
*The first time this happened, it was triggered by someone actually banging on another apartment's door in the same building while I was sleeping around 2 a.m. Since then, it seems to happen on it's own. That was about 7 or 8 years ago I think.
Edit: meant to say facing *away* from the bedroom door
I found that the only way I could escape from the sleep paralysis situation, even though I was lucid, was to force my breathing to speed up gradually until I woke up. Breathing was the only motor control I could exercise at all, and that only barely.
I had sleep paralysis episodes pretty regularly for years and years. They went away almost entirely when my fiancee moved in and we started sleeping in the same bed together - that forced me to change positions, which somehow stopped the sleep paralysis.
When I'm sleeping alone I seem to revert to what I used to be doing and have several sleep paralysis episodes in a single night.
Good to see you included the section on sleep apnea. I use to have nightmares about drowning all the time, then I got diagnosed with sleep apnea, got a machine to help me breathe and the nightmares went away.
"as can (too much) of some B vitamins" -> "as can (too much of) some B vitamins"
Thanks for posting this! Somehow despite knowing about the predictive processing model *and* hearing a lot of the folk wisdom about nightmares, it never occurred to me that I could just make changes that reduce them.
As a child, I suffered from what is called "Night Terrors". Thankfully, they are in the past. Even to this day, I have daytime episodes where I catch a glimpse of those dreams and it fills me with dread. I suppose I have a fear of falling asleep from this past. I once asked my physician for a sleep medication and she gave me zaleplon. The daytime episodes increased.
So... What happens to someone whose dreams are deliberately suppressed (assuming that is possible)? Presumably, that would provide strong evidence about why we have them in the first place.
I think there are certain drugs that can induce a fully dreamless sleep. But I'd imagine that studying the long-term effects of dreamlessness is tricky, because it would be very hard to discern what's a result of not having dreams and what's a direct result of the drugs themselves. (Not to mention all the usual ethical problems with performing potentially harmful experiments on human beings.)
Still, there have been a few studies on the effects of dream deprivation, and they seem to strongly indicate that dreaming less often is correlated with various physical and mental illnesses: https://www.thehealthy.com/sleep/dream-sleep-deprivation/
Years ago a Chinese girlfriend pointed out to me that sleeping with my hands folded over my heart would guarantee nightmares. Try it and you will see that it's true
my friend said from a Chinese medicine perspective it had something to do with obstruction of flows of energy. My sense was the weight on the heart was stirring up weighty ermotions.
Is this not common knowledge in the West? I noticed on my own that sleeping on my back makes me more likely to have nightmares, but I've also been told this by Chinese friends. Not American friends? I don't recall. Obviously if sleep apnea is causing the nightmares this makes sense, but I've been tested for sleep apnea and that's not the issue. But this is definitely a thing that my (Chinese-American) family all "knows."
As a child of about 10 or 12 years old I used to have dreams that happened to me while I was still awake shortly after going to bed of a distinctly frightening nature. Does anyone know what that's called?
Could it be hypnagogia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia ? I think what you are describing is fairly common. At least, I have experienced something similar on several occasions. I've also found I can recreate it by meditating when I'm tired: I tend to hover on the edge of sleep and get some really bizarre and disturbing visions.
It could be though they don't seem to describe the quality of the nightmarish experience of that time for me. Nothing since even remotely approaching the taste of true evil I experienced
This is very nitpicky but I don't really know what the word valence means here, I thought it was just a chemistry thing but I've seen it popping up in a few places now. I get the impression it is a bit of a California thing?
Ngram viewer looks like that phrase has grown ten-fold since 1990 but it's still pretty rare. Google trends doesn't have enough data to see if the newfangled expression is indeed concentrated on the left coast, but it's a reasonable guess.
I can think of several supplements to *avoid* when you're trying to avoid nightmares.
Lucid dreaming forums recommend high dose vitamin B6, choline, and many acetylcholinesterase inhibitors. So if you want the opposite (less vivid/emotional/memorable dreams), probably do the opposite. Don't overdo it with vitamin B6 or choline or AChEIs right before bed. Timing is important for B6 because it's a water soluble vitamin. If you take it in the morning the effect on your dreams will be much attenuated. I take all my vitamins and choline in the morning. But I have repeatedly experimented with B6 before bed with obvious positive results at the 25mg dose (the UL is 50mg). (edit: the effect was to make dreams vastly more vivid without actually giving me control over them. That's an uncanny valley where you probably don't want to be if trying to minimize nightmares.) I haven't tried choline or AChEIs before bed or seen any formal studies on them but the common mechanism makes the praxis claims more credible than they would be if it was just a random grab bag of chemicals. (edit: also nicotine is a selective acetylcholine receptor agonist that several people are recommending, which probably has the same mechanism of action)
Re AChEIs as nootropics and lucid-dreaming-inducers, can anyone explain the evolutionary tradeoff that caused us to not have somewhat lower levels of AChE all the time ala https://www.gwern.net/Drug-heuristics ? Most nerve agent weapons are some sort of ultra-potent irreversible AChEI so that's probably a hint. But small doses of AChEI seem harmless enough.
From an evolutionary perspective, play, storytelling, daydreaming, fantasizing, dreams, and nightmares have a common benefit: They help us practice. Dreams and nightmares exercise our emotional reactions to various situations. From this perspective some number of nightmares is expected, and maybe even beneficial.
This is great. I think that the first paragraph of section 1 is a little too definitively worded, and undersells the degree to which the “predictive modeling” framework is idiosyncratic and speculative. The second sentence does use the word “suggests,” but the rest of the paragraph seems a little off to the races, making definitive, unqualified statements about predictive modeling as if this was a well accepted and highly confirmed model of cognition.
By chance I happened to be reviewing this literature for a paper on what utilitarians should think about dreaming, which is currently under review. Below are some key points along with copied sections and in-text references.
1) We all really underestimate how much we dream, and 2) NonREM sleep also involves dreaming:
When asked in surveys how often they dream, people report dreaming roughly 1–2 times per month on average (Schredl, 2009), with very wide variability both between and within individuals (.g. Bulkeley (2012) and Stepansky et al. (1998) find that ~30% of people recall them several times a week, while another ~30% report less than once a month). But when people are asked to keep a dream diary—to write what they remember dreaming as soon as they wake—they report far more dreams than on surveys, recalling having a dream roughly 50% of the time (though again with large variation between individuals; Watson, 2003). In fact, these higher figures from dream diaries still grossly under-estimate total dream time. People who are woken up in the middle of their sleeping report being able to recall dreams at substantially higher rates than when they are asked to use a dream diary. It seems that most dreams fade almost entirely from memory shortly after being experienced.
When woken up in the middle of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, people report dreaming ~80% of the time, and ~40% of the time when awoken from non-REM sleep (Nielsen 2000). REM sleep makes up 20-25% of our total sleep time, while non-REM sleep makes up 75-80% of our sleep time. Previous estimates that we dream for only two hours a night (e.g. Crick & Mitchison, 1983; Hobson, 1988), since this is how long we typically experience REM, are mistaken. While non-REM sleep dreams tend to be relatively more thought-like, less bizarre, and less emotionally charged than REM sleep dreams on average, they regularly include genuine phenomenal experiences. 80% REM dreaming x 22.5% REM duration + 40% nREM dreaming x 77.5% nREM duration = roughly 49% total dream time on average (again, wide variability).
This is a *lot* of time spent having experiences that we could potentially improve. For reference, an average of 1 hour of dreaming per night adds up to 3.3 years over the course of an 80-year lifetime. Or, to make our grasp of the figures slightly more accurate, it adds up to the equivalent of what we would ordinarily think of as 5 years, given we are ordinarily only awake for 16 hours per day and tend to intuitively think of sleep as time in which we are unconscious
3) Might we just be reporting our last dream which may have happened hours ago?
It has notably been found that when woken and asked to describe as much of their dream as possible, subjects’ report length and narrative structure drops dramatically as the interval between the end of a REM period and being woken increases (Hobson, Pace-Schott, and Stickgold 2000). This suggests that, in general, dreams are the kind of thing that we lose memory of very quickly, and so subjects are often only remembering their most recent dream.
4) How frequent are nightmares?
On surveys, 2.5–6% of adults report having nightmares at least once a week, while 8%–29% report having them monthly (Sandman et al., 2013; Zadra and Donderi 2000). But in studies using dream logs, 12.7% of subjects’ reported dreams were experienced as negative (Robert and Zadra, 2014). Contemporary studies with valid estimates of nightmare frequency by waking people up in a laboratory are almost non-existent because the novel location changes the dream content significantly, and most studies focus on unrepresentative populations, typically those with sleep disorders. In laboratory wake-up studies on subjects with no disorders, 20-36% of dreams directly feature aspects of the laboratory environment (Picard-Deland, Nielsen, & Carr, 2021; Schredl, 2003, 2008), and there is a dramatic reduction in dreams featuring aggression or hostility (Paul, Schredl, & Alpers, 2015; Zadra & Domhoff, 2011).
5) Lucidity is easier to achieve if you combine triggering cues.
Carr et al. (2020) managed to induce lucid dreaming in 50% of experimental subjects by playing a tone to them while asleep, after having them earlier attend a single session in which they were asked to think about their own self-awareness while hearing that same tone. This method thus combined a few previously studied interventions. Lucidity can be verified by having subjects engage in particular eye movements while dreaming, rather than simply relying on self-report.
Yes, saying that dreams occur (implying 'only' here) in REM sleep is definitely wrong. When it comes to nightmares though I'm not aware of any research that was made.
Some authors have argued that REM and NREM dreams differ qualitatively, REM dreams being emotional and vivid and NREM dreams being less emotionally loaded. (Scarpelli & al, 2022) for a review. So this could support the fact that increasing deep wave sleep reduce the amount of nightmares one does.
We tend to recall our dreams only if we have woken up in the middle of them, because during sleep our brain enters in a phase of consolidation of existing memories, in which no new memories are created. One cognitive researcher in the fields dreams I've talked to told me that the more sudden the wake up is, the better the dream recollection is.
I very rarely have any dreams at all (or at least any that I have any memory of): maybe a few times a year. I don't think I've had a nightmare for a decade or two, though the occasional dreams I have sometimes include me doing unpleasant things to other people (generally not anyone I know in real life). The one time I had recurrent nightmares (30 years ago), they were very abstract and formless, just threatening patterns and colours and emotions without any semantic content.
I think dreams is a way for the brain to determine which memories are important. The dream-maker part of the brain tells a story to the dreamer part of the brain based on memories. If the dreamer has a strong emotional reaction, the dream-maker assumes the memories are important and keeps them. If not, the memories are unimportant and gets deleted or kept in a harder to reach place. If you are scared in a dream, having a nightmare, the brain thinks this memory is really important, it's about something dangerous, so it wakes you up, so you'll remember for sure.
Right after waking up it is easy to remember a dream, but if you don't you soon forget it. This is the brain's last test to see if a memory is important, if you think about the dream the memories are, otherwise the brain deletes the memory of the dream.
I'd add a note about parasomnias, especially night terrors and confusional arousal - those tend to be lumped together with nightmares by laypeople, despite a completely different mechanism. Treating these probably should be the topic of a whole another article.
Speaking of which, 3+ mg of melatonin seems to be the most promising treatment for parasomnias, from both pubmed and recent personal experience.
I _think_ parasomnias and hypnagogic phenomena are related, or at least comorbid (sample size=2 plus some random anecdotes on the net). The entire domain is mostly terra incognita, and the evidence-based treatment boils down to "give them benzos or something idk".
When I was around 14, I watched A Nightmare on Elm Street and it affected me pretty badly. I started having multiple nighmares a night - often 3-4 levels of "dream-within-a-dream" where I dream that nightmare woke me up, and then something scary happens again, and I again dream that it woke me up, until a few iterations later I finally wake up for real - often with some sleep paralysis that would than take a very scary minute or two to shake off. The whole dream-within-a-dream thing forced me to start figuring out how to recognize that I am within a dream - and once I was able to actually do it during a dream and not immediately wake up - and in that dream I though "oh cool - this is a dream, so I am perfectly safe, and I can go explore" (really fun! Think - fully immersive video game!) - and then promptly forgot it was a dream, but "not scary" stayed and I had a dream where weird stuff was happening (such as grandma disappearing into thin air), but now it was all "wow, how interesting" and not scary... After that the nightmares went away... Had maybe a couple (unrelated to Elm Street) in the next 30 years...
P.S. My parents tried to take me see somebody, but the guy was all like ,"Do you realize that none of that is real?" with respect to my being scared of the dark at the time - completely useless.
"We’ll look at a few of these further: Desensitization and LDT, the two highest-performing therapies. IRT, the best-studied therapy. And prazosin, the highest-performing medication."
This section may be marginally easier to understand if the acronyms are explained in this sentence instead of just in the table.
I can reliably induce nightmares by sleeping on left side. It took me many years to figure out the relationship but now I simply roll to tge other side and now nightmares are very rare. When I lay on left side for a longer period I start to hear heartbeat pounding in my ears and that somehow correlates with feeling of fear and doom. I can speculate that something about this particular body position affects the way my heart operates and the change in pulse/pressure/rythm gets interpreted as a stressful situation maybe?
For what it's worth, I suffered for many years not from nightmares as such, but from deeply unpleasant dreams, usually caricatural versions of difficult episodes in the distant past. The pharmacist (most European pharmacists are trained in homeopathy) suggested Stramonium 15 if you wake up after a nightmare. She said that it was known to be very effective with children. I also took it before sleep occasionally, and found that it improved the general quality when I was anxious or disturbed.
What I have found during lucid dreaming is that it is quite hard to redirect them, or even to think too hard about the fact that one is in a dream, without waking up. The way I perceive it, while waking up, is that I have run out of imagination, or made too large an effort: it is like writing a novel or short story while sedated, only more so, since one is actually asleep.
Yep. In my experience it's fairly straightforward to change the results of something that's already inside the dream-logic. If I'm being attacked by a group of ruffians, it doesn't strain the dream too much if I make my fighting back be absurdly effective, like a choreographed fight scene from a movie. On the other hand, it would be impossible in that dream to make myself fly without waking up. It breaks the dream-context.
From my experience, a retired cognitive behavioural therapist, schema work to understand the beliefs that make nightmares will work because they then can be transformed by understanding what the dream is doing; processing emotions, and in doing so, I find nightmares are a prompt to deal with issues I've been avoiding.
"A sufficiently threatened, stressed, or traumatized person will naturally have more threatening dreams."
I don't think this is necessarily true: I am quite anxious and prone to stress, and yet the vast majority of my dreams are remarkably boring; nightmares are exceedingly rare for me.
This is a nitpick I wouldn't have bothered to mention if you hadn't asked for feedback, but fwiw I think "REM sleep, a very light stage of sleep on the border of wakefulness" is not exactly right. It is on the border of wakefulness in a couple senses (you are more likely to wake up during it, and it is less/more dominant when you more/less sleep deprived), but in other senses it isn't usually described that way (the atonia, for starters, but also the basic need for it such that if you are specifically deprived of REM sleep your body starts to plunge into it immediately).
- "fainting" and "fainting while standing" are both in the side-effects list separately; perhaps "fainting, including while standing" is better?
- Sleep apnoea is said to be "a relatively common condition", but I always find this unhelpful. What's the reference class of "conditions" in which it's a relatively common one, and how far up the distribution is "relatively common"? If there's a number available, I'd far prefer it.
I assume Scott will give a better answer but sleep apnea is a continuum (everyone has them occasionally; when you have them all the time and they ruin your sleep it's a problem; but there's lots of gray between those two points). That said: it's usually considered to be about 10% of people that have serious enough sleep apnea that it's a problem, and risk factors are being male (2x as common), elderly (3x as common), and overweight (not sure the exact number but it is significant)
Peer Review: Scott, the statement in the first paragraph that "the predictive models go out of control and become essentially random" seems unclear or mistaken.
The content of dreams is not random. We do not sample randomly from a distribution of pure sensations and concepts. There is internal coherence to what we experience in dreams, even if less so than in waking life.
Maybe the sentence is intended to mean that we draw "random samples" from an internal generative model of the world? Even there, the sampling is not random: for example, the content of dreams is related to specific episodes of waking life, and is recency-biased. Do any current models of memory consolidation, replay, or dream-generation assume random sampling?
Maybe you are emphasizing randomness in order to counter the notion that dreams are deterministically related to something that happened in the day... e.g. the article is meant to counter the idea that "we work through our daily traumas in our dreams", which would make people obsess too much about the meaning of their dreams? That seems a good goal. Still, I think it's worth trying to be more nuanced, because I don't know of any evidence that dream content is sampled at random or "essentially" at random from our memories and internal models. More recent, more surprising and more personally significant events all seem more likely to influence our dream content (even if they are not explicitly "replayed"), and surely there are many other regularities.
A lot of the time when something particularly unpleasant or even just weird and magical happens in my dreams, I end up interpreting it not as me actually being in that situation, but as me roleplaying a character who's in that situation (or an odd mixture of the two), so even when I'm having dreams that would sound like they should be nightmares if I just described the plot, they aren't actually particularly unpleasant. I assume this is because I have a lot of experience playing roleplaying games. This sounds kind of like a less specific version of Image Rehearsal Therapy, although I don't know how repeatable it would be.
Let me share the story of my worst night mate ever. I believe the circumstances that led to it may be helpful in understanding. What causes nightmares.
So I went to a an afterhours party and I took way too much MDMA I probably took around 700mg (this was not intentional, I misjudged the density of the crystals) at first I felt amazing, euphoric, wanting to socialize with everyone but then I began to feel overwhelmed. I asked my date if we could go home. We called an Uber and in the Uber I spent most of my time in my dates arms passing in and out of consciousness. Once we got home we drank some electrolyte beverages (thank God I always keep those on hand) had sex for bit (which felt amazing but orgasm was impossible) and then passed out.
When I awoke a few hours later I would say I was experiencing serotonin syndrome. I was sweating, overheating, delirious and just generally felt like I was dying. Luckily I am well prepared so I I took 2 25mg tabs of cyproheptadine that I keep around for such occasions. Those helped a lot, they took me from feeling like I was dying to just feeling like I had a flu. I still didn't feel good so I went to lie back down. I spent the next several hours in and out of consciousness, sweating trying to rehydrate basically feeling like I had a had flu. After the night passed I actually felt much better the next day and went through my day about as normal. That night however I could not get to sleep
And now after that overly long introduction I am finally ready to tell you about my worst nightmare ever.
Since I was struggling to fall asleep I decided to take a melatonin gummy. I believe it was 5mg.
That did help me sleep but once I fell asleep I experienced the most terrifying thing in my life. I've had sleep paralysis before but this was 10x worse no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get out of it. And not. Only that but was a two headed demon attacking as I was paralyzed and struggling to cry for help. Now rationally I knew that what I was experiencing was sleep paralysis and that the demon wasn't real but that didn't stop the sheer terror I felt as I lay paralyzed struggling with all my might to squeak out a tiny cry for help. This experience lasted longer than any other sleep paralysis I have ever experienced and when it finally ended I woke up gaspping for breath. I called one of my best friend who thankfully picked up even though it was like 3:40 and he talked me down.
Absolutely one of the most frightening experiences of my life.
So I think the takeaway here is v that something to do with the interplay between serotonin and melatonin has a lot to do with nightmares
Well the cyproheptadine possibly saved my life or at least my health. It's a potent 5-ht2a, 5-ht2b, 5-ht2c antagonist. It's used to treat serotonin syndrome. Unless you mean the MDMA, that was very irresponsible of me
Do you by any chance know how to get a doctor to prescribe cyproheptadine? I found it to be fantastic as an antihistamine and really useful as a sleep aid.
Thank you. I don't think I've seen an Indian pharmacy in this part of the country (have seen Indian grocery stores, but not pharmacies). I'll look harder.
The mention of REM sleep being very light sleep is interesting, because "on the border of wakefulness" is how I usually experience dreams but multiple (popular, not scholarly) sources I've read say that REM sleep is deep sleep. Does that reflect older scholarship, or is that a sort of folk belief?
I think it reflects different things. your body is in a deeper state of relaxation in REM sleep but your brain activity is closer to waking brain activity in REM sleep. your body accomplishes this by blocking the usual connection between brain and body during rem sleep, so that e.g. unless you have a sleep disorder, when your brain is saying "punch the demon" you aren't actually making a punching motion.
less likely but the reference to "deep sleep" might also refer to "necessary state of sleep". if you are REM sleep deprived you'll basically go nuts (thankfully "REM sleep deprived" is something that generally only happens in the lab). whereas your body can do without stage 1 (the lightest stage of non-REM sleep) just fine, and without stages 3-4 (the deepest stages of non-REM sleep) ok, it's not ideal but it's not as bad as being deprived of REM sleep.
Yeah, I think the stages are part of what is confusing me here because REM is usually considered the last stage, although now that I look at the Wikipedia entry it says that REM occurs as you're emerging from the deepest stage, so I guess that fits with what Scott said. I find that as I'm falling asleep I often have these sort of flashes of dreams or dreamlike thoughts, though, so it has made me wonder if you can dream at the front end of the cycle too.
Those are actually a different thing called hypnogogic hallucinations although I don’t happen to know much about them (beyond that it is not a sleep stage). You can also sometimes go straight into REM sleep which happens more often toward the end of the night.
Really happy to see lucid dreaming on here. It's been super helpful for me, both for dealing with nightmares and for self-exploration.
You might consider mentioning galantamine, which fairly reliably induces lucid dreams (see this paper by Stephen LaBerge: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6082533/) and is available OTC. The handful of times I've taken it the experience has been rather intense, but reliably lucid.
I experience this more than seasonally, and by extension poor sleep. In part because in the wee hours I am just a dumb creature of habit. My auto-pilot script makes no adjustment for climate. I also plainly have difficulty with thermoregulation, unable to rely on even a light comforter or duvet in the summer, and often not even in the winter if I'm sharing the bed. I stack sheets and material instead.
Nefariously, being too cold will yield the same outcome through tossing and turning. You want your surface-skin temperature to be warm enough (according to research papers I've leafed through, approx 30 degrees Celsius), but the bedding micro-climate not to trap too much heat. Warming your skin promotes bloodflow to the extremities, allowing you to lower your core temperature near onset. You effectively need both cold (ambient) and heat (trunk, upper body) for optimal results.
To add insult to injury, chronic insomniacs have impaired thermoregulation. Leveraging sunlight, relaxation methods, cognitive therapy exercises was the bare minimum I needed to recover because thermal discomfort drove me insane. Now I can at least sleep, but periodically I'll wake in a sweat.
I have experimented with more intricate ideas I had discovered in some papers, such as thicker material on legs than upper body, and targeting specific areas. I didn't really fare any better, except that I move aside most of the sheets at the foot of the bed, so they don't feel cold but can expel heat effectively. We tend to expel most heat through our head, hands and feet. I tried keeping my hands out - it sucks. Material itself is pretty much whatever, it's all cotton. The current comforters are not but they might as well be for show. I had spent an inordinate amount trying bamboo sheets, breathable weighted blankets, "cooling" blankets, etc.
I get acephalic migraines, where parts of the visual field are… weird. Not invisible, or blocked, just kind of sparkly and not there.
I rarely get nightmares, but when I do it is usually something like “I’m talking to someone and suddenly they are a spirit and not an actual person” or “I’m driving on the freeway and just went blind”.
If the nightmare is stressful enough to wake me, almost invariably I find it’s the middle of the night and I’m having an acephalic migraine: part of my visual field is unprocessable.
So FWIW I’ll second biological/neurological quirks as one input to dreams and nightmares.
1) For othrostatic hypotension in the prazosin section, I believe that telling the subject to rise to a sitting possition, pausing for a moment, then standing up is more effective than telling them to stand up slowly.
2) Under the temperature control section, in addition to AC, window, fans, etc, there are active cooling devices that go under the bedding to actively cool the bed. I believe that some have been shown to encourage quicker transition to NREM sleep, but I don't know for sure off hand.
3) In the sleep apnea section, you may want to link to a STOP BANG self screening test.
I've had very few nightmares, and those when I was much younger, but I've had a lot of unenjoyable dreams; dreams in which I'm late and/or lost, naked in public, really need a washroom bad and can't find one, and dreams in which I am working all night. Can those dreams be considered similar to nightmares? They are certainly reality-based, aside from the naked in public; but I'm guessing the last is just an exaggerated fear of being judged by other people. Lucid dreaming is difficult; because either I accept the internal logic of the dream, or recognizing the implausibility causes me to wake up.
* palmar and plantar surfaces are equally important for cooling, so in addition to removing socks, it can be helpful to learn to sleep with hands and feet out of the coverings
* while it's not IRT, traditional dream sculpting using art therapy methods can help with non-recurrent nightmares; common interventions include making and displaying art of a helpful guide or object -- a ball of yarn to find one's way, a doorknob to create a door, a green EXIT sign, a rope ladder up to an invisible helicopter, or whatever else strikes one's fancy
Given your description of causes, I'd expect that I would have nightmares. I don't. I've got lots of dreams, but they don't match the description of nightmare. I do, often, just as I'm waking up, have a dream where I realize that I've forgotten the basis of a logical chain of reasoning I was following, but there's no strong emotion associated with it.
P.S.: I have (treated with CPAP) sleep apnea. But there was (nearly?) a decade before it was diagnosed, and while I ended up too sleepy to think straight, there were still no nightmares.
FWIW, I think your description of what causes nightmares is largely things that make one have lots of dreams and/or be uncomfortable. But the connection has to be considerably more indirect.
RE: heat causing nightmares and ways to reduce hot sleeping
A few different companies sell products that actively cool (or heat) your bed. Essentially a mattress cover with water tubes running through it that cycles the water into a unit that cools it. Ooler and Eight Sleep are the ones I'm aware of, I just ordered an Ooler as I'm a hot sleeper and don't have A/C.
Might be worth pursuing if hot sleeping is a major trigger.
> (I’m not sure how you do these therapies if your nightmares don’t have recurring themes. If any therapists understand this, please email me at scott@lorienpsych.com. Some sources suggest that if you do these practices with enough different nightmares, your brain learns the meta-lesson that nightmares in general aren’t scary or end with pleasant content, and you don’t have to keep doing the same therapy for ever new theme.)
I'm not a therapist, but if I'm understanding image rehearsal therapy, I basically invented a better version of this on my own as a kid. I would wake up from nightmares and within a couple minutes (as soon as I calmed down enough) would start replaying the dream from the point where it became scary, but with modifications that made it non-scary and put me in control. (Writing about this, it now seems similar to the example about trauma integration in Body Keeps the Score about the kid who drew the twin towers with a trampoline, using imagination to make a less scary version of his experience.). Eventually, I learnt to do this "rewind time and rewrite the dream" mental motion without waking up (and also without the need to be aware that I was dreaming).
If I generalize from sample size 1, the way to do IRT when there are no common themes is to (a) figure out how to get the patient to wake up from nightmares at least some of the time, and then (b) teach them to apply IRT to whatever nightmare they just had, rehearsing the no-longer-nightmarish dream until either they are fully calmed down or until they fall asleep. Then (c) make sure this process actually calms them down as they're doing it (otherwise they're probably doing it wrong), and (c) hope that they learn this trigger-response pattern automatically.
These days I basically don't have nightmares unless either (a) the nightmare is actually a thing that I'm worried about in real life and don't have a solution for (or is obviously a close metaphor for such a thing), or (b) is an "unexpected" turn, e.g., I had a dream recently where I was digging holes in the sand (a normally fun activity) and then realized partway though that I had dug them in a way that I never would when awake and that the way I had dug them made me being buried alive a possibility; this was very scary, and I promptly woke up (but it was clear to me that the generator of this dream was "digging holes in the sand" and the anxiety/fear was an accidental byproduct of observing the result, rather than the generator being "anxiety/fear").
You're missing the obvious explanation of dreaming from a predictive processing standpoint: eliminating Turing surprise.
This also gives an obvious explanation for why infants sleep so much more than adults: when you're starting from basically nothing, there's a lot more insight to be mined by observing the output of your predictive processes.
Speaking of silexan, I think it has a mildly positive effect on anxiety. I hadn't noticed any effect for about two weeks, then forgot to take it a few nights in a row. I realized that I was more anxious than I had been over the last week or so while on it. I definitely get the lavender burps.
Not fully clear yet on whether I want to incorporate it into my regular regimen, but I'm leaning toward giving a longer trial period to see if it's really helping.
I need to follow up on this to verify, but I learned that healthy people with good sleep sometimes have nightmares because during sleep, the prefrontal cortex is downregulated and the amygdala is upregulated, resulting in an anxious state of mind while dreaming even if you're not anxious while awake. This is claimed to be the reason why dreams about teeth falling out or being naked in public are so common: it's an easy thing for the anxious dreaming brain to latch onto. There is some random variation in amygdala activity and if it happens to spike one night, that may cause a nightmare instead of a more tame anxious dream, even if there's nothing else causing them. It may not be very strong evidence, and "the brain just does this" is not very helpful, but it's worth considering.
Edit: A quick literature search turns up nothing conclusive, although there appear to be many studies about changes in functional connectivity of the amygdala and prefrontal cortex during sleep deprivation. So, in the absence of any solid evidence from neuroscience, I would just point to the fact that many people experience the same types of dreams, which tend to be somewhat fearful, and random variation pushes this tendency into nightmares occasionally, even for healthy people with normal sleep habits.
I'm surprised you didn't include THC as a potential medication treatment for nightmares. It's well-studied, its mechanism of action is clear (it reduces time spent in REM), it's available to most of the population OTC, and there aren't significant side effects associated with THC consumption.
+1. Word on the street is that stoners don't dream, and that veterans with PTSD smoke to avoid nightmares. I was also surprised not to find a mention of this in the article.
There are a lot of small reality-check habits you can practice during the day to improve your likelihood of lucid dreaming that might be worthwhile to include (though I don't know how rigorous you want to be, and all of these are super anecdotal and just things I've picked up from sources I can't remember over time). Lots of people have mentioned some of them already; you precede them by thinking, in your waking life, 'is this a dream?' followed by:
*pushing your finger into your palm -- in a dream many/most people experience the feeling that their finger goes through their palm
*reading something, looking away, then reading it again -- text in dreams is wild and jumbly for most people, and tends to change between glances if you pay attention. works with clocks, books, all sorts of shit
*pinch your nose -- you'll still be able to 'breathe' through it in a dream
*jumping up and down -- gravity is weird in dreams, and you might notice that you float and land bizarrely
Basically, you just do this stuff every once in a while during the day until it becomes a habit, then when you habitually do it while you're dreaming, you achieve lucidity.
"Nobody really knows why we dream. Modern neuroscience suggests that the brain processes data by creating predictive models, then double-checking them against reality. We experience the predictive models, not reality - although the double-checking process is so fast that they usually match well enough to be the same for all practical purposes. When we can’t double-check with reality - for example because we're asleep and not receiving sense-data - then the predictive models go out of control and become essentially random. This results in us having kind of random experiences."
I recommend this paper by Tore Nielsen on nightmares, dreaming, and emotion regulation. He has done important work on the dynamics of nightmares and treatment approaches.
There are also studies that people with "thin boundaries" tend to have nightmares. Ernest Hartman studied this. Changing the personality can alter the nightmare experience.
Or maybe “Anxiety that is not grounded to some real threat..”
My personal definition of self-inflicted anxiety is “ knowing something to be true that I refuse to believe.”
My go-to nightmare is always something that I really need to use isn’t working, or
I am lost in some familiar yet strange environment and I need to be somewhere else.
I had one once where I shot someone dead, for no reason, and I knew I could never make it right no matter what I did. That was the worst one I’ve ever had. It haunted me for years.
I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night for any of the usual reasons, and have recently noticed the pattern from the stimulus that requires attention to the dream/ nightmare that ultimately wakes me. The pattern is:
Too cold -> cold, e.g. lost in an icescape without a jacket
Need to pee -> need to pee or peeing, e.g. searching the endless halls of urinals for a private one
Loud sound -> loud sound plus silly explanation for the sound
Too warm -> OVERWHELMING TERROR, e.g. THE HUNTERS HAVE CAUGHT ME AND ARE GOING TO FEAST ON MY LIVER AS I WATCH
When I was a kid I figured out how not to have nightmares. Before falling asleep I would think about the scariest things I could imagine. Then I would never dream about them.
Very interesting read. I believe however that dreams can also occur during non-REM sleep. There was recently an article published by The Human Brain Project examining the differences these dreams play in our brain. They saw that non-REM dreams are more “realistic” while when we dream during REM sleep our brain tends to be more creative. It is during those creative dreams that our brain tends to deconstruct concepts and experiences better. Here's the link: https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en/follow-hbp/news/2022/05/12/strange-dreams-might-help-your-brain-learn-better-according-research-hbp-scientists/
As for lucid dreaming, last year some researchers had a "proof of concept" of 2 way communication with lucid dreamers. While this sounds a bit Inception like I guess it will be quite helpful for scientists that study dreams to get a more accurate view of dreams and not rely on retrospective reports that might be inaccurate. https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-entered-peoples-dreams-and-got-them-talking
I notice you left hypnotherapy off your list. It helped me with a non-nightmare dream problem.
Personal anecdote, while I've never had a problem with nightmares, I once developed an annoying weekly dreaming habit, where on Monday around 3am I'd have a lucid dream where I'd need to make a list of the things I'd have to do at work for the coming week. In my dream, I had pen and paper, but because (at that time) I couldn't read or write in my dreams, I would realize that I'd have to wake up to actually write out this list. So every Monday morning, I'd wake at around 3am with an urge to make my to-do list. But I'd be wide awake and alert—because psychologically I was getting up to work—and I could never get back to sleep. So Monday's were always rough for me because of my lack of full night's sleep would catch up with me about mid-morning.
BTW, I was dreaming of the actual tasks that I'd need to accomplish in the coming week—because of the lucidity of the dreams, these were not imaginary task lists I was making up. Nor was this a stressful type of dream. It was just a non-stressful thing that I did at work that somehow I had transferred into my dreaming consciousness. I tried various mental tricks to avoid the need for making a list at 3am. For instance, I'd make up my to do list for the coming week Sunday evening before I went to bed hoping I'd remember that I already made that list when the 3am list-making dream rolled around. My dreaming self did remember making the list, but the dreaming urge was now to review the list I had made the evening before to see if I had left anything out (!) — and I'd have to wake up because I was unable to read the words on the list in my dreams.
I knew that alcohol and other drugs affect REM sleep, so I tried having a shot of whiskey before I went to bed on a Sunday night. That stopped the list-dreams and my waking at 3am for about four weeks, but then it started happening again despite the shot of booze. Then I tried chamomile tea, which also worked for about four weeks before I again started making the lists and waking. Then I got an Rx for Ambien. (I forget what the dosage was, but it was the minimum.) I started with 1/2 an Ambien Sunday night, and that worked for about six weeks. But then it stopped working, and the list-making dreams came back. I upped to a full pill, but that only worked for about six weeks before my dreaming mind was able to overcome the effects. I decided that pushing the Ambien dosage up any further would be unwise, and I didn't like the side-effects because I found that it made me tremendously groggy in the morning, .
Since my dreaming mind seemed intent on sabotaging me, I decided to try hypnotherapy to try to persuade my subconscious change its behaviors. The hypnotherapist did her relaxing spiel for me. I was conscious through the whole process — and I wouldn't have said I was hypnotized either — but it *was* a very relaxing experience. She gave me a simple post-hypnotic suggestion of: don't make lists in my dreams. She put it on recording that she gave me to listen to Sunday nights before I went to bed. It worked! Well, sort of...
Instead of waking up making a list of things to do for the coming week, I had the most hilariously funny dream that woke me up laughing out loud — at 3am, of course! But I figured I was on to something with hypnotherapy because her suggestion had stopped me from making the damn lists! I went back to the hypnotherapist. She hypnotized me again, and this time she gave me a more general post-hypnotic suggestion that was not to give into the urge to wake at 3am. And that mostly worked. I started sleeping much better on the Sundays before work.. Eventually, I gave up playing the suggestion before I went to bed on Sundays, and I've never had the problem recur again.
Does anybody else get too warm then take their socks of while they're in bed and then wonder where they've got to when they're all under the end of the duvet?
I really enjoyed reading the other content on your website about seasonal depression! It seemed very approachable and actionable, which I'm guessing is what you were going for.
In this post about nightmares, I found the first paragraph to be a little confusing and technical, to the point where it may be off-putting to some readers. Specifically, I know what "predictive modeling" means, but I would guess that many people wouldn't be able to immediately understand it and apply it to their understanding of dreaming. It might be worth rephrasing it to avoid scaring people off.
Someone else has already commented on how the table might be made more interpretable, and I agree. I have to admit that the way the table was introduced made me feel as if I was supposed to understand it right away, which made me slightly panic.
I also wanted to say, thank you for this work that you are doing! I'm so excited for this project, and I'm sure it will bring help and relief to a lot of people.
All I do is lucid dream when I sleep. It’s honestly annoying an exhausting. I never wake up feeling rested. I have no clue how I learned this either. I wish I could unlearn it and just sleep.
I seldom have nightmares(at least scary ones). My late husband was an alcoholic and I frequently dream about him coming back in bizarre circumstances. Vivid dreams run in my family, my mother and I both have them. One of her brothers who served in WWII had such horrible nightmares that dr. Had to give him medication to keep the frights under control. I just find mine entertaining.
It seems this article got linked from today's, Morning Brew (morningbrew.com/). Haven't noticed them linking ACX before. It might get more reads than usual.
I have dreams, mostly during when I am asleep in the morning. I wonder why they happen, and this seems to be telling me that it can be nightmares. But as far as I remember them, they aren't anywhere near as scary to be considered as nightmares. I just want to sleep more comfortably, without any dreams which make me get tired a little bit, it feels like I haven't slept well when I think I should have.
I should try changing my sleep schedule, as it can be the culprit. Thanks very much for this post, I learned a lot.
It’s not a treatment exactly, but in my clinical practice I found that non-elaboration was highly effective. Most people who have chronic nightmares have gotten in the habit of elaborating in them—either internally (worrying or ruminating) or with other people (waking a partner up and retelling the nightmare in the middle of the night, for example)—but when you decrease those elaboration behaviors, frequency and intensity tend to drop dramatically in my experience.
Thanks for adding in the section on sleep apnea. General medical opinion seems to be that if you're not a fat 55-year old man, then it can't be sleep apnea. Maybe add that not everyone with sleep apnea snores, and teeth grinding is a fairly common symptom:
This is a good article, but the first paragraph of section 1 is way more technical than the rest... and mostly more technical than it needs to be. "The brain goes a little haywire without input from the senses, and when the brain is anxious you get nightmares" is the key message you need for the rest of this piece, and that can be expressed in pretty simple language.
(At least Ritz was gesturing at this, but I figured it was worth making this a (more-)explicit comment.)
MORE SLEEP! This is info I got from research on children's nightmares. All the common issues that occur during children's sleep also occur for adults (only less often); nightmares, sleep terrors, sleep walking and talking. tooth grinding ....
I've had success helping pts to reduce their nightmares by increasing their sleep time. I usually suggest 15 minutes extra (usually by going to bed earlier, the most realistic for most adults) for a week, then another 15, until up as much as an hour of added sleep. When this helps, it helps a lot! I've also encouraged this when people report their kids are having any of the parasomnias OR insomnia; usually helps there, too.
Of course, more sleep requires better sleep hygiene, so there's a lot of coaching and trouble-shooting to do around that, to implement this.
Are there any registered lucid dream false positives? E.g. someone who got chased by a huge dog in real live, assumed it was a dream, tried some fantastic solution instead of more practical lines of action, and ended up mauled?
NightWare, an app for Apple Watches that decreases PTSD nightmares, might be worth watching. According to a study in Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, it significantly increases sleep quality in veterans with PTSD. It's prescription only :(
I can’t think of anything more likely to be subject to the placebo effect than nightmares
Reading in dreams is unusual - from what I’ve heard, most people don’t. It happens to me now and then (in non-lucid dreams) but, like you say, the words keep changing - and I’ve never read anything coherent or meaningful in a dream. Don’t recall ever seeing any numerals or mathematical signs in any dream - I wonder if mathematically inclined people sometimes do?
Backwards question: Anyone know good ways to increase nightmares? I personally find them more interesting than most of my other dreams, and almost never get to experience them.
Take cyproheptadine, apparently.
I take my antihistamine at night anyways, might just try it.
Stop taking your antihistamine at night. Antihistamines tend to help you sleep, thus minimizing bad dreams.
Cyproheptadine is prescription-only, and you are likely to be disappointed if you took it. I found it to be a pretty good sleep aid (which is no surprise if you look at its formula - it looks like a tricyclic antidepressant with an extra ring on its tail, and tricyclic antidepressants are prescribed off-label as sleep aids).
Maybe depends on the specific drug? It's common knowledge that Benadryl specifically tends to cause pretty bad dreams due to the combo side effects of being a sedative, slightly hallucinogenic and increasing heart rate (which for many people seems to trigger anxiety). At higher doses it also may cause memory loss and confusion, which seems like the perfect cocktail of physiology nightmare fuel.
My bad, I should have worded this more carefully. I meant "maybe you're not getting bad dreams exactly because you're taking an antihistamine at night".
But he's either not taking Benadryl, or it's not having this effect on him.
Tangent: Every time I've taken a Benadryl it has taken ~2 days for me to quit feeling groggy afterward.
Both times I took the supplement ZMA, I had nightmares. It is known for creating vivid dreams, but mine specifically were nightmares and I heard the same from a friend.
Huh. I'll try that. Thanks!
Yeah I took a ton of zinc and magnesium last fall for fun as an experiment when I found out I have HH and had daily nightmares.
Fun fact- Sweden tried to combat acid rain in the 80s by seeding vast swaths of agricultural land with calcium carbonate which only leeched molybdenum from the soils into the plants and into the intestines of moose where it blocked their absorption of copper and killed them slowly by really bizarre reproducible organ failure.
was called "mysterious moose illness" and I am hellbent on getting more friends to cite it in their neuro nature papers
I just checked, and all of the top 4 ZMA supplements on Amazon also contain B6. That is probably the culprit. Take your B6 in the morning and you'll piss out the excess before it affects your sleep.
Nicotine patch every night at bedtime. They won't be nightmares at first (though vivid and often entertaining). Be persistent because after your first, nightmares will come with increasing regularity.
That's how I got on smoking in the first place, and I have finally stopped nicotine, lol. (Also it didn't work. But also the nicotine was great and did eventually lead to me realizing I had pretty severe ADHD, as the return of the symptoms when I'd try to quit were basically why it was hard to quit, it was difficult to readjust to not self-medicating.)
I found the dreams very entertaining for a couple of weeks, but there's something about growing dread following an intensely bad I've that just fuels the damn things.
It was probably the beta carbolines I ended up missing the most. I suspect that if they were added to the patch my dreams wouldn't have veered off in that direction, or at least not so dramatically.
I used nicotine patches as an ADHD treatment for a while. They work really well for that.
I usually used them during the day, but also left them on during the night a few times. (Mostly by accident.) I can confirm the vivid dreams! Don't remember getting nightmares from them, but I am not prone to those anyway.
I'm not particularly prone to nightmares either. But there is a positive feedback associated with dread, just like anticipatory frustration about not being able to sleep.
I'm not sure nicotine patches really do work that well for ADHD. They do probably work a bit better for associated conditions though (untreated sleep apnea, various metabolic issues, dysautonomia). But then, of course, there's the problem of, what the hell is ADHD anyway? The research on nicotine as an aid to concentration/cognitive performance was never very encouraging though.
That long-term smoking doesn't seem to cost much cognitively is interesting in it's own right because you'd expect it to, but even the putative protective factor for Parkinson's is probably an artifact arising from neurodegenerative loss and resulting diminishing desire to keep smoking.
Smoking also includes beta carbolines though, which are reversible maois. This means all the research on nicotine alone fails to account for another potentially important factor in tobacco.
But individual results vary, I'm sure.
I'm not sure how nicotine is supposed to help with sleep apnea. Are you supposed to keep them on while you sleep?
From what I can tell, nicotine during the day works about as well against ADHD as any other stimulant. Ie fairly well, but no magic bullet.
Nicotine seems to work well also for people who already have Parkinson's. (That sentence is based on some literature research long ago, and seeing my father-in-law with Parkinson's try some patches.)
Of course, individual results vary, yes.
I do not advocate inhaling burning tobacco smoke at all. That's bad for you, in general.
If you want nicotine, take a patch or perhaps vape.
Nicotine is primarily a selective agonist of acetylcholine receptors, so there's a nice consilience between that and all the lucid dreaming forums that recommend choline and AChEIs.
Excessive melatonin doses (3+mg) give me nightmares, and are probably pretty harmless otherwise.
I think mostly that made me drowsy in the morning, but thanks!
I just recently read https://www.theonion.com/nature-made-releases-new-melatonin-formula-promising-40-1848994323 , which makes me think this is a more common experience than I knew!
I had to stop using melatonin for the same reason. Unpleasantly vivid dreams usually involving body horror of some kind.
Even very small melatonin doses cause me to wake up over and over again with very rapid heart rate from intense dreams. They don't feel like nightmares in the sense that they lack "dread." Lot's of running and fighting but no emotional involvement. I guess it feels a bit like playing video games. The overall result is a really bad nights sleep.
I used to have that reaction to melatonin. I thought it was great. I remembered far more dreams, and I got to have the experience of being tired and getting to sleep many times, and it felt like I required less sleep. Unfortunately, I don't have the reaction anymore.
I also wake up soaking wet after taking too much melatonin - in addition to causing weird unpleasant dreams it also consistently causes fevers, which I have never heard of anyone else reporting.
You could try all of the stuff Scott mentions in #2:
"Dreams occur during REM sleep, a very light stage of sleep on the border of wakefulness. Although it's natural to have some REM sleep, anything that prevents deep sleep and pushes you towards more light sleep instead will give you more (and worse) dreams.
So: pain, discomfort, heat, caffeine, bright lights, alcohol, stimulant medications, a noisy environment, an uncomfortable bed. Of these, heat is an especially common culprit . Use windows, fans, and A/C, but also consider getting lighter sheets, wearing less clothing, and taking off your socks (it's socks in particular a surprising amount of the time!). Digestion is another common culprit; try not to eat too soon before bedtime, and try not to eat foods that make you feel bloated and give you indigestion."
With the possible and notable exception of heat, none of these have seemed to factor into nightmares, personally. I should try heat, though
Alcohol a few hours before bedtime deadens my dreaming. And I'm not sure why Scott says *more* dreaming will lead to *worse* dreams. Does he have any data to back up that statement?
Recall that this is in the treatment plan for someone trying to mitigate nightmares in the first place. If most of your dreams are nightmares to start with, then reducing dreams in general should also reduce your nightmares.
Passion fruit flower does this well. see my comment above also
eat right before bed
That's most likely to wake me up with acid reflux at this point in my life, lol
Drink for a week and then stop :D
I tried that, but I had to stop and breathe after a minute or so
I get many nightmares/delirum when sleeping or resting with fever. Covid works too. To be clear, never self induced.
You have more interesting nightmares than mine. Mine mostly involve realizing I forgot to take a mandatory class in uni, or losing my bag and looking for it everywhere. (The rare exception involved a military base, a dragon and lots of tall grass going up in flames)
I think I've had / have all the "normal" nightmares. All my teeth falling out annoys me because I'll need to go get fitted for dentures; or I notice that my teeth falling out doesn't seem to be reducing the number of teeth in my mouth, and hey, apparently I'm a weird mutant who can grow new teeth, that's neat. Can't really get roused to much by the "Forgot to study for a test" or the "It's the last day of school and I forgot I signed up for an online course" things; I'm aware at too deep a level I'm done with education, so instead it got reinterpreted as "For some reason I decided to go back to school but I still don't care and this won't have any effect on my life". (Although the "Forgot I took an online course and all the work is due tomorrow" nightmare was rather visceral while I was actually in college.)
"Naked in public" dreams just make me politically annoyed while I'm asleep; it's not my fault I'm naked, why would I get punished for this, and also why is being naked even illegal? (My annoyance in these dreams has translated to fairly strong waking political opinions on this matter.)
Falling turns into flying, being chased turns into fighting. Dying in a dream was a weird one; not horrifying, just kind of confusing, because my brain clearly didn't know where to go from there, and just kind of did a prolonged freeze-frame. I experience myself as invulnerable in fistfights; those turn into weird stalemates.
I note these mostly to observe that my brain serves up mundane "nightmares", I just can't/don't experience them as nightmares.
It's the same with nightmares generally; my brain tries to set up nightmares for me, say a cult of people carrying bowling balls attached to chains are going around crushing people's heads in, or there are multiple tornadoes all closing in on the house I'm in, or an ill-defined amorphous thing with black teeth is trying to catch me, and then I react inappropriately, and then it's just a weird and interesting dream.
Even the straight-up nightmare - which necessarily cannot have anything concrete in it, because then I'll react inappropriately, and instead will just be, say, a rising sense of dread and disaster (literally just that - the entire dream experience has to be the experience of negative emotional experiences, without any visuals or audio for me to react to) - end up being "Oh hey that was a neat experience" when I wake up.
I can't really give you any advice, because I haven't really had a nightmare since I was about six years old. I was lucky enough as a little dreamer to encounter a "spirit" guardian (who appeared as a bird in my dreams), and who acted as my dream instructor. She showed me how to become what is commonly called a lucid dreamer (we didn't have that term back when I was a kid). Before she came along, I had horribly scary nightmares every night.
Because of her, I always know I'm dreaming in my dreams, and I seem to be able to manipulate my dreams so that anything scary that pops up in them becomes a fun challenge to overcome. I had a great dream the other night were a team of assassins came to kill me, and I used a series of Home Alone type tactics to defeat them. Then I located my dream pistol and it became first-person shooter game. One of the funnest dreams I've had in a while!
But if you're into having fun in your dreams, try to train yourself to be lucid dreamer. Dreams are one of my major forms of recreation.
Eat cheese just before bedtime. Your dreams will be astonishingly intense. (Not necessarily nightmares but vivid and memorable.)
I have no idea why this is supposed to work, but after seeing this advice several times in the comment section I decided to give it a try.
Eating plenty of cheddar right before bedtime seems to have caused waking after each sleep cycle. No change in dream quality nor quantity, but still pretty neat, even if it's just a placebo.
Lion's Mane Mushroom extract sharply increase my (and most anecdotal reporter's) dream intensity, or maybe recall. Nightmares are more frequent and more intense (or more likely to be remembered upon waking).
smoke copious amounts of cannabis.. then quit cold turkey you will have absolutely mind bending dreams and nightmares.
Not to mention an increased risk or serious, long term mental illness (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/20786190.2014.978106) and the entertainingly titled 'scromiting', in which the cannabis hobbyist cannot stop screaming and vomiting (https://www.newportacademy.com/resources/treatment/teen-scromiting/).
Just stick to cheese. A nice piece of Lincolnshire Poacher before nap time will give you all the crazy dreams that you want.
Those links are for adolescents who shouldn’t be using cannabis much at all imo. If I could paint I wish I could create some of the dream scenes I’ve enjoyed while withdrawing from thc.
Try Doritos before bed. Works for me, every time. And I don't even want the nightmares! 😂
Oddly that is one thing I kind of miss about having sleep apnea. I used to have the craziest, most vivid dreams. Sometimes they were upsetting but they were often just interesting and engaging
"Oh god,, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space were it not that I have bad dreams."
Pavlovian response to a post about nightmares.
The DBT Manual has a decent Nightmare Protocol potentially worth sharing in the Image Rehearsal section: https://depts.washington.edu/uwbrtc/wp-content/uploads/Nightmare-Protocol.pdf
"ever new theme" -> "every new theme"
^ This: specifically, it's in section 3.1, under Image Rehearsal Therapy, at the end of the parenthetical section.
Quick copy+paste search:
doing the same therapy for ever new theme.)
I think it seems like a great resource. As I was reading, all the questions I had (like, "is he going to include the thing about melatonin and B vitamins?") were answered very soon after I had them. Only two exceptions to this to consider: 1) I think putting the PTSD caveat up front in the first or second paragraph would be smart, given that many people suffering from PTSD have nightmares and their treatment will likely be different so you might as well put that info out there early, and 2) inositol is another supplement that can cause nightmares in folks (esp. those who get nightmares with B and melatonin), so maybe include that?
+++ to putting information about co-morbidities up front.
Agreed on the PTSD point. I'd also say that TF-CBT and CPT are probably more standard evidence supported trauma treatments than EMDR.
Yeah, one of my Complex PTSD pts had frequent and severe nightmares. We did years of trauma work, they reduced only somewhat. Then a very bad life event sent her into a spiral that ended in her having ECT for depression. Not only helped her depression, but the nightmares disappeared and never came back!
It's possible that one of the ways ECT works is by jolting the brain into allowing new learning. Apparently one of the reasons psychedelics can help w/PTSD as well.
I rarely dream and hadn't had nightmares since childhood, but started taking Singular after age 50. It triggered very bad nightmares for the first two weeks. One so vivid that I recall it in detail a year later. I was about to stop taking the medicine, but then the nightmares stopped with no recurrence in the last year. I recommend adding a reference to it as a possible trigger for nightmares.
It’s kind of unpleasant to learn that enough people have chronic nightmares to generate this much data.
Next time, can you figure out what drug I should take to get another dream where I can fly? I had one when I was eleven and still think about it.
Eric Scwitzgebel raises a related ethical question: how much effort should we put into improving our dream lives?
http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-dream-argument-against.html
As a young adult, I had a lot of flying dreams. They'd often start with me thinking, "Oh, hey, I can fly. Of course I can fly, why did I ever think I couldn't?" When I woke up I'd realize that I can't actually fly. Always disappointing.
I could fly too. Akin to slow swimming, it took a lot of concentration and control else I would lose altitude. Felt so real.
This and the parent mirror my experience with flying dreams to a T. I'm curious, did you spend a lot of time in swimming pools as a child? I know I did, and the dreams seem to have waned since I've spent less and less time swimming.
Indeed. Spent my youth in pools and the flying dreams faded once I stopped swimming regularly.
I never considered this, but the timing matches almost perfectly for me!
Lifelong swimmer until Covid. Have always had infrequent but exhilarating flying dreams, though I know I had them during periods when I lived overseas and was rarely able to find places to swim. Some are the type you describe, where I have to concentrate and work really hard and I wake up kind of tired, but in others, I just soar above everyone else and wonder why no one is joining me and then remember only I can fly.
Conversely, my childhood flying dreams always involved the thought process "I thought I could only fly in dreams, but *this* time it's real!"
You can follow guidelines for lucid dreaming, and then once lucid 'just decide' that you want to fly.
As a shortcut: habits from your waking life carry over into your dreams. Dream physics is really, really wonky (for most people).
One common 'bug' is that your brain can't simulate light being switched on and off quickly. So light switches in dreams will not work light in waking life. Another common bug, and one that's relevant here, is that gravity is off in dreams: when jumping or running you will likely float down to the ground way too slow. (That's also one reason why people report not being able to run away properly in a dream.)
So the application is: get in the habit of jumping a bit every once in a while when you are awake. It's good exercise anyway.
Then you'll likely do that in your dreams as well, and will start floating. It's a short distance from there to flying.
Wow, is the light switch thing common for everyone? I have a recurring nightmare, in which I'm walking through a house in the faintest of lighting trying to turn a light on, none of the switches work, and of course the dark is terrifying - there's something bad in the dark. Does everyone have this same problem?
Count me in
haha I have nightmares based on the gravity bug, like something is chasing me and I jump away and can't fall down
If I flip a light switch and the light doesn't go on (because e.g. the bulb burned out), I get an immediate sense of derealization, dread, and utter wrongness for a few moments while I think "wait, but I thought I was AWAKE!"
Another one that is very consistent is this: you can’t suffocate in dreams. You exploit this by pinching your nose and trying to breath through it (without opening your mouth). In a dream you will be able to breath normally through your closed nose. Benefit is you don’t need to be near a light switch or anything to check it, and it doesn’t look weird (like trying to float)
Long time ago, I got into a habit of doing this compulsively every 15 minutes, and it made dream lucid a lot. Have since lost the habit unfortunately
I haven't heard of that one! Most interesting!
For any bystanders reading this: just do some web search for more of those tricks, if you are interested. There are quite a few.
I do wonder what that teaches us about the human mind?
One time I did manage to get myself to lucid dream and immediately started trying to fly because that's what you do when you lucid dream, right?
My subconscious shut that down instantly. I remember feeling a distinct sense of arguing with an invisible power that was adamant humans cannot fly, that's against gravity, and how about we go for a nice walk in the park instead? Eventually I had to give up and accept a walk in an improbably-beautiful park.
When I woke up I had a chuckle about being so logical I couldn't even convince my dreams to break reality.
Meanwhile I am often aware that I'm in a dream and that gives me the power to change approximately nothing, which I've assumed is for the same reason. If I do manage to tweak the reality engine for myself, then anything I'm struggling with in the dream (if anything) just does the same thing. I make myself fly in a dream where I'm being chased? Pursuers do that same thing.
If this means that all of your nightmares are within boundaries of what's possible, I envy you.
Ah, this explains my "flying" in dreams to a T. I can't ever actually fly, but I can jump in what feels like vastly reduced gravity and like, jump from the top of a big flight of stairs or the top of a hill and just coast along 4 or 5 feet off the ground, moving laterally more than vertically.
I've never gotten reality-check methods to work. My brain regularly serves me up dreams that are so fantastical and abstract and my brain goes along with it without a second thought. Usually it resolves it as "oh, this is a video game" or something stupid like that.
I've had much better luck with conscious-sleeping techniques. The most consistent lucid dreams are when I wake up in the middle of the night -- I can sometimes literally close my eyes and consciously daydream and it goes straight into a lucid dream from that within seconds.
I get dreams of flying pretty reliably whenever I spend too much time in Minecraft creative mode. I think it might have to do with instilling expectations, or something.
nitpick: "will also improve nightmares" is ambiguous
Yeah, I took "improve nightmares" as the words of a sadist the first time.
Well, there are a few people in this thread (and on Reddit) who say they want more nightmares...
I’d replace it with “ameliorate nightmares”.
Relieve and mitigate might also be good choices.
+1 for this. I had to read the sentence a couple of times before I realised what it was actually trying to say.
I’m not clear on how well this might apply to children. Nightmares are a major parenting struggle.
I noticed our toddler started having nightmares right around the time she hit the “imaginative play” milestone and could put together narratives. She’s an unusually verbal kid, and we tried to help her with what I didn’t know was a kind of image rehearsal therapy/lucid dream. We emphasized that these things were not real, and told her that whatever scared her came from her own imagination, so she could imagine something else more powerful to chase it away. We actually had pretty good luck with this.
My favorite was when she said she had a nightmare about a monster, so she summoned a version of *herself* that could fly and had magic powers to make it disappear.
What age did she hit the 'imaginative play' milestone and nightmares?
Our toddler had what seemed like one nightmare about 13 months of age, and also really got into imaginative play around a similar time. She's 18 months now. Not sure whether she even had another nightmare since then, they certainly haven't been common nor a problem.
I think when I say “imaginative play”, I mean telling verbal stories and role playing. My kid had enough language/theory of mind to pull this off sometime around age 2, but it was between 2.5 and 3 that the whole nightmare thing peaked.
Related anecdote: When I was a child, I was once in the middle of a nightmare when I heard my mother's voice saying, "It's okay, it's just a dream," or something to that effect. I then immediately understood that it was true, so I started laughing at the scary thing, then flew away, and had a glorious lucid dream. Ever since that night, basically any time a dream headed into nightmarish territory, that would trigger a lucid or semi-lucid state that enabled me to revise the dream to something less bad. The paradoxical result of this is that I now kinda wish I still had proper nightmares, just because the state of lucid dreaming they would enable was awesome.
Many years later I told my mom this story and explained how glad I was for intervening that one time while I was having a nightmare! (I'd always assumed she'd literally said the words "It's okay, it's just a dream" to me while I was flopping around in the middle of a nightmare, and that it had penetrated my dreaming mind.) She insisted, however, that that didn't sound at all like what she would have done in that situation, or like anything she would ever say. So probably my own brain came up with this strategy on its own.
Still, trying to teach lucid dreaming to children sounds like a great idea--they're presumably a lot closer to being able to do it naturally than an adult is.
Good call - I believe that's excellent advice. (When my kid was little, he spent lots of waking hours imagining himself as a superhero, so I guess he didn't need any extra encouragement on that score - and didn't have any trouble with nightmare either.) :-)
I'm not a child psychiatrist and nothing I say should be interpreted as making any claims about relevance to children, sorry.
The one thing that might be relevant - the temperature thing. We noticed this spring that our four year old was suddenly crying out in the night without waking up, rolling out of his bed, etc. Switching away from pajamas with long sleeves and long bottoms helped (he insists on socks though).
I learned about the existence of lucid dreaming from one of my children, who was about 5 or 6 at the time. I have nightmares in which I shout and shout, waking my partner and often others in the house. She asked me why I don't just choose to dream something else. I was confused, so she said, "You know, if dinosaurs are chasing you, you make them get stuck in the mud or turn them into canaries so you can laugh at them." I didn't believe her, but I read up on it. She was a natural lucid dreamer. Unfortunately, I never mastered it.
It's such a foreign experience to me that most people have common themes in dreams, let alone nightmares. But I have a pretty strange central hypersomnia, so I think it makes my dreams more random and sort of hypnogogic-ish. Anyways, only real recommendation I might have is to give a good primer on sleep stages in general, both REM and NREM, but maybe that content belongs elsewhere.
There's actually a whole scientific study of formal dream analysis.
Not the Freudian kind, but just eg asking folks how many people where in their dreams, and who and what happened.
If I remember right, the number of people occurring in dreams is fairly stable, even amongst folks who see vastly different number of people in their waking life.
Yeah, people are usually in my dreams but they often morph and the things they are doing and saying don't make sense at least not in a describable way. I've described my dreams to my friends as robot chicken on extra drugs. I usually can't remember them well because they are such nonsense that I can't really synthesize them into an narrative.
So to be clear, is Lucid Dreaming actually a real thing? I've always been pretty skeptical, and I don't think I have ever experienced one.
Yes. I've never cared enough to look into how to have lucid dreams on purpose, but I used to have them naturally sometimes.
It is; it's very fragile, however; personally it's a razor edge of being conscious enough to be aware I'm in a dream, but not so conscious as to actually wake up. I've had the best success when going back to sleep after waking up in the middle of a dream (I often lucid dream when returning to the dream), and some mixed success falling asleep while meditating.
"Dreams occur during REM sleep, a very light stage of sleep on the border of wakefulness" is relevant to this question, I suspect. I've only had a couple semi-lucid dreams in my life (in one I could fly, but only with effort - comparable to swimming, but in the air. I was consciously exerting effort, because flying is fun, but also realized I was dreaming because - duh - people can't really fly like that. Quite vivid: I was in the sideyard of an old church, about 12 feet off the ground.) More to the point: I've half-woken up from a bad dream, consciously imagined the scenario changing to a good dream (deliberately, to calm myself) and drifted back to sleep - with the dream taking up where it left off, in the more pleasant way my half-awake mind directed it to go. Finally, on a related note, I'll occasionally experience a "hypnic jerk" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnic_jerk) and wake up if I happen to dream of falling. So yeah, I think the border between "half-asleep" and "dreaming" is blurrier than is generally acknowledged, and this is relevant to the "lucid dreaming" thing.
Interesting. I've able to imagine and visualize long running narratives and scenarios both during the day and in bed, and consciously direct and experience the experiences of my proxy in that scenario, but I don't think I experience that in the same way I experience a dream.
Since I started to do a daily breathing meditation I can regularly hover in the liminal state between waking and sleeping. As I start to wake I can tune in to the sensation of my breath and kind of hover at the edge. It pleasurable and a good way to start lucid dreams.
That question is much more interesting than you might think!
First, people definitely report having lucid dreams. So they are real in that sense. But, of course, they could just be all lying, or more insidious: instead of actually having had a lucid dream, perhaps that's just their memory playing tricks on them when recounting their dream to a researcher after waking up?
The latter is actually a concern with basically all dream research, and lucid dreams are a way out of this philosophical conundrum!
See, when you are dreaming, your body generally shuts down the ways that normally allow you to move your body. When you are walking in a dream, you don't typically actually move your limbs and knee your spouse in the gonads. (When that paralysis mechanism goes wrong in a specific way, you can get an episode of 'sleep paralysis'. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis )
But not eyes! Eyes are weird. Anatomically they are almost a part of your brain. During REM sleep eyes are not paralysed. Hence the 'Rapid Eye Movements'.
It turns out, when lucid dreamers consciously move their eyes in their dreams, their actual eyes do the same movements.
Thus you can train people to send signals and messages out of their lucid dreams.
And researchers have come up with all kinds of weird and inventive ways to make use of that.
You are missing an alternative. All dreams are "lucid" if you don't require that the person be aware that they're dreaming. But I've noticed that if I wake slowly enough at some point I become aware that I can't remember why I'm doing whatever I'm dreaming about, even though I'm sure that I knew about it when I started. Perhaps all dreams *are* lucid, the the memory that you're dreaming isn't very persistent. In that case "lucidity" would be a gradient, depending on how persistent the memory of "I'm dreaming this" was.
FWIW, I rarely try to draw a boundary between "lucid dreams" and "the other kind". Such a boundary feels artificial.
Yes, I used to routinely get lucid dreams. The process was sort straightforward for me, but it wasn't really that fun, so I'm glad I don't get them anymore:
I have sleep apnea. I'd have trouble breathing while asleep. I'd have a dream about not breathing or holding my breath underwater. I'd sometimes realize that I could still breathe even if I was underwater. It would make me realize I was dreaming without waking me up. I would then be in a state of lucid dreaming.
The reasons it wasn't all that great:
1. Have you ever laid down in a quiet room, closed your eyes, and imagined your greatest fantasies as hard as you can? Lucid dreaming is only a little better than that.
2. I entered a state of lucid dreaming usually right after I'd basically been suffocating. Usually I was just happy to survive. And often I'd end the lucid dreaming just cuz I wanted to be sure that I was ok.
3. I'm a guy and one of the things my mind associated with a high heart rate (and maybe some adrenaline) is violence. I had multiple lucid dreams of incredibly violent scenarios. Knife fights, gunning down innocent political enemies (I was a dictator in that dream), brutal crashes, and all sorts of other things.
4. Staying in the lucid dream state often required what I would call "story continuity" (this is probably unique to me and I probably could have trained away from this problem). I had full control over my own actions and some level of input on the setting, but I couldn't just magic myself to whatever setting I wanted. If I started off drowning in the ocean I couldn't magically be on a plane the next second. A boat had to rescue me, then take me to an airport, and then I'd get on the plane. It was a bit like a dungeons and dragons game, but I was a player, not the dungeon master.
My memories of the lucid dreams were always crystal clear. Or at least as clear as you might remember something you did yesterday.
There are devices out there that can assist in helping you reach a lucid dreaming state. My guess is that they aren't that popular, because lucid dreaming is only a little better than what you can just imagine by yourself.
> 4. Staying in the lucid dream state often required what I would call "story continuity" (this is probably unique to me and I probably could have trained away from this problem). I had full control over my own actions and some level of input on the setting, but I couldn't just magic myself to whatever setting I wanted. If I started off drowning in the ocean I couldn't magically be on a plane the next second. A boat had to rescue me, then take me to an airport, and then I'd get on the plane. It was a bit like a dungeons and dragons game, but I was a player, not the dungeon master.
This is definitely not unique to you. Can attest to a similar dynamic.
I've often had lucid dreams, and the way Cole described it is perfect:
"It was a bit like a dungeons and dragons game, but I was a player, not the dungeon master."
When you're in that state, you know you are dreaming. You have conscious control over "your own" actions. But you don't control the world around you. You cannot "make things happen" around you. Your subconscious mind takes care of that.
It's just like playing an extremely convincing video game or a role-playing game.
In fact, it's like real life, except that there are no permanent consequences to anything you do, you can't get hurt, and you can safely tell people you don't like to fuck off.
Also, you can fly, but maybe it's just me. In fact, for me, attempting to float in the air is the foolproof test that it's a dream. Because there's no way you can in real life. If I can fly, I know it's a dream and then I can relax, knowing there's no consequence to anything I do.
Wow. I've never even been lucid enough in a dream to be able to contemplate whether I was dreaming. ~98% of nights I don't even have any dream I can remember unless I take a lot of B6 right before bed. Then the odds of having a dream I can remember go up from 2% to ~75%, but they're still not lucid.
This is also my experience lucid dreaming, but I've heard a lot of people say the opposite - that they *can* control what happens. I don't know if it's an individual difference or a matter of lucid dreaming "skill level".
This book has some great tips and exercises for increasing your level of control while lucid dreaming: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199519.The_Tibetan_Yogas_Of_Dream_And_Sleep
I always thought lucid dreaming meant you control literally everything (like a daydream, or writing a story). But then my daughter said that in her dreams she has no control over even her own actions (like watching a movie, only much more immersive). So that made me wonder whether that's actually the norm, and whether my own ability to control my own actions in dreams but not my environment (like real life), which I've always taken for granted, might be what people mean by "lucid dreaming".
For me, the difference is that I know it's a dream. When you know it's a dream, everything changes; you're liberated; you know nothing can go wrong.
For example, if you are dreaming you're back in high school and haven't done your studying, you will feel afraid and uncomfortable.
But once you know it's just a dream, then there's nothing to fear any longer and you can do anything you want. You can slap the horrible teacher you hate. You can leave the school building and go somewhere else. You wouldn't even think of doing these thing unless you know it's a dream.
That feeling of freedom (which comes with the awareness that it's a dream) is what I personally call "lucid dreaming". Scott seems to agree.
The "player but not DM" analogy also matches my experience. I could gain control, but there were boundaries of what's allowed in the dream. If I attempted to break the boundaries, it will wake me up. With some practice, I was able to (metaphorically) lightly push against the boundaries to see if it destabilizes the dream, and then stop before waking if I feel it's causing problems.
Of course, I have no idea how much getting that idea reinforced itself, or how much that generalizes to other people's experiences.
There's nothing in my experience like "waking up because I'm breaking the boundaries". It's actually extremely difficult to wake up deliberately, even if I'm lucid and I know I'm dreaming.
One occasional failure mode is that, if I go in a direction my subconscious disagrees with, especially if I open a *door* that my subconscious doesn't want me to open, I may end up in an infinite maze where behind every door there are just more doors.
I hate that infinite maze!
But it doesn't wake me up.
Also, if I try to have dream sex with someone in the dream, I may have an orgasm and wake up because of it... but that's an entirely different phenomenon.
I've only had them a few times in my life, and I tried, so I'm not "skilled" at all. But when I did, I could control them. So, one point for "individual difference" I guess. For example, I generally can't really visualize things clearly when awake so while in a dream I realised I was dreaming, made appear some chess boards to play a bit, and it was shockingly easy and clear. My hands otoh were all weird and not clear at all (but I knew they might be so it could be just suggestion + lack of control). I always woke up fast.
"You cannot 'make things happen' around you. Your subconscious mind takes care of that."
Beg to differ. It's a matter of expectations. In the dream world faith can move mountains.
I certainly can change some things about the world, if they're consistent with the general logic of the dream. If I'm running away from some people down a seemingly infinite road, it's pretty easy for me to magic up a skateboard and the skills to do fancy tricks on it to get away. If I'm running through a forest, that would be different; trying to make a skate board show up would probably lead to it tripping me (since that's the only notable way for a skateboard to plausibly interact with the story in a forest.)
This isn't what I experience when I lucid dream. I feel it more like "whatever I most expect to happen, will happen", regardless of whether that's affecting self or world.
For example in one part of the last lucid dream I can remember (faintly), I flew into a building and couldn't find my way out. I realized my previous failures were causing me to expect more failures, which was why going through doorways wasn't working. So I decided to phase through the wall, making sure to imagine outdoorsy things like sun and sky and grass awaiting me on the other side, and I was out. Control the dream logic, control the world.
(I do also use the "can I fly" test of dreaming, if I can even think to check that.)
Yeah, see eg http://www.lucidity.com/slbbs/index.html . I think there's room for a lot of debate about how strong/controllable they are, but not so much whether they exist.
I have been a "lucid" dreamer, in the sense of always being able to tell that I was dreaming, my entire life. My experience of this is somewhat different than what I usually hear described as "lucid dreaming", though, so YMMV.
My dreams lack a complete sensorium. The best metaphor I have for this is that it's like the difference between direct quotation and reported speech: if someone tells me something in a dream, I know what they communicated to me, but I generally don't know what specific words they used (because my brain didn't bother to generate the specific words; no 'ground truth' exists). The other senses are similar; I know what things look like, for example, but that's very different from actually seeing an image. (For example, I'm not restricted to a first-person view. I used to describe this to people as 'third-person', but it would be more accurate to say that I know where I and other objects in the scene are without necessarily 'seeing' it from one specific 'camera angle'. My most interesting dreams are often ones I'm not in, or am in only briefly in a frame narrative.) The result is very difficult to confuse with real life, which has a rich stream of sensory detail whether I am paying attention to it or not.
I'll skip the wild speculation about the perceptual mechanism of this and just note that I'm also aphantasic by most standards, although I have doubts about how this is usually measured and interpreted. See [1] and replies for similar misgivings, or [2] (which Scott linked in a previous post) for evidence I find suggestive (when I say that in dreams I "know what things look like", that's often quite literal, in that I compare them to things I've seen in real life that looked similar). However, as far as I know most aphantasics don't report this kind of lucid dreaming, so this may or may not be relevant.
I shared your skepticism, so I keep a mental lookout for times that the fact I'm dreaming specifically comes up within the dream. It's not impossible to have confabulated these after the fact, but it would definitely be harder than a simple 'oh, I knew it all along'. Here are some I can remember:
- I was being pursued by an evil djinn. I ran, but in a rather desultory fashion, and at one point he caught up and shouted at me for not taking him seriously. I explained that as it was only a dream he couldn't really hurt me, at which point he grew furious and told me that he would make sure I NEVER WOKE UP. This distressed me enormously until I did, in fact, wake up; it is the only post-toddlerhood nightmare I can say I've experienced. (I don't think that threat would work on me again.)
- I fell from a significant height and thought 'hm, this will be interesting; I've never died in a dream before'. (I did not die.)
- I went to a friend's party and had an encounter at a particular library along the way; at the party, relating what I had done that day, I got to the part about the library and apologized for the fact that it was nowhere near the route I had supposedly taken, adding in my defense that it was a dream and they couldn't expect the geography to be accurate.
I don't control what happens in my dreams (except for very occasional re-runs close to waking, similar to what McClain describes). I don't even feel like I particularly control what I do in my dreams—dream-me sometimes operates on dream-logic even when I think this is silly. (For example, during that last incident I was rather embarrassed because I'd come to the party in my pajamas. The fact that I clearly knew I was dreaming and my dream-avatar was clearly capable of acting on that information did not prevent this.) I'm not sure I could give eye-movement signals! It seems like that might require too much sensory specificity.
But I don't really feel like I'm missing out. I share Cole's perspective; since dreaming isn't "like real life" for me, even perfect control would leave it no better than waking fantasy.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6z8grm/is_aphantasia_really_real_like_how_is_that_even/dmts25b/
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0149763420307041
I don't know about some of the claims people make about it, but there have been a few rare times in the middle of a dream where I became aware "oh, this is a dream". The dream usually changed after that, because once I was aware, it was no longer convincing, so my brain seems to have decided to change tack.
I did it naturaly as a kid before learning lucid dream was a thing. Basically, I found that the best way to escape a dream was to 'rewind', change a decision and replay the dream, taking a new tangent. If it fails, rewind further.
Example: open a door, being chased by zombies, rewind, open the other door instead.
A bit like these "choose your own adventure" books.
I tought it to my kids but don't remember if it worked for them or not
I can assure you that it is, but can only point to my personal experience as evidence.
It is real, but I'm not sure it's advantageous. I tend to consider dreams as part of the brain's garbage collection mechanism. I.e., you need to check that something is really ready for disposal before you throw it out. Then you run it through the system and clear out all the pointers. (I believe that accessing a memory is required to enable it to be changed.) Lucid dreaming would seem to act to defeat this.
I was just learning about Glycine as a treatment for anxiety, which I didn't know about. I know a doctor who prescribes it for that. It comes as a powder and the dose recommended is 2,000mg up to 2x/day. Vital Nutrients - Glycine Powder sells on Amazon for $25 and the dose recommended on it is 2-4,000mg. I'm going to try it out for anxiety and will report back.
I had a terrible recurring nightmare as a teen to young adult -- that was clearly related to trauma -- and finally stopped it with lucid dreaming, which I'd done on occasion without knowing how to consistently do it. The dream never returned after that one time I intervened in the midst of it.
I think every client I've ever had who had consistent trouble with nightmares also had PTSD symptoms from earlier trauma, so I like that you encourage people to find treatment for trauma. You might consider making that even clearer earlier on (I think it comes in middle of paragraph under item 3).
Most of my practice is with people who have anxiety, and the folks with anxiety and not so much trauma don't talk so much about nightmares. Your framing above emphasizes anxiety a lot more than trauma, which makes me interested to know if you see people who have a lot of trouble with nightmares who have anxiety alone.
I rarely have nightmares, and when I do, I usually wake up quickly. When I try to lucid dream, the dream sometimes "resists" my attempts to change it and increasing my mental "effort" tends to wake me up.
I'm not sure what resources exist at Lorien or elsewhere w/r/t this problem, but I think it would be appropriate to link or otherwise reference some specific guidance regarding anxiety disorders generally.
Anecdotally, from a non-psychiatrists perspective, nightmares are closely linked in the popular consciousness to PTSD. This is referenced in the post in passing, but I imagine many readers will be especially concerned with differentiating PTSD-related nightmares from other nightmares. Not a huge change, but it might be helpful to link to somewhere with guidance re: PTSD signs and symptoms.
I have had regular bad dreams since I was in a young enough to be in a cot. I'm 37 now so it's been a while. Around 6 y/o I used to physically pull my eyelids open to wake myself up out of nightmares. I have gone in and out of periods where lucid dreaming was available to me. The older (and less stressed) I get, the less reoccurring the themes are - though the intensity, cruelness, and randomness has increased. I have committed to all the sleep hygiene elements, dark/cool room; no eating/drinking/caffeine; meditation helps me get to sleep and possibly enjoy a few hours before the madness begins. I have tried IRT with a Sleep Psychologist with little effect due to the random nature of my dreams. I trialled Prazosin for 3 and 2 months respectively, a couple of years apart, with disastrous results both times. My nightmares were SIGNIFICANTLY worse on this medication. I dream anywhere from 2am until the time I wake up. Yes sadly, sleeping-in means increasingly random and intense nightmares. I can recall a lot of them with stupid specificity. I gave up writing them down because it was taking too long. Occasionally I'll talk about a theme if it's relevant with a Psychologist (i.e. no brakes on a car - feeling out of control). I wake up from sleep feeling absolutely rubbish EVERY DAY. I'm exhausted. My jaw hurts. This brings on corresponding headaches. If the nightmare is particularly bad, I sometimes clench my hands. Cue ongoing joint pain. I wake up in sweats often. I used to wake up crying or distressed a lot. Now I just sleep through or go back to sleep through the most horrific of dreams. Because I'm legit exhausted. How am I functioning during the day? Poorly, at best. I'll stay on the lookout for any new techniques or medications that are being trialled. Because at this present state, I've got my doctors stumped. (Context: Childhood trauma, 15+ years of psychotherapy, current meds: duloxetine, amitriptyline).
If you've never had a sleep study, please get one. Familiar themes in your post, and a CPAP saved my life, I think.
None of my providers brought it up because I was a young, fit man who didn't have a large neck. The constellation I look for re osa is daytime tiredness, morning headache, breathing problems (asthma, if it's been going on a long time) and snoring. (Also arousal: enhancing compensations line massive caffeine intake, sugar, stim behaviours). Osa isn't the only type, however.
Apologies if none of this applies to you, and best wishes regardless.
Yes, I need to book another sleep study. I did one about 4 years ago. The result was no major apnea or restless leg syndrome which was good to cross off. They said I slept poorly (no surprises) and it showed I had no REM sleep ??? Interestingly, I noted that I still had a vivid dream that night.
Awesome that the CPAP made such a difference for you. Absolutely a lifesaver!
Some people don't fall deeply asleep during sleep studies, as they are always semi-aware of being hooked up to the machines (whether doing a home study or one in a sleep clinic). In that case, REM-only apnea may not be picked up. That could be the case for you, since they reported no REM sleep. This sub-category of apnea is fairly rare, but is a real thing! You definitely have the signs, even the waking up sweating can be bc of apnea.
Thanks Karen, you may be right. I struggled to sleep on my back there (as instructed) when I'm typically a side-sleeper. I wonder if an at-home test will be any better, perhaps not if the positioning is the same. I shall enquire!
You mention stimulants, either as prescription medication or caffeine or nicotine, as one of the things that might make people's sleep worse.
Anecdotally, from my own experience and talking to friends, for people with ADHD taking stimulants during the day can make their sleep at night better (compared to not taking any stimulants at all).
The first few times I took ADHD medication during the day, I fall asleep much, much quicker than normal in the evening and then slept like a log. I was up and about earlier than usual, because I had slept so well.
Some of these different experiences with psychostimulants can be affected by metabolic differences, as well as whether or not it's an extended release formulation or not. Brain chemistry variance, as well, of course, I knew one guy who would get hyperaggressive on benzos, but a massive dose of Dexedrine would put him almost immediately into 14 hr snooze fest. Some folks brains' have oversteer when external agonists or antagonists are introduced.
Right, paradoxical, that was the term I wanted to use but couldn't remember because I'm a derp
My own speculation is slightly simpler:
The stimulants during the day helped me be awake more completely. So less need for naps etc.
So because of more activity during the day I could sleep better at night, when the stimulants had also worn off.
(Your theory about oversteering would make more sense, if I had taken the stimulants in the evening before going to bed.)
Also when any stimulant wears off, our energy, mood and focus drop BELOW our normal, before returning to normal. (That's one of main reasons stimulants are so addictive.)
So if you were going to sleep during that 'dip', it'd be much easier to get to sleep, and you'd likely get into a deeper sleep at the beginning.
Stimulants aren't particularly addictive. What makes you think they are?
You are right about the dip. The effect I described is independent of the dip, though. I had that effect even when my stimulants wore off at about 5pm, the dip done and over with by 7pm, and me going to bed by 10pm.
Hmm, that’s cool. Do you think it was because you were more tired, from getting more done in the day, or less stressed/frustrated at the end of the day?
Stimulants as a class (not specifically the meds used for ADHD) are extremely addictive. The percentages of people who experiment with or use different psychoactive substances and end up with habitual and/or compulsive use are well known. I’ll try to find the stats. Stimulants are the main reason coffee, tea and cigarettes are so popular all over the world.
Stimulants are really popular, but that doesn't mean they are addictive.
Eg even nicotine is at most very mildly addictive. The whole cocktail of chemicals you get from cigarettes is quite addictive, though.
See eg "Nicotine · Gwern.net" https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine for more details and links to lots of background material.
Anecdotally, I have no problem taking breaks from various stimulants (that I use for ADHD treatment).
About why I could sleep better: I don't think it was because of something as high level as feeling productive. I suspect it was a more primordial corrective to my circadian rhythm. I didn't yawn nearly as much throughout the day.
(Also without meds I can sort-of power through with will power alone on a task for a while, but it's extremely tiring. The stimulants seem to remove the need for will power here.)
About lucid dreaming:
I used to have used dreams quite commonly. Usually when my sleep hygiene was bad, ie I slept irregular hours, went to bed late, stayed in bed late. That's also when I had more sleep paralysis, and weird dreams that could be nightmares for other people (but I wasn't afraid..)
In some sense, it's an irony of biology that bad sleep hygiene can cause both nightmares and one of the cures for them (lucid dreaming).
If it isn't too much off topic, I'd love to see a section added on night terrors/sleep paralysis. I've had the typical hypnagogic hallucinations for decades and am not particularly bothered by them, as I know what they are and have a fair bit of practice in lucid dreaming. (No, I've never been narcoleptic, and though it looks like a lot of the literature associates hypnagogic and hynopompic hallucinations with narcolepsy, I've never noticed a correlation between sleep paralysis and narcolepsy in people I've known that have this problem.)
I've seen two adults reduced to tears recounting their experiences of these things. If my experience is any guide, I think the (real but not really terrible) psychological trauma of these events would be minimized for others if the word got out that this is a pretty common experience for many people and has no "supernatural" significance, as many people seem to assume.
(Just for fun: One of my sleep paralysis experiences was actually published in a collection of ghost stories, as it happened in a notorious old "haunted" house and involved a hallucinated character that strangely resembled a real person that had died there many years before.)
Note for those unfamiliar with the topic, in layman's terms from a non-psychologist: this is a strange state some people occasionally get stuck in, somewhere between full sleep and being awake where a nightmare begins after your normal motor control is shut off for sleep... but you still feel like you're completely awake. You feel paralyzed and hallucinate in frightening ways; a stereotypical example is being unable to move as a witchy sort of character does something unpleasant to you, such as sitting on your chest, making it hard to breathe (probably a side effect of the inability to use motor control over your breath as you normally can). Funnily, it has even been called "Old Hag Syndrome", as this particular hallucination is apparently quite common.
I've never had any of the supernatural stuff. It is almost always that someone who is angry with me or wants to hurt me is banging on my front door*, and I know that not answering the door is making things worse and even that the person might break down the door and come attack me in my bed. I'm usually facing away from the bedroom door so I have no way of knowing when or if someone is coming in.
I'm usually lucid enough to realize that it is another bout of sleep paralysis (I understand why I can't move) but not lucid enough to filter out the fear of harm from whatever I'm hallucinating or the fear that this time the paralysis won't end.
Occasionally when I'm napping I'll get sleep paralysis without the hallucinations (or at least none that I notice) which is more annoying than frightening because I want to get up and do whatever I was going to do that day but I can't.
*The first time this happened, it was triggered by someone actually banging on another apartment's door in the same building while I was sleeping around 2 a.m. Since then, it seems to happen on it's own. That was about 7 or 8 years ago I think.
Edit: meant to say facing *away* from the bedroom door
I found that the only way I could escape from the sleep paralysis situation, even though I was lucid, was to force my breathing to speed up gradually until I woke up. Breathing was the only motor control I could exercise at all, and that only barely.
I had sleep paralysis episodes pretty regularly for years and years. They went away almost entirely when my fiancee moved in and we started sleeping in the same bed together - that forced me to change positions, which somehow stopped the sleep paralysis.
When I'm sleeping alone I seem to revert to what I used to be doing and have several sleep paralysis episodes in a single night.
In short, changing sleep positions might help!
Typo: "for ever new theme" -> "for every new theme"
Good to see you included the section on sleep apnea. I use to have nightmares about drowning all the time, then I got diagnosed with sleep apnea, got a machine to help me breathe and the nightmares went away.
Part 1 could use some links. I know it's speculative, but where would someone who is curious learn more about what evidence is available?
Pedantic correction:
"as can (too much) of some B vitamins" -> "as can (too much of) some B vitamins"
Thanks for posting this! Somehow despite knowing about the predictive processing model *and* hearing a lot of the folk wisdom about nightmares, it never occurred to me that I could just make changes that reduce them.
As a child, I suffered from what is called "Night Terrors". Thankfully, they are in the past. Even to this day, I have daytime episodes where I catch a glimpse of those dreams and it fills me with dread. I suppose I have a fear of falling asleep from this past. I once asked my physician for a sleep medication and she gave me zaleplon. The daytime episodes increased.
"Nobody really knows why we dream"
Behold David Eagleman's Defensive Activation Theory:
https://time.com/5925206/why-do-we-dream/
I didn't say "nobody has ever speculated as to why we dream", but that theory is great, thanks.
So... What happens to someone whose dreams are deliberately suppressed (assuming that is possible)? Presumably, that would provide strong evidence about why we have them in the first place.
I think there are certain drugs that can induce a fully dreamless sleep. But I'd imagine that studying the long-term effects of dreamlessness is tricky, because it would be very hard to discern what's a result of not having dreams and what's a direct result of the drugs themselves. (Not to mention all the usual ethical problems with performing potentially harmful experiments on human beings.)
Still, there have been a few studies on the effects of dream deprivation, and they seem to strongly indicate that dreaming less often is correlated with various physical and mental illnesses: https://www.thehealthy.com/sleep/dream-sleep-deprivation/
Great post. Henceforth I sleep sockless. Suggest "blue box" or "blue rectangle" rather than "blue square".
Years ago a Chinese girlfriend pointed out to me that sleeping with my hands folded over my heart would guarantee nightmares. Try it and you will see that it's true
I've never tried this but I wonder why it would be. Muscle tension, breathing issues?
my friend said from a Chinese medicine perspective it had something to do with obstruction of flows of energy. My sense was the weight on the heart was stirring up weighty ermotions.
Is this not common knowledge in the West? I noticed on my own that sleeping on my back makes me more likely to have nightmares, but I've also been told this by Chinese friends. Not American friends? I don't recall. Obviously if sleep apnea is causing the nightmares this makes sense, but I've been tested for sleep apnea and that's not the issue. But this is definitely a thing that my (Chinese-American) family all "knows."
that was what my GF told me too. She was shocked i did not know this
As a child of about 10 or 12 years old I used to have dreams that happened to me while I was still awake shortly after going to bed of a distinctly frightening nature. Does anyone know what that's called?
Could it be hypnagogia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia ? I think what you are describing is fairly common. At least, I have experienced something similar on several occasions. I've also found I can recreate it by meditating when I'm tired: I tend to hover on the edge of sleep and get some really bizarre and disturbing visions.
It could be though they don't seem to describe the quality of the nightmarish experience of that time for me. Nothing since even remotely approaching the taste of true evil I experienced
This is very nitpicky but I don't really know what the word valence means here, I thought it was just a chemistry thing but I've seen it popping up in a few places now. I get the impression it is a bit of a California thing?
Ngram viewer looks like that phrase has grown ten-fold since 1990 but it's still pretty rare. Google trends doesn't have enough data to see if the newfangled expression is indeed concentrated on the left coast, but it's a reasonable guess.
I think it's a psychology thing, it means whether something is positive or negative.
I can think of several supplements to *avoid* when you're trying to avoid nightmares.
Lucid dreaming forums recommend high dose vitamin B6, choline, and many acetylcholinesterase inhibitors. So if you want the opposite (less vivid/emotional/memorable dreams), probably do the opposite. Don't overdo it with vitamin B6 or choline or AChEIs right before bed. Timing is important for B6 because it's a water soluble vitamin. If you take it in the morning the effect on your dreams will be much attenuated. I take all my vitamins and choline in the morning. But I have repeatedly experimented with B6 before bed with obvious positive results at the 25mg dose (the UL is 50mg). (edit: the effect was to make dreams vastly more vivid without actually giving me control over them. That's an uncanny valley where you probably don't want to be if trying to minimize nightmares.) I haven't tried choline or AChEIs before bed or seen any formal studies on them but the common mechanism makes the praxis claims more credible than they would be if it was just a random grab bag of chemicals. (edit: also nicotine is a selective acetylcholine receptor agonist that several people are recommending, which probably has the same mechanism of action)
Re AChEIs as nootropics and lucid-dreaming-inducers, can anyone explain the evolutionary tradeoff that caused us to not have somewhat lower levels of AChE all the time ala https://www.gwern.net/Drug-heuristics ? Most nerve agent weapons are some sort of ultra-potent irreversible AChEI so that's probably a hint. But small doses of AChEI seem harmless enough.
From an evolutionary perspective, play, storytelling, daydreaming, fantasizing, dreams, and nightmares have a common benefit: They help us practice. Dreams and nightmares exercise our emotional reactions to various situations. From this perspective some number of nightmares is expected, and maybe even beneficial.
This is great. I think that the first paragraph of section 1 is a little too definitively worded, and undersells the degree to which the “predictive modeling” framework is idiosyncratic and speculative. The second sentence does use the word “suggests,” but the rest of the paragraph seems a little off to the races, making definitive, unqualified statements about predictive modeling as if this was a well accepted and highly confirmed model of cognition.
By chance I happened to be reviewing this literature for a paper on what utilitarians should think about dreaming, which is currently under review. Below are some key points along with copied sections and in-text references.
1) We all really underestimate how much we dream, and 2) NonREM sleep also involves dreaming:
When asked in surveys how often they dream, people report dreaming roughly 1–2 times per month on average (Schredl, 2009), with very wide variability both between and within individuals (.g. Bulkeley (2012) and Stepansky et al. (1998) find that ~30% of people recall them several times a week, while another ~30% report less than once a month). But when people are asked to keep a dream diary—to write what they remember dreaming as soon as they wake—they report far more dreams than on surveys, recalling having a dream roughly 50% of the time (though again with large variation between individuals; Watson, 2003). In fact, these higher figures from dream diaries still grossly under-estimate total dream time. People who are woken up in the middle of their sleeping report being able to recall dreams at substantially higher rates than when they are asked to use a dream diary. It seems that most dreams fade almost entirely from memory shortly after being experienced.
When woken up in the middle of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, people report dreaming ~80% of the time, and ~40% of the time when awoken from non-REM sleep (Nielsen 2000). REM sleep makes up 20-25% of our total sleep time, while non-REM sleep makes up 75-80% of our sleep time. Previous estimates that we dream for only two hours a night (e.g. Crick & Mitchison, 1983; Hobson, 1988), since this is how long we typically experience REM, are mistaken. While non-REM sleep dreams tend to be relatively more thought-like, less bizarre, and less emotionally charged than REM sleep dreams on average, they regularly include genuine phenomenal experiences. 80% REM dreaming x 22.5% REM duration + 40% nREM dreaming x 77.5% nREM duration = roughly 49% total dream time on average (again, wide variability).
This is a *lot* of time spent having experiences that we could potentially improve. For reference, an average of 1 hour of dreaming per night adds up to 3.3 years over the course of an 80-year lifetime. Or, to make our grasp of the figures slightly more accurate, it adds up to the equivalent of what we would ordinarily think of as 5 years, given we are ordinarily only awake for 16 hours per day and tend to intuitively think of sleep as time in which we are unconscious
3) Might we just be reporting our last dream which may have happened hours ago?
It has notably been found that when woken and asked to describe as much of their dream as possible, subjects’ report length and narrative structure drops dramatically as the interval between the end of a REM period and being woken increases (Hobson, Pace-Schott, and Stickgold 2000). This suggests that, in general, dreams are the kind of thing that we lose memory of very quickly, and so subjects are often only remembering their most recent dream.
4) How frequent are nightmares?
On surveys, 2.5–6% of adults report having nightmares at least once a week, while 8%–29% report having them monthly (Sandman et al., 2013; Zadra and Donderi 2000). But in studies using dream logs, 12.7% of subjects’ reported dreams were experienced as negative (Robert and Zadra, 2014). Contemporary studies with valid estimates of nightmare frequency by waking people up in a laboratory are almost non-existent because the novel location changes the dream content significantly, and most studies focus on unrepresentative populations, typically those with sleep disorders. In laboratory wake-up studies on subjects with no disorders, 20-36% of dreams directly feature aspects of the laboratory environment (Picard-Deland, Nielsen, & Carr, 2021; Schredl, 2003, 2008), and there is a dramatic reduction in dreams featuring aggression or hostility (Paul, Schredl, & Alpers, 2015; Zadra & Domhoff, 2011).
5) Lucidity is easier to achieve if you combine triggering cues.
Carr et al. (2020) managed to induce lucid dreaming in 50% of experimental subjects by playing a tone to them while asleep, after having them earlier attend a single session in which they were asked to think about their own self-awareness while hearing that same tone. This method thus combined a few previously studied interventions. Lucidity can be verified by having subjects engage in particular eye movements while dreaming, rather than simply relying on self-report.
Yes, saying that dreams occur (implying 'only' here) in REM sleep is definitely wrong. When it comes to nightmares though I'm not aware of any research that was made.
Some authors have argued that REM and NREM dreams differ qualitatively, REM dreams being emotional and vivid and NREM dreams being less emotionally loaded. (Scarpelli & al, 2022) for a review. So this could support the fact that increasing deep wave sleep reduce the amount of nightmares one does.
We tend to recall our dreams only if we have woken up in the middle of them, because during sleep our brain enters in a phase of consolidation of existing memories, in which no new memories are created. One cognitive researcher in the fields dreams I've talked to told me that the more sudden the wake up is, the better the dream recollection is.
I very rarely have any dreams at all (or at least any that I have any memory of): maybe a few times a year. I don't think I've had a nightmare for a decade or two, though the occasional dreams I have sometimes include me doing unpleasant things to other people (generally not anyone I know in real life). The one time I had recurrent nightmares (30 years ago), they were very abstract and formless, just threatening patterns and colours and emotions without any semantic content.
I think dreams is a way for the brain to determine which memories are important. The dream-maker part of the brain tells a story to the dreamer part of the brain based on memories. If the dreamer has a strong emotional reaction, the dream-maker assumes the memories are important and keeps them. If not, the memories are unimportant and gets deleted or kept in a harder to reach place. If you are scared in a dream, having a nightmare, the brain thinks this memory is really important, it's about something dangerous, so it wakes you up, so you'll remember for sure.
Right after waking up it is easy to remember a dream, but if you don't you soon forget it. This is the brain's last test to see if a memory is important, if you think about the dream the memories are, otherwise the brain deletes the memory of the dream.
I'd add a note about parasomnias, especially night terrors and confusional arousal - those tend to be lumped together with nightmares by laypeople, despite a completely different mechanism. Treating these probably should be the topic of a whole another article.
Speaking of which, 3+ mg of melatonin seems to be the most promising treatment for parasomnias, from both pubmed and recent personal experience.
I _think_ parasomnias and hypnagogic phenomena are related, or at least comorbid (sample size=2 plus some random anecdotes on the net). The entire domain is mostly terra incognita, and the evidence-based treatment boils down to "give them benzos or something idk".
When I was around 14, I watched A Nightmare on Elm Street and it affected me pretty badly. I started having multiple nighmares a night - often 3-4 levels of "dream-within-a-dream" where I dream that nightmare woke me up, and then something scary happens again, and I again dream that it woke me up, until a few iterations later I finally wake up for real - often with some sleep paralysis that would than take a very scary minute or two to shake off. The whole dream-within-a-dream thing forced me to start figuring out how to recognize that I am within a dream - and once I was able to actually do it during a dream and not immediately wake up - and in that dream I though "oh cool - this is a dream, so I am perfectly safe, and I can go explore" (really fun! Think - fully immersive video game!) - and then promptly forgot it was a dream, but "not scary" stayed and I had a dream where weird stuff was happening (such as grandma disappearing into thin air), but now it was all "wow, how interesting" and not scary... After that the nightmares went away... Had maybe a couple (unrelated to Elm Street) in the next 30 years...
P.S. My parents tried to take me see somebody, but the guy was all like ,"Do you realize that none of that is real?" with respect to my being scared of the dark at the time - completely useless.
"We’ll look at a few of these further: Desensitization and LDT, the two highest-performing therapies. IRT, the best-studied therapy. And prazosin, the highest-performing medication."
This section may be marginally easier to understand if the acronyms are explained in this sentence instead of just in the table.
I can reliably induce nightmares by sleeping on left side. It took me many years to figure out the relationship but now I simply roll to tge other side and now nightmares are very rare. When I lay on left side for a longer period I start to hear heartbeat pounding in my ears and that somehow correlates with feeling of fear and doom. I can speculate that something about this particular body position affects the way my heart operates and the change in pulse/pressure/rythm gets interpreted as a stressful situation maybe?
For what it's worth, I suffered for many years not from nightmares as such, but from deeply unpleasant dreams, usually caricatural versions of difficult episodes in the distant past. The pharmacist (most European pharmacists are trained in homeopathy) suggested Stramonium 15 if you wake up after a nightmare. She said that it was known to be very effective with children. I also took it before sleep occasionally, and found that it improved the general quality when I was anxious or disturbed.
What I have found during lucid dreaming is that it is quite hard to redirect them, or even to think too hard about the fact that one is in a dream, without waking up. The way I perceive it, while waking up, is that I have run out of imagination, or made too large an effort: it is like writing a novel or short story while sedated, only more so, since one is actually asleep.
Yep. In my experience it's fairly straightforward to change the results of something that's already inside the dream-logic. If I'm being attacked by a group of ruffians, it doesn't strain the dream too much if I make my fighting back be absurdly effective, like a choreographed fight scene from a movie. On the other hand, it would be impossible in that dream to make myself fly without waking up. It breaks the dream-context.
From my experience, a retired cognitive behavioural therapist, schema work to understand the beliefs that make nightmares will work because they then can be transformed by understanding what the dream is doing; processing emotions, and in doing so, I find nightmares are a prompt to deal with issues I've been avoiding.
"A sufficiently threatened, stressed, or traumatized person will naturally have more threatening dreams."
I don't think this is necessarily true: I am quite anxious and prone to stress, and yet the vast majority of my dreams are remarkably boring; nightmares are exceedingly rare for me.
This is a nitpick I wouldn't have bothered to mention if you hadn't asked for feedback, but fwiw I think "REM sleep, a very light stage of sleep on the border of wakefulness" is not exactly right. It is on the border of wakefulness in a couple senses (you are more likely to wake up during it, and it is less/more dominant when you more/less sleep deprived), but in other senses it isn't usually described that way (the atonia, for starters, but also the basic need for it such that if you are specifically deprived of REM sleep your body starts to plunge into it immediately).
Couple of minor review comments:
- "fainting" and "fainting while standing" are both in the side-effects list separately; perhaps "fainting, including while standing" is better?
- Sleep apnoea is said to be "a relatively common condition", but I always find this unhelpful. What's the reference class of "conditions" in which it's a relatively common one, and how far up the distribution is "relatively common"? If there's a number available, I'd far prefer it.
I assume Scott will give a better answer but sleep apnea is a continuum (everyone has them occasionally; when you have them all the time and they ruin your sleep it's a problem; but there's lots of gray between those two points). That said: it's usually considered to be about 10% of people that have serious enough sleep apnea that it's a problem, and risk factors are being male (2x as common), elderly (3x as common), and overweight (not sure the exact number but it is significant)
> might be biological, or due to some kind of sleep problem.
What does biological mean here and how is a sleep problem not a biological thing?
You might consider adding morning headache to the list of untreated sleep apnea symptoms.
Some beta blockers (e.g. Nadolol), when taken at night, have been associated with "bad" dreams.
Peer Review: Scott, the statement in the first paragraph that "the predictive models go out of control and become essentially random" seems unclear or mistaken.
The content of dreams is not random. We do not sample randomly from a distribution of pure sensations and concepts. There is internal coherence to what we experience in dreams, even if less so than in waking life.
Maybe the sentence is intended to mean that we draw "random samples" from an internal generative model of the world? Even there, the sampling is not random: for example, the content of dreams is related to specific episodes of waking life, and is recency-biased. Do any current models of memory consolidation, replay, or dream-generation assume random sampling?
Maybe you are emphasizing randomness in order to counter the notion that dreams are deterministically related to something that happened in the day... e.g. the article is meant to counter the idea that "we work through our daily traumas in our dreams", which would make people obsess too much about the meaning of their dreams? That seems a good goal. Still, I think it's worth trying to be more nuanced, because I don't know of any evidence that dream content is sampled at random or "essentially" at random from our memories and internal models. More recent, more surprising and more personally significant events all seem more likely to influence our dream content (even if they are not explicitly "replayed"), and surely there are many other regularities.
Empirically, it appears to be true. There are many papers on this topic and some of them are collected under the "continuity hypothesis of dreaming":
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053810002000727
That paper may be behind a paywall, so here is another which discusses and references effects of recency, novelty, emotionality, etc:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185262&type=printable
A lot of the time when something particularly unpleasant or even just weird and magical happens in my dreams, I end up interpreting it not as me actually being in that situation, but as me roleplaying a character who's in that situation (or an odd mixture of the two), so even when I'm having dreams that would sound like they should be nightmares if I just described the plot, they aren't actually particularly unpleasant. I assume this is because I have a lot of experience playing roleplaying games. This sounds kind of like a less specific version of Image Rehearsal Therapy, although I don't know how repeatable it would be.
Does discomfort due to coldness cause nightmares too, or is it just heat?
Let me share the story of my worst night mate ever. I believe the circumstances that led to it may be helpful in understanding. What causes nightmares.
So I went to a an afterhours party and I took way too much MDMA I probably took around 700mg (this was not intentional, I misjudged the density of the crystals) at first I felt amazing, euphoric, wanting to socialize with everyone but then I began to feel overwhelmed. I asked my date if we could go home. We called an Uber and in the Uber I spent most of my time in my dates arms passing in and out of consciousness. Once we got home we drank some electrolyte beverages (thank God I always keep those on hand) had sex for bit (which felt amazing but orgasm was impossible) and then passed out.
When I awoke a few hours later I would say I was experiencing serotonin syndrome. I was sweating, overheating, delirious and just generally felt like I was dying. Luckily I am well prepared so I I took 2 25mg tabs of cyproheptadine that I keep around for such occasions. Those helped a lot, they took me from feeling like I was dying to just feeling like I had a flu. I still didn't feel good so I went to lie back down. I spent the next several hours in and out of consciousness, sweating trying to rehydrate basically feeling like I had a had flu. After the night passed I actually felt much better the next day and went through my day about as normal. That night however I could not get to sleep
And now after that overly long introduction I am finally ready to tell you about my worst nightmare ever.
Since I was struggling to fall asleep I decided to take a melatonin gummy. I believe it was 5mg.
That did help me sleep but once I fell asleep I experienced the most terrifying thing in my life. I've had sleep paralysis before but this was 10x worse no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get out of it. And not. Only that but was a two headed demon attacking as I was paralyzed and struggling to cry for help. Now rationally I knew that what I was experiencing was sleep paralysis and that the demon wasn't real but that didn't stop the sheer terror I felt as I lay paralyzed struggling with all my might to squeak out a tiny cry for help. This experience lasted longer than any other sleep paralysis I have ever experienced and when it finally ended I woke up gaspping for breath. I called one of my best friend who thankfully picked up even though it was like 3:40 and he talked me down.
Absolutely one of the most frightening experiences of my life.
So I think the takeaway here is v that something to do with the interplay between serotonin and melatonin has a lot to do with nightmares
The other takeaway is to avoid tanking up on exotic pharmaceuticals. So thanks for that.
Well the cyproheptadine possibly saved my life or at least my health. It's a potent 5-ht2a, 5-ht2b, 5-ht2c antagonist. It's used to treat serotonin syndrome. Unless you mean the MDMA, that was very irresponsible of me
Do you by any chance know how to get a doctor to prescribe cyproheptadine? I found it to be fantastic as an antihistamine and really useful as a sleep aid.
You can buy it from Indian pharmacies without a prescription
Thank you. I don't think I've seen an Indian pharmacy in this part of the country (have seen Indian grocery stores, but not pharmacies). I'll look harder.
I mean online shipping from India
Other other takeaway: find myself a date who would send me to the hospital if I was dying, not just assume everything will work out
The mention of REM sleep being very light sleep is interesting, because "on the border of wakefulness" is how I usually experience dreams but multiple (popular, not scholarly) sources I've read say that REM sleep is deep sleep. Does that reflect older scholarship, or is that a sort of folk belief?
I think it reflects different things. your body is in a deeper state of relaxation in REM sleep but your brain activity is closer to waking brain activity in REM sleep. your body accomplishes this by blocking the usual connection between brain and body during rem sleep, so that e.g. unless you have a sleep disorder, when your brain is saying "punch the demon" you aren't actually making a punching motion.
less likely but the reference to "deep sleep" might also refer to "necessary state of sleep". if you are REM sleep deprived you'll basically go nuts (thankfully "REM sleep deprived" is something that generally only happens in the lab). whereas your body can do without stage 1 (the lightest stage of non-REM sleep) just fine, and without stages 3-4 (the deepest stages of non-REM sleep) ok, it's not ideal but it's not as bad as being deprived of REM sleep.
Yeah, I think the stages are part of what is confusing me here because REM is usually considered the last stage, although now that I look at the Wikipedia entry it says that REM occurs as you're emerging from the deepest stage, so I guess that fits with what Scott said. I find that as I'm falling asleep I often have these sort of flashes of dreams or dreamlike thoughts, though, so it has made me wonder if you can dream at the front end of the cycle too.
Those are actually a different thing called hypnogogic hallucinations although I don’t happen to know much about them (beyond that it is not a sleep stage). You can also sometimes go straight into REM sleep which happens more often toward the end of the night.
Really happy to see lucid dreaming on here. It's been super helpful for me, both for dealing with nightmares and for self-exploration.
You might consider mentioning galantamine, which fairly reliably induces lucid dreams (see this paper by Stephen LaBerge: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6082533/) and is available OTC. The handful of times I've taken it the experience has been rather intense, but reliably lucid.
Where? My Google search tells me it needs a prescription in the US.
You can find it on Amazon or Walmart.com
I experience this more than seasonally, and by extension poor sleep. In part because in the wee hours I am just a dumb creature of habit. My auto-pilot script makes no adjustment for climate. I also plainly have difficulty with thermoregulation, unable to rely on even a light comforter or duvet in the summer, and often not even in the winter if I'm sharing the bed. I stack sheets and material instead.
Nefariously, being too cold will yield the same outcome through tossing and turning. You want your surface-skin temperature to be warm enough (according to research papers I've leafed through, approx 30 degrees Celsius), but the bedding micro-climate not to trap too much heat. Warming your skin promotes bloodflow to the extremities, allowing you to lower your core temperature near onset. You effectively need both cold (ambient) and heat (trunk, upper body) for optimal results.
To add insult to injury, chronic insomniacs have impaired thermoregulation. Leveraging sunlight, relaxation methods, cognitive therapy exercises was the bare minimum I needed to recover because thermal discomfort drove me insane. Now I can at least sleep, but periodically I'll wake in a sweat.
I have experimented with more intricate ideas I had discovered in some papers, such as thicker material on legs than upper body, and targeting specific areas. I didn't really fare any better, except that I move aside most of the sheets at the foot of the bed, so they don't feel cold but can expel heat effectively. We tend to expel most heat through our head, hands and feet. I tried keeping my hands out - it sucks. Material itself is pretty much whatever, it's all cotton. The current comforters are not but they might as well be for show. I had spent an inordinate amount trying bamboo sheets, breathable weighted blankets, "cooling" blankets, etc.
Anecdote:
I get acephalic migraines, where parts of the visual field are… weird. Not invisible, or blocked, just kind of sparkly and not there.
I rarely get nightmares, but when I do it is usually something like “I’m talking to someone and suddenly they are a spirit and not an actual person” or “I’m driving on the freeway and just went blind”.
If the nightmare is stressful enough to wake me, almost invariably I find it’s the middle of the night and I’m having an acephalic migraine: part of my visual field is unprocessable.
So FWIW I’ll second biological/neurological quirks as one input to dreams and nightmares.
Why have you chosen 12 mg as max dose for prazosin?
1) For othrostatic hypotension in the prazosin section, I believe that telling the subject to rise to a sitting possition, pausing for a moment, then standing up is more effective than telling them to stand up slowly.
2) Under the temperature control section, in addition to AC, window, fans, etc, there are active cooling devices that go under the bedding to actively cool the bed. I believe that some have been shown to encourage quicker transition to NREM sleep, but I don't know for sure off hand.
3) In the sleep apnea section, you may want to link to a STOP BANG self screening test.
I've had very few nightmares, and those when I was much younger, but I've had a lot of unenjoyable dreams; dreams in which I'm late and/or lost, naked in public, really need a washroom bad and can't find one, and dreams in which I am working all night. Can those dreams be considered similar to nightmares? They are certainly reality-based, aside from the naked in public; but I'm guessing the last is just an exaggerated fear of being judged by other people. Lucid dreaming is difficult; because either I accept the internal logic of the dream, or recognizing the implausibility causes me to wake up.
Brief points to append:
* palmar and plantar surfaces are equally important for cooling, so in addition to removing socks, it can be helpful to learn to sleep with hands and feet out of the coverings
* while it's not IRT, traditional dream sculpting using art therapy methods can help with non-recurrent nightmares; common interventions include making and displaying art of a helpful guide or object -- a ball of yarn to find one's way, a doorknob to create a door, a green EXIT sign, a rope ladder up to an invisible helicopter, or whatever else strikes one's fancy
I like nightmares.
Given your description of causes, I'd expect that I would have nightmares. I don't. I've got lots of dreams, but they don't match the description of nightmare. I do, often, just as I'm waking up, have a dream where I realize that I've forgotten the basis of a logical chain of reasoning I was following, but there's no strong emotion associated with it.
P.S.: I have (treated with CPAP) sleep apnea. But there was (nearly?) a decade before it was diagnosed, and while I ended up too sleepy to think straight, there were still no nightmares.
FWIW, I think your description of what causes nightmares is largely things that make one have lots of dreams and/or be uncomfortable. But the connection has to be considerably more indirect.
RE: heat causing nightmares and ways to reduce hot sleeping
A few different companies sell products that actively cool (or heat) your bed. Essentially a mattress cover with water tubes running through it that cycles the water into a unit that cools it. Ooler and Eight Sleep are the ones I'm aware of, I just ordered an Ooler as I'm a hot sleeper and don't have A/C.
Might be worth pursuing if hot sleeping is a major trigger.
> (I’m not sure how you do these therapies if your nightmares don’t have recurring themes. If any therapists understand this, please email me at scott@lorienpsych.com. Some sources suggest that if you do these practices with enough different nightmares, your brain learns the meta-lesson that nightmares in general aren’t scary or end with pleasant content, and you don’t have to keep doing the same therapy for ever new theme.)
I'm not a therapist, but if I'm understanding image rehearsal therapy, I basically invented a better version of this on my own as a kid. I would wake up from nightmares and within a couple minutes (as soon as I calmed down enough) would start replaying the dream from the point where it became scary, but with modifications that made it non-scary and put me in control. (Writing about this, it now seems similar to the example about trauma integration in Body Keeps the Score about the kid who drew the twin towers with a trampoline, using imagination to make a less scary version of his experience.). Eventually, I learnt to do this "rewind time and rewrite the dream" mental motion without waking up (and also without the need to be aware that I was dreaming).
If I generalize from sample size 1, the way to do IRT when there are no common themes is to (a) figure out how to get the patient to wake up from nightmares at least some of the time, and then (b) teach them to apply IRT to whatever nightmare they just had, rehearsing the no-longer-nightmarish dream until either they are fully calmed down or until they fall asleep. Then (c) make sure this process actually calms them down as they're doing it (otherwise they're probably doing it wrong), and (c) hope that they learn this trigger-response pattern automatically.
These days I basically don't have nightmares unless either (a) the nightmare is actually a thing that I'm worried about in real life and don't have a solution for (or is obviously a close metaphor for such a thing), or (b) is an "unexpected" turn, e.g., I had a dream recently where I was digging holes in the sand (a normally fun activity) and then realized partway though that I had dug them in a way that I never would when awake and that the way I had dug them made me being buried alive a possibility; this was very scary, and I promptly woke up (but it was clear to me that the generator of this dream was "digging holes in the sand" and the anxiety/fear was an accidental byproduct of observing the result, rather than the generator being "anxiety/fear").
You're missing the obvious explanation of dreaming from a predictive processing standpoint: eliminating Turing surprise.
This also gives an obvious explanation for why infants sleep so much more than adults: when you're starting from basically nothing, there's a lot more insight to be mined by observing the output of your predictive processes.
Speaking of silexan, I think it has a mildly positive effect on anxiety. I hadn't noticed any effect for about two weeks, then forgot to take it a few nights in a row. I realized that I was more anxious than I had been over the last week or so while on it. I definitely get the lavender burps.
Not fully clear yet on whether I want to incorporate it into my regular regimen, but I'm leaning toward giving a longer trial period to see if it's really helping.
Glycine comes in 1 gram pills in addition to powder. They're not ridiculously huge. I take three a day with no particular difficulty. Example: https://www.amazon.com/Thorne-Research-Relaxation-Detoxification-Function/dp/B000VYRROC
I need to follow up on this to verify, but I learned that healthy people with good sleep sometimes have nightmares because during sleep, the prefrontal cortex is downregulated and the amygdala is upregulated, resulting in an anxious state of mind while dreaming even if you're not anxious while awake. This is claimed to be the reason why dreams about teeth falling out or being naked in public are so common: it's an easy thing for the anxious dreaming brain to latch onto. There is some random variation in amygdala activity and if it happens to spike one night, that may cause a nightmare instead of a more tame anxious dream, even if there's nothing else causing them. It may not be very strong evidence, and "the brain just does this" is not very helpful, but it's worth considering.
Edit: A quick literature search turns up nothing conclusive, although there appear to be many studies about changes in functional connectivity of the amygdala and prefrontal cortex during sleep deprivation. So, in the absence of any solid evidence from neuroscience, I would just point to the fact that many people experience the same types of dreams, which tend to be somewhat fearful, and random variation pushes this tendency into nightmares occasionally, even for healthy people with normal sleep habits.
I'm surprised you didn't include THC as a potential medication treatment for nightmares. It's well-studied, its mechanism of action is clear (it reduces time spent in REM), it's available to most of the population OTC, and there aren't significant side effects associated with THC consumption.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6494011/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7388834/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8116407/
+1. Word on the street is that stoners don't dream, and that veterans with PTSD smoke to avoid nightmares. I was also surprised not to find a mention of this in the article.
There are a lot of small reality-check habits you can practice during the day to improve your likelihood of lucid dreaming that might be worthwhile to include (though I don't know how rigorous you want to be, and all of these are super anecdotal and just things I've picked up from sources I can't remember over time). Lots of people have mentioned some of them already; you precede them by thinking, in your waking life, 'is this a dream?' followed by:
*pushing your finger into your palm -- in a dream many/most people experience the feeling that their finger goes through their palm
*reading something, looking away, then reading it again -- text in dreams is wild and jumbly for most people, and tends to change between glances if you pay attention. works with clocks, books, all sorts of shit
*pinch your nose -- you'll still be able to 'breathe' through it in a dream
*jumping up and down -- gravity is weird in dreams, and you might notice that you float and land bizarrely
Basically, you just do this stuff every once in a while during the day until it becomes a habit, then when you habitually do it while you're dreaming, you achieve lucidity.
Wow, I didnt know this:
"Nobody really knows why we dream. Modern neuroscience suggests that the brain processes data by creating predictive models, then double-checking them against reality. We experience the predictive models, not reality - although the double-checking process is so fast that they usually match well enough to be the same for all practical purposes. When we can’t double-check with reality - for example because we're asleep and not receiving sense-data - then the predictive models go out of control and become essentially random. This results in us having kind of random experiences."
Where can I read more about this?
I recommend this paper by Tore Nielsen on nightmares, dreaming, and emotion regulation. He has done important work on the dynamics of nightmares and treatment approaches.
https://www.academia.edu/468982/Nightmares_dreaming_and_emotion_regulation_A_review_2007_?email_work_card=view-paper
There are also studies that people with "thin boundaries" tend to have nightmares. Ernest Hartman studied this. Changing the personality can alter the nightmare experience.
"Anything that decreases stress, increases comfort while sleeping, and deepens sleep quality will also improve nightmares..."
"improve nightmares" reads weird.
Maybe "reduce nightmares"?
"Anxiety is a bias for the brain to interpret information in a threat-related manner."
I had to read this a few times to parse it.
Maybe something like "Anxiety is a mental bias that causes the brain to interpret information in a threat-related manner."
Or maybe for that last part "...interpret information more threateningly."
Or maybe “Anxiety that is not grounded to some real threat..”
My personal definition of self-inflicted anxiety is “ knowing something to be true that I refuse to believe.”
My go-to nightmare is always something that I really need to use isn’t working, or
I am lost in some familiar yet strange environment and I need to be somewhere else.
I had one once where I shot someone dead, for no reason, and I knew I could never make it right no matter what I did. That was the worst one I’ve ever had. It haunted me for years.
I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night for any of the usual reasons, and have recently noticed the pattern from the stimulus that requires attention to the dream/ nightmare that ultimately wakes me. The pattern is:
Too cold -> cold, e.g. lost in an icescape without a jacket
Need to pee -> need to pee or peeing, e.g. searching the endless halls of urinals for a private one
Loud sound -> loud sound plus silly explanation for the sound
Too warm -> OVERWHELMING TERROR, e.g. THE HUNTERS HAVE CAUGHT ME AND ARE GOING TO FEAST ON MY LIVER AS I WATCH
Not sure what's up with that last one.
My evopsych ass-pull for the last one is that some genetic memory is saying "too warm = fire = panic and run"
When I was a kid I figured out how not to have nightmares. Before falling asleep I would think about the scariest things I could imagine. Then I would never dream about them.
Very interesting read. I believe however that dreams can also occur during non-REM sleep. There was recently an article published by The Human Brain Project examining the differences these dreams play in our brain. They saw that non-REM dreams are more “realistic” while when we dream during REM sleep our brain tends to be more creative. It is during those creative dreams that our brain tends to deconstruct concepts and experiences better. Here's the link: https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en/follow-hbp/news/2022/05/12/strange-dreams-might-help-your-brain-learn-better-according-research-hbp-scientists/
As for lucid dreaming, last year some researchers had a "proof of concept" of 2 way communication with lucid dreamers. While this sounds a bit Inception like I guess it will be quite helpful for scientists that study dreams to get a more accurate view of dreams and not rely on retrospective reports that might be inaccurate. https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-entered-peoples-dreams-and-got-them-talking
Scott:
I notice you left hypnotherapy off your list. It helped me with a non-nightmare dream problem.
Personal anecdote, while I've never had a problem with nightmares, I once developed an annoying weekly dreaming habit, where on Monday around 3am I'd have a lucid dream where I'd need to make a list of the things I'd have to do at work for the coming week. In my dream, I had pen and paper, but because (at that time) I couldn't read or write in my dreams, I would realize that I'd have to wake up to actually write out this list. So every Monday morning, I'd wake at around 3am with an urge to make my to-do list. But I'd be wide awake and alert—because psychologically I was getting up to work—and I could never get back to sleep. So Monday's were always rough for me because of my lack of full night's sleep would catch up with me about mid-morning.
BTW, I was dreaming of the actual tasks that I'd need to accomplish in the coming week—because of the lucidity of the dreams, these were not imaginary task lists I was making up. Nor was this a stressful type of dream. It was just a non-stressful thing that I did at work that somehow I had transferred into my dreaming consciousness. I tried various mental tricks to avoid the need for making a list at 3am. For instance, I'd make up my to do list for the coming week Sunday evening before I went to bed hoping I'd remember that I already made that list when the 3am list-making dream rolled around. My dreaming self did remember making the list, but the dreaming urge was now to review the list I had made the evening before to see if I had left anything out (!) — and I'd have to wake up because I was unable to read the words on the list in my dreams.
I knew that alcohol and other drugs affect REM sleep, so I tried having a shot of whiskey before I went to bed on a Sunday night. That stopped the list-dreams and my waking at 3am for about four weeks, but then it started happening again despite the shot of booze. Then I tried chamomile tea, which also worked for about four weeks before I again started making the lists and waking. Then I got an Rx for Ambien. (I forget what the dosage was, but it was the minimum.) I started with 1/2 an Ambien Sunday night, and that worked for about six weeks. But then it stopped working, and the list-making dreams came back. I upped to a full pill, but that only worked for about six weeks before my dreaming mind was able to overcome the effects. I decided that pushing the Ambien dosage up any further would be unwise, and I didn't like the side-effects because I found that it made me tremendously groggy in the morning, .
Since my dreaming mind seemed intent on sabotaging me, I decided to try hypnotherapy to try to persuade my subconscious change its behaviors. The hypnotherapist did her relaxing spiel for me. I was conscious through the whole process — and I wouldn't have said I was hypnotized either — but it *was* a very relaxing experience. She gave me a simple post-hypnotic suggestion of: don't make lists in my dreams. She put it on recording that she gave me to listen to Sunday nights before I went to bed. It worked! Well, sort of...
Instead of waking up making a list of things to do for the coming week, I had the most hilariously funny dream that woke me up laughing out loud — at 3am, of course! But I figured I was on to something with hypnotherapy because her suggestion had stopped me from making the damn lists! I went back to the hypnotherapist. She hypnotized me again, and this time she gave me a more general post-hypnotic suggestion that was not to give into the urge to wake at 3am. And that mostly worked. I started sleeping much better on the Sundays before work.. Eventually, I gave up playing the suggestion before I went to bed on Sundays, and I've never had the problem recur again.
Does anybody else get too warm then take their socks of while they're in bed and then wonder where they've got to when they're all under the end of the duvet?
My two cents:
I really enjoyed reading the other content on your website about seasonal depression! It seemed very approachable and actionable, which I'm guessing is what you were going for.
In this post about nightmares, I found the first paragraph to be a little confusing and technical, to the point where it may be off-putting to some readers. Specifically, I know what "predictive modeling" means, but I would guess that many people wouldn't be able to immediately understand it and apply it to their understanding of dreaming. It might be worth rephrasing it to avoid scaring people off.
Someone else has already commented on how the table might be made more interpretable, and I agree. I have to admit that the way the table was introduced made me feel as if I was supposed to understand it right away, which made me slightly panic.
I also wanted to say, thank you for this work that you are doing! I'm so excited for this project, and I'm sure it will bring help and relief to a lot of people.
All I do is lucid dream when I sleep. It’s honestly annoying an exhausting. I never wake up feeling rested. I have no clue how I learned this either. I wish I could unlearn it and just sleep.
I seldom have nightmares(at least scary ones). My late husband was an alcoholic and I frequently dream about him coming back in bizarre circumstances. Vivid dreams run in my family, my mother and I both have them. One of her brothers who served in WWII had such horrible nightmares that dr. Had to give him medication to keep the frights under control. I just find mine entertaining.
It seems this article got linked from today's, Morning Brew (morningbrew.com/). Haven't noticed them linking ACX before. It might get more reads than usual.
I have dreams, mostly during when I am asleep in the morning. I wonder why they happen, and this seems to be telling me that it can be nightmares. But as far as I remember them, they aren't anywhere near as scary to be considered as nightmares. I just want to sleep more comfortably, without any dreams which make me get tired a little bit, it feels like I haven't slept well when I think I should have.
I should try changing my sleep schedule, as it can be the culprit. Thanks very much for this post, I learned a lot.
It’s not a treatment exactly, but in my clinical practice I found that non-elaboration was highly effective. Most people who have chronic nightmares have gotten in the habit of elaborating in them—either internally (worrying or ruminating) or with other people (waking a partner up and retelling the nightmare in the middle of the night, for example)—but when you decrease those elaboration behaviors, frequency and intensity tend to drop dramatically in my experience.
How can they leave off the fact that holding a fuller bladder while trying to sleep causes nightmares as well?
Thanks for adding in the section on sleep apnea. General medical opinion seems to be that if you're not a fat 55-year old man, then it can't be sleep apnea. Maybe add that not everyone with sleep apnea snores, and teeth grinding is a fairly common symptom:
https://www.sleepapnea.org/if-you-grind-your-teeth-at-night-you-might-have-sleep-apnea/
"Dr. Mark Burhenne at the Ask the Dentist blog suggests these are the new “At-Risk Groups for Sleep Apnea” when a case of bruxism is also identified:
Petite women
Children with ADHD and other learning disabilities
People with a long neck
People who did not breastfeed as infants
People with anxiety and depression"
This is a good article, but the first paragraph of section 1 is way more technical than the rest... and mostly more technical than it needs to be. "The brain goes a little haywire without input from the senses, and when the brain is anxious you get nightmares" is the key message you need for the rest of this piece, and that can be expressed in pretty simple language.
(At least Ritz was gesturing at this, but I figured it was worth making this a (more-)explicit comment.)
MORE SLEEP! This is info I got from research on children's nightmares. All the common issues that occur during children's sleep also occur for adults (only less often); nightmares, sleep terrors, sleep walking and talking. tooth grinding ....
I've had success helping pts to reduce their nightmares by increasing their sleep time. I usually suggest 15 minutes extra (usually by going to bed earlier, the most realistic for most adults) for a week, then another 15, until up as much as an hour of added sleep. When this helps, it helps a lot! I've also encouraged this when people report their kids are having any of the parasomnias OR insomnia; usually helps there, too.
Of course, more sleep requires better sleep hygiene, so there's a lot of coaching and trouble-shooting to do around that, to implement this.
Are there any registered lucid dream false positives? E.g. someone who got chased by a huge dog in real live, assumed it was a dream, tried some fantastic solution instead of more practical lines of action, and ended up mauled?
nienor turambar posted on DSL:
"According to wikipedia and sleepfoundation.com and webmd etc etc, there is a common myth that "Dreams occur during REM sleep" only, but the current science is that it's not exclusive. (See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_eye_movement_sleep#Dreaming, for details of some disagreement on the subject.)
Scott may not have meant this mistake, or he may have oversimplified for the sake of brevity. Just saying."
Piracetam is great for both lucid dreaming and increasing dreams in general.
> pain, discomfort, heat, caffeine, bright lights, alcohol, stimulant medications, a noisy environment, an uncomfortable bed
*laughs until tears begin to flow, then just keeps crying*
I've often wondered what I would be capable of if only it didn't hurt to sleep.
NightWare, an app for Apple Watches that decreases PTSD nightmares, might be worth watching. According to a study in Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, it significantly increases sleep quality in veterans with PTSD. It's prescription only :(
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/11/veterans-find-relief-from-nightmares-with-nightware-and-apple-watch/