Absurdly vivid dreams - GP? Supplements? Priest?

[FilippityFiloppity]

I don’t quite know where, if anywhere, to go with this.

I’ve always had periods of having really vivid dreams (now late 30s). Sometimes scary ones, but often just incredibly detailed and intricate, and typically I remember a decent chunk the next day (though definitely not all of it).

Currently on about week 5 of another chunk of vivid dreams, to the point I feel like I’m waking up tireder than when I went to bed. I also think I’ve had lucid dreams a couple of times within this recent chunk - at least I think it is, it feels like I change the story in my dream when I gets too scary. Occasionally I get recurring themes, but rarely the exact same, so it’s like a different epic movie each night.

It doesn’t usually bother me a huge amount, but I feel very low energy at the moment. Has anyone else experienced this? Is it worth seeing a GP, or are they likely to write it off as anxiety? (I’d say I’m actually a lot less anxious now than I have been over the past 18 months or so). Any obvious supplements or anything else to try?

This is an ongoing problem for me too. I'm being investigated by sleep clinic and neurologist (except waiting list is very long). Psychological services on NHS completely did not address this at all, even though it was my main reason for requesting it.

I have recurring dreams/nightmares. I don't know how my brain comes up with this shit or exactly what it has to do with real life. For example, I have a recurring dream that I have secretly kept my old flat which is unoccupied but no longer mine, whilst simultaneously managing to also live between my parents house and where I live now; K sometimes crash there with my stuff that should have been moved years ago. I also have two cars and have to figure out journeys between and which car to use and sometimes a train where i miss stops in various endeavours to get to important things. It's on repeat.

There a few other ones on repeat. But also, I sometimes dream the same dream, but pick up from where I left off last time I dreamt it, like a running soap opera. My conscious brain isn't keeping track, but my subconscious is. I didn't know this was even possible. It's like being asleep means I step into an alternate universe where I have a different life.

I'm suffering quite severely with physical symptoms and drowsiness, plus I can sleep for many, many hours, plus equally I'm capable of staying awake for days. I've no idea what is wrong and I won't even start to get to the bottom of it until next summer. I'm watching House at the moment and I envy how he gets things resolved within a few hours/days. The dreams are super interesting but at the same time, distressing. I've tried researching this phenomenon but I've come up with nothing I can relate to.

Me too. I'm having amazingly detailed dreams and am so bloody exhausted.

Do either of you have past trauma? I know I probably have cPTSD. But it just all seems a bit far fetched. The dreams are very real; I am distressed because so far unable to conquer the lucid dreaming thing.

I've also suffered from the dream hallucination thing in the past too. Where I physically feel and literally hear things between waking and sleep. I also visually hallucinated once when waking up. So it's clear I have a sleeping disorder, I just don't know why.

Check your diet. Some people who eat more cheese than usual can get vivid dreams.

Google vivid dreams diet and you will see loads of links.
Tryptophan is an amino acid taken by Vitamin B6 and converted into Serotonin. Serotonin can cause extremely vivid dreams at higher levels. Tryptophan is found in such foods as cheddar cheese, chicken, salmon, lamb, egg, flour, white rice, and milk. Cheddar cheese has the most amount of tryptophan.

Oh this is interesting - I have had this on and off all my life. As a child my dreams were so vivid I did things like try and climb walls, jump down stairs etc. As an adult I get periods where they come back - so far I’ve been lucky that these periods haven’t been too extended ( although I get such little sleep anyway not sure I’d notice). Some of the dreams are terrifying. So sorry everyone going through this and hope you find some answers.

I dis have trauma as a child and also meningitis and often wonder if they triggered it - but who knows.

Sometimes you have to tackle things indirectly- it’s a symptom of something else you can work on.

Do active relaxation- prayer, meditation, journaling, candle lit baths, tai chi… whatever works for you.

If you can manage stress while you are awake, you’ll have less to trawl through at night.

You could literally be describing me!
I say to dh every morning, I feel like I've been watching films all night. I wake up so tired.
They're so vivid & I can remember them all day long too.

What would happen if you thought the dreams were your brain trying to tell you something? Something that it might help you to understand?

One way in might be to write them down in a notebook as soon as you wake up - this can sometimes help the mind move on a bit.

Then perhaps write an account of the dream from different perspectives- not just the people in it but the flat or the car too. But do this in the first person “I am the old car and…”.

Don’t expect anything at first but do this for a bit and things may shift.

@AttillaThePlum I think I will definitely do that. A dreams diary. It's a lot to work through. I can already make some guesses but it's still very surreal. I could easily make some of these dreams into good horror stories/thrillers/even some sci fi stuff. One dream I had with auditory and sensory hallucinations was me in a space ship car/flying car in a tunnel with wind, going upside down trying to escape being shot at by another space ship. It was the most realistic experience ever. I can't wait to hear a neurologist explain that.

I'm sorry for hijacking your thread OP. I'd suggest the same, plus see your GP. The food info above seems quite useful too. I will def be cutting back on cheese later in the day.

I would also agree with writing it down. I thought dreams were about our mind processing events but it sounds like if you are being exhausted by it then this has become unhelpful and time to take action to help things. Have you tried taking magnesium supplements? That can help with sleep. Good luck, it sounds exhausting. I have very vivid dreams from time to time and they generally stick with me for the day.

Thank you, I’d half forgotten that I’d posted this before bed (have reached the stage I’m putting off going to sleep).

Very vivid dreams again, but, fairly dull. Woke once to roll over and go back to sleep. So nigh on 8 hours, but so tired.

I was having a conversation with someone about an event I am attending and explaining that I had already spoken to someone else about what I needed to do. We were having this conversation whilst climbing through a playground type obstacle course, although it had some electric scoreboards that weren’t turned on, and we couldn’t do the whole thing because the slide was locked because there wasn’t an instructor on it. That felt like about 20 seconds of a very long night.

To pick up on a couple of things:

@AttillaThePlum I have at points tried writing them down. They often make little sense. Last nights had elements of a real life situation, but not really one that is worrying or concerning me. The ones where I can draw links with real life worry me less, even if they were scarier. And sometimes the link is as much as ‘the cabbages were on offer in the Co Op, and there was a cabbage in my dream’, or someone I’ve seen an instagram post from earlier in the day makes an appearance.

Interestingly realising and remembering that I have a flat somewhere I’ve forgotten about, or another part of my flat/house (it’s never anywhere from real life) is one of the few really recurring themes.

I’ve never (to my knowledge) sleep walked/talked or done anything else interesting, in fact you’d say I sleep really well. It’s rare for me not to sleep within minutes of being in bed.

@Firefly2009 The cPTSD question is interesting. I meet a lot of the diagnostic criteria, apart from having no identifiable trauma. That said, I am autistic, and I know there is a train of thought that many ‘late’ diagnosed autistic people present similarly, and that growing up undiagnosed and unsupported is traumatic.

@LittleGreenDragons Im actually lactose intolerant and vegetarian, so eat very little on the list! Worth me looking into more though, and magnesium isn’t a bad shout generally.

Now to try and shake the morning tiredness!

Sorry @coffeeisthebest, it was you that suggested magnesium.

You're telling me this isn't normal? I've always been like this, vivid dreams every night all night long. I never feel well rested because it's like my brain never switches off.

Could be a sign of sleep apnoe; see if you can be referred to a sleep clinic.

Yes, I forgot to say that. GP then referral to sleep clinic. That was my first step; I did a sleep study. In my case I don't have sleep apnoea related to breathing issues, just central sleep apnoea, so then it's a 9 month wait to see a neurologist.

Are you on any medication? I had waking) sweating and screaming nightmares nightly for a year on pizotifen. Same the next time I was tried on it as well.

No, no medication (either now or in the past).

I have / have had recurring dreams throughout my life, sleep paralysis and was a very vivid dreamer until a non-sleeper of a baby then small child wrecked my sleep, which was pretty concurrent with lots of high level work stress and using the progesterone implant (took a long time to realise progesterone doesn’t agree with me).

so had a long spell of poor recall of dreams linked to abysmal sleep which I don’t recommend as a cure!

dreams are back as a result of finally taking time of work due to depression and burnout. However, what strikes me is that I have always had dreams about rooms in houses or homes I have abandoned or kept locked and when I remember I feel horrible guilt about. Or I’m trying to get back to somewhere. So your dreams sounded a bit like mine?

I shut away my creative side in order to pursue a demanding profession, and have just resumed them 35 years later. I was pushing all my needs to the bottom of the pile at work and at home as I was conditioned to believe that not only was asking for what I need is selfish it is deeply wrong. So have had to start some baby steps on working on that…

sometimes you don’t need Freud to interpret dreams, your brain is trying to give you a message, you’re just one of the lucky people to be tortured through the medium of self inflicted unconscious weird home movies that make no sense until they might sort of do?

I had very vivid dreams when I started to give up smoking nearly 12 weeks ago. I was on nicotine patches - 4 weeks each of 21mg, 14 mg, and 7mg. It was really strange. I was having vividly coloured, very realistic dreams that I remembered in detail afterwards. One or two that I have not told DH about! The oddest was when I was drifting off to sleep and I was abruptly and suddenly confronted, if you like, by a extraordinarily vivid scene of a landscape with weird little stone towers. I knew it was Croatia (where I have never been). I actually thought 'Hey' I shouldn't be dreaming, I'm not asleep yet'. Is that what Lucid dreaming is like? They were kind of like a free trips to the cinema, nothing sinister, but I don't miss them, in fact I came off the 7 mg patches two weeks early. Richard Feynman wrote about lucid dreaming, and how he learned to control it, but I never thought I'd find out what it was like.

I have this too. Sometimes I can control them and am aware I am in the dream and i get back into them after waking . I usually enjoy them but not always.

With the bad ones- where I've done or helped cover up a murder- come with much much deeper feelings of being bereft, guilty, sad etc than I have ever experienced awake and it is such a relief to wake up.

I also have the multiple houses (usually remembering a fish or cat I've left and dashing there) dream involving versions of old houses and I can get quite confused for a few seconds when I wake up in the dark as to where I am.

The level of detail is mad too- I was in an apothecary at Castle Howard last night and could pick up and read all the intense details on all the labels and I remember thinking wow- how is my mind coming up with this.

Absolutely exhausted every day.

I think mine is a combination of prozac, cheese, alcohol and menopause.

Thing is, it genuinely feels like the dreams get more vivid the less stressed and anxious I feel. I think that’s what I find so baffling and frustrating - when I sort out my daytime life, my nighttime life goes tits.

Definitely there with the level of detail. Dreamt that I had found a burner email I’d forgotten I’d created to make a Facebook account to comment on a group I’m on (that but I can link to a joking conversation with a friend), but I can tell you that the email address was [email protected] and there were three emails in the inbox, two from google and one from Facebook. Like, why?!

Also, it is genuinely reassuring to know it’s not just me. I hold back on some of the detail in real life, because it must seem like I’m making it up.

@Firefly2009 i have the exact same dream about having my old house but it’s not mine. I go in to a load of post and I messy kitchen. I also stay over and sometimes long to be back there. How bizarre is that?!

@NaughtyBoyGeorgeMichaelJacksonBrown and also about leaving a fish tank behind or forgetting to feed the ones in my bedroom for 4 weeks - end up with half of them dead but a load of babies to restart the cycle. I was just telling someone about this day and they looked at me like I was mad!

https://www.bighealth.co.uk/

Lots of advice on sleep hygiene and mental health here with the option to download digital therapeutics.