Incredibly vivid nightmares, please help!

did u use any brain meds ever?

Hi Katie not sure if we are experiencing the same thing. My sleep issues started at a young age. I experience what they call sleep paralysis with hallucinations. I thought alll these years I was schizophrenic.  I am now 47. I have a sleep (REM) disorder. It is scary and still have it. 

You likely have dreams that you can control but are also very vivid and do for some reason come true. 

I am a Registered Nurse and not that it accounts for anything except my experience.  I find writing them down helps. 

I also see things that are unusual. I can’t fix any of it. Just want you to know you’re not alone. 

Take care. Buffy

Hi Katie,

Trying to unpick your post, I was wondering whether this might be sleep paralysis (as Buffy has also mentioned in another post).

I too am a former registered nurse, specialised in neuro, and I've had sleep paralysis for more than 50 years. Like most people who have SP, I also have very good dream recall. Everyone dreams btw - you can prove this in a sleep lab - but not everyone remembers their dreams.

Just taking the vivid dreams alone - you don't need to worry about this at all, however scary they are. I've always had dreams where I get murdered, murder other people, and so on and so forth, and I've never let them bother me. My father and several members of his family had the same kind of dreams, and they all had sleep paralysis too. We're none of us responsible for what we do in our dreams, and there's no way we can control them, or any need to do so.

Do you think you might be awake, and just coming out of a dream (or about to fall asleep) when you see all these "monsters"? Hallucinations are quite common during sleep paralysis, and some people get the hallucinations without actually realising they're paralysed. Another common feature of SP is an overwhelming desire to go back to sleep at the end of an attack - even though that can mean going straight back into another one. I always make myself sit up, or at least turn over, before allowing myself to fall asleep again.

Incidentally, the perceived length of your dreams has nothing whatever to do with the length of time you're spending in REM sleep. At a time of great stress in my life, about 10-15 years ago, I was regularly going straight into REM sleep immediately on falling asleep at the start of the night - a typical stress symptom. I also had trouble falling asleep, and would regularly look at the clock. I can't tell you how many times it would happen that I'd see it was, say 1.30, then then dream an entire lifetime (someone else's!) before waking in an attack of SP, looking at the clock again and seeing it was only 1.50.

I won't go into the physiological mechanism of SP here, though you can look it up on this site, or any other reputable medical site. You'll see that we're all paralysed during REM sleep, to stop us jumping up and acting out our dreams, but in about 5% of the population, the paralysis-inducing hormone either fails to switch off as soon as we wake, or (less commonly) kicks in before we're asleep.

As Buffy says, you can't fix it. It just happens to some of us, and it's down to a very minor brain glitch. It's not an illness, either mental or physical. If, having read up on sleep paralysis you feel that this is what you're having, there is quite a lot you can do about it, by identifying what triggers your attacks.

In my case, a sure-fire trigger for both vivid dreams and SP is getting too warm in bed. I also find I have more attacks when I'm getting too much sleep - e.g. having a morning lie-in or an afternoon nap. Some people, however, find they're more likely to have attacks if they're not sleeping enough. Certain foods eaten too late in the evening can trigger some people, as can alcohol or recreational drugs - especially cannabis. Sleeping too near electronic equipment can be another trigger, which is hardly surprising when you remember that our brains operate via electrical signals. And of course, anxiety - especially anxiety about having another bad dream or SP attack - is a major trigger.

This list isn't exhaustive. Everyone has their own individual triggers, and they're often the same for SP as for vivid dreams. If you can identify and avoid your triggers, you can reduce both SP and vivid dreaming, but you won't entirely stop either of them.

As to whether or not to see a doctor - I'd say wait a bit and see whether you can manage this yourself, but that's from personal experience. My SP started when I was 23 and in the run-up to my nursing finals, and involved horrifying hallucinations (tactile in my case) from the outset. I told a friend about it, she went to the matron in charge of student nurses' health, thinking she was helping me, and I was hauled up before the hospital's chief psychiatrist before my feet touched the ground. He made no attempt to explain what had happened, just bellowed at me that if I ever so much as mentioned this again, he'd see that I never got to complete my training anywhere! I had no idea what it was, like Buffy, and it wasn't till after I'd qualified (somehow, in spite of the terrified, sleepless nights) and moved on to a specialist neuro course that I found a single paragraph about it in a text book.

I suspect psychiatry has moved on a bit since 1968 (I hope so anyway) but I know from talking to other SP sufferers that there's still very little knowledge about REM-related phenomena in the medical profession as a whole, even including some so-called sleep specialists.

The one thing that will stop both vivid dreams and SP is going on antidepressants - especially the older tricyclic kind like amitriptyline and nortriptyline - which totally suppress REM sleep. This isn't because SP or vivid dreams are a sign of depression, it just happens to be a spin-off effect of these drugs. However, antidepressants are by no means without side-effects, they also come with nasty withdrawal effects, and they won't cure the problem, just suppress it. As soon as you stop taking them, it will all come back.

To summarise: read up a bit on SP (or ask me to explain it in detail, which I'll be quite happy to do); and look at possible triggers. As already explained, the same things tend to trigger both SP and vivid dreams, so you should be able to get your problem under some kind of control by managing your triggers, whether it's SP or not.

If you have any further questions, don't hesitate to post them here or send me a private message via this site. Above all, try not to worry about all this. Once you start understanding it, you'll find it's quite easy to manage and live with.