by liberal japonicus
I was going through a backlog of links I had saved and finally got to listening this NPR Fresh Air interview about dreaming. I’ve had a small bit of success with lucid dreaming, but it has not been to the extent of being able to alter my dreams, I just realise I am asleep in my room and I can look around the room but am unable to move. While that doesn’t seem exciting, when I can do it, I feel that my sleep is much better and I feel much more relaxed when I wake up and perhaps others might discuss their own dreams here.
But the interview had this, which interested me.
in one condition, and in particular called REM behavior disorder, people really, they start acting out their dreams a lot. And this often occurs in men over 60. […] And it’s actually an indication of, it’s often – I mean, up to 90% of people who develop this sudden acting out of usually violent dreams, they might start punching or kicking while they’re asleep. And they dream about these aggressive or violent things. And it’s actually one of the earliest indications of someone developing neurodegeneration. So up to 90% of people who have REM behavior disorder, they will go on to develop some type of neurodegenerative disease – like Parkinson’s, I think, is the most common – within a decade of diagnosis. So it’s actually a really – it’s an early indicator that something, you know, some kind of neurodegenerative process has begun in the brain. And it’s resulting in this acting out of aggressive dreams, essentially.
This is really interesting, because I remember reading about awhile ago, how a some wives of NFL players said they would often get hit by their husbands while they were both sleeping. At the time, I wondered if it was just a cover story for some sort of domestic violence, but now, I wonder if that would be a symptom of CTE, perhaps happening at an age earlier than 60. Anyway, a thread about sleep and dreams.
I had a friend who, even as a young adult, would sometimes act out his dreams. Once, he tried to stuff his wife behind the headboard of the bed. A few years ago, in the late stages of Parkinson’s, he died after a fall.
i’ve had those kids of (RDB) dreams since my mid 30s.
Drs haven’t been interested.
Now that I have an older man’s prostate and bladder, I wake up once in the middle of the night because I have to pee. Sometimes I have trouble getting back to sleep after that, another common problem amongst the old. I have very vivid, complicated dreams, which are common side effects of the two long-term medications I take. I seem to dream more than I used to, but don’t have any of the symptoms (like waking up fatigued) that indicate excess dreaming. None of the acting-out behavior, the normal REM “paralysis” seems to be working just fine.
I’ve long been interested in what kind of nightmares people have — what makes you wake up huffing and puffing with the adrenaline pumping. The only ones that do that to me are dreams about vampires. For unknown reasons, while I know that witches and werewolves and such — everything except vampires — are just make-believe, part of me believes in vampires. I don’t know if the fear pre- or post-dates the time I finished reading Salem’s Lot in bed at 2:00 in the morning. I had to decide if I was going to walk across the room to turn the light off, knowing that I would have to walk back in the dark, or put my head under the pillow to sleep. I elected to put my head under the pillow.
None of the acting-out behavior, the normal REM “paralysis” seems to be working just fine.
A couple of times, I’ve woken and been completely paralyzed. But recovered in less than a minute.
I sometimes sleep with my eyes open and can see if there’s enough light, but don’t always know what I’m looking at until I wake up. I once dreamt of being chased by a helicopter during an afternoon nap and woke up to realize I was looking at the spinning ceiling fan.
I have been trapped asleep but unable to awake multiple times, starting at elementary school age. I have taught myself to wake myself up by moving one of my arms. It can be very difficult, frustrating, and frightening.
I quit teaching over twenty years ago, but I still have dreams related to my job. A recurrent dream concerns IEPs–the required paperwork for each student, typically about 20 pages. I did 30 to 40 a year and never was late.
My dream is that it’s May and I haven’t started. I make futile attempts to find the necessary records and forms but can’t. I seriously consider blowing the IEPs off and dumping the mess on other teachers. I’ve never done that in the dream because I always wake up first.
The other teaching dream involves being in the building on the first day, but I don’t know what subjects I will be teaching or where my room is and I have no teaching materials. I used to get frantically worried in the dream but one night I thought, “Fuck it. This isn’t my fault. I’m not going to feel bad. I am going to get mad instead.”
So now that dream has a different story arc.
I used to get frantically worried in the dream but one night I thought, “Fuck it. This isn’t my fault. I’m not going to feel bad. I am going to get mad instead.”
So now that dream has a different story arc.
I’m delighted by this!
5 mg of indica MJ at bedtime. sleep like a baby. or better than a baby, maybe.
even before they made MJ legal in MA, I slept pretty well. I enjoy my dreams, they’re often funny. And I’m often the butt of the joke.
I take it as a sign of sanity.
that said…
I had a friend, father of another friend of mine and my wife’s. He was a tank guy in WWII. Killed a number of people. Had a cool and complicated shotgun he took off a guy – a German civilian – who tried to shoot him, and who missed. But he – my friend – did not miss.
In his late 80’s and into his 90’s, he had really bad dreams where he relived his time in Europe. Unsettling, violent dreams, which would cause him to thrash and kick and punch in his sleep.
He went back to Europe in much later life to see if he could lay his ghosts to rest. He could not.
This was not the advent of mental or neurological decline, he was sharp as a tack right up until the end.
It was the legacy of what he was required to do as a young man.
Some folks think that sleep, and dreaming, is another bardo. Another form of consciousness, distinct from waking awareness. I don’t really know, one way of the other.
But my own thought is that sleep and dreaming is the time when your mind and consciousness tries to repair itself. Tries to come to terms with and resolve all the crap you don’t have the time or attention or capacity to resolve in your waking life.
It’s kind of a gift. Not always welcome, but essential nonetheless.
I try to remember and pay attention to dreams. I don’t think of them as some kind of messages from the great beyond. They just seem like messages from myself, to myself. Or maybe not even messages, just ruminations.
But helpful, and occasionally useful. Sometimes amusing, sometimes disturbing. More or less your own mind, without the filters. But speaking in images, not prose.
I agree with Russel in that I think dreams are often more than just random. I think they often are a way of working out or working on issues that concern the dreamer.
That said, sometimes dreams are just fun.
As a kid, I was able to set my mind to dream of flying. I loved to fly! My dreams were very realistic, right to feeling chilly. Ot scary at all. I wish I could still make myself dream that way.
For a time after my father died I regularly had dreams where I would see him at a distance, sometimes across a large room full of people or on the street driving by. As I would get closer to him, his appearance would change and I’d realize it wasn’t him. I wouldn’t exactly remember in the dream that he had died, but it would make me feel extremely sad that it wasn’t my father that I had seen.
>5 mg of indica MJ at bedtime.
for me anyway, pot makes it more likely i’ll act out a dream. it’s a reason i limit my partaking.
>The other teaching dream involves being in the building on the first day, but I don’t know what subjects I will be teaching or where my room is and I have no teaching materials.
hilarious. i and my wife both have recurring dreams about being in school on exam day when we realize we are signed up for a class that we have never attended. and then we frantically search the campus trying to find the classroom where the exam will be held.
I don’t remember ever having a nightmare. But I’ve had anxiety dreams. First, about school, then the military, and work. In recent years, I’ve had very few of any of them.
I still have the occasional “forgot to go to class the whole semester and can’t find my final-exam location” dream.
Every once in a while I have a dream where some law was changed and I have to go back to high school for a class or two for my graduation to remain valid. The dreams start off without anything seeming silly, but as the dream goes on, I begin to realize how stupid of a situation it is and the dream kind of trails off.
I have dreams where I am lost in a conference hotel and wandering through all manner of industrial, dystopian tunnels trying to find my way back to the lobby. And like many of you, I still have student dreams (damn you, grad school trauma), or very similar retail work dreams, where I have failed to check a schedule and am trying hard not to fail or be fired for having ghosted something important.
Never any teaching anxiety dreams, though. I save all of my teaching anxiety for my waking hours. Thank the botanical gods for CBD.
or a time after my father died I regularly had dreams where I would see him at a distance, sometimes across a large room full of people or on the street driving by. As I would get closer to him, his appearance would change and I’d realize it wasn’t him.”
I have dreams like this only about cats. In the dream I see one of my long ago deceased cats and I am overwhelmed with guilt, thinking that I just forgot about the cat and have been ignoring it. Then I get into a fuss about whether or not it’s my cat or just one that looks like my cat. I never raised a cat from a kitten. All of my cats were old when I got them and died within five or six years, so I have a lot of dead cats to remember–but I do remember all of them.
I used to act out shouting “no, no, no” so that my wife had to wake me up. In the dream I would usually be in a situation of powerlesness.
Then, when my daughter was younger, I had these dreams where she suddenly was gone and I couldn’t find her anymore. Scary stuff.
I’m glad things are calmer now.
Lol, same here.
I’ve always known that most people can remember at least some of their dreams. But I’ve never done that. The closest I’ve come is the handful of times I’ve awakened full of adrenaline, apparently over something I dreamed. But with no clue what it might have been.
I’ve always known that most people can remember at least some of their dreams. But I’ve never done that.
I can remember the last dream immediately upon awakening, but have to review it a couple of times to get it into somewhat more permanent storage. I did that this morning. The dream setting was a hilly suburban neighborhood. The guy down the street was a sword smith who produced “good” magical swords. The guy across the street made “bad” magical swords. The wife of the guy across the street was a serial killer using one of the bad swords. They were framing the guy who made good swords for the killings. When I figured out what was going on, the good smith gave me a sword so I could take on the bad smith. Swashbuckling across streets and yards ensued. One of the backyards was filled with rabbits, we literally had to wade through them. Each rabbit had been dyed a bright color: red, blue, green, yellow.
Sometimes I wake up from the weird ones because, in the dream, I get to the point of “I’d like to speak with the screenwriter, please.”
I used to act out shouting “no, no, no” so that my wife had to wake me up. In the dream I would usually be in a situation of powerlesness.
My vampire dreams — see above — were infrequent. My wife would wake me up when things got to the huffing and puffing and occasionally whimpering stage. “Vampires again?” she would ask.
This discussion has me realize that my panic based dreams have come in distinct phases/periods. The first was when I was a kid and I dreamed I would swim in air, but would be hopelessly slower than other people. It was just like pushing off from the bottom of a pool and doing a dog stroke in air. I’d love to go back and see if I could do that with lucid dreaming, i
The second era, corresponding to hs and uni, was the relatively common one of being in some place with no clothes and everyone else was dressed. Of course, I now realize that no one else noticed and I couldn’t tell anyone. Would have been nice to have figured that out then
The last stage, though it hasn’t happened recently, I would have sleep paralysis, which would happen when I was totally knackered. I had the impression that someone was in the room and I couldn’t move and I couldn’t say anything. It wasn’t someone like an ax murderer, it was just someone I knew, but it would really be stressful to have them in the room and I couldn’t acknowledge them, so I would force myself awake, and in waking up, I felt like I pulled every muscle in my body. Not fun. I had a theory that I was dropping into REM sleep to quickly (I could feel my eyes doing REM even though I just laid my head on the pillow)
I still get very tired, but I feel like my slight ability to lucid dream is actually related to that, because I’m lying in bed and I don’t try to move, but I can see everything in the room. On the other hand, it might be because I don’t really care if someone comes in the room and I can’t talk to them, because I’ve reached an age where I don’t give a shit…
Sometimes I wake up from the weird ones because, in the dream, I get to the point of “I’d like to speak with the screenwriter, please.”
This happens to me, too. You become aware of how ridiculous the circumstances are and your conscious mind steps in to cut the nonsense. Or so it seems.
It happens to me when I’m lucid dreaming and start doing whatever I want. It’s like I’m trying to hang on, but it doesn’t last too long once the veil has been lifted.
I get regularly woken up by the inner censor who will not allow any sex to happen (at least not involving me).
The most recurring dream is of me looking for a toilet but only finding ones that for one reason or other can’t be used (clogged, full of water, built in a way one cannot sit upon them, extremly dirty etc.). The problem is usually very detailed and in high resolution. What I do not understand is that the locations are usually completely unknown to me but have a degree of detail that to me would seem to require great familiarity with the source the dream screenwriter used to create the images.
The (written) exam dream is also quite familiar but it is usually so that I know the stuff but once I have finished most of it, all the paper gets confused and I can’t find the correct pages to finish and to hand in, resulting in a panic.
Someone is also constantly meddling with the public transport system. I get stranded at an unknown (and often confusedly constructed*) station (often rural or semi-rural) and can’t find my way to the correct one since for some reason the whole net and the timetables have changed. Occasionally on the underground lines but more often on a railroad above ground. Well, at least some effort is usually put into scenic landscapes and the weather tends to be pleasant.
*which has some basis in reality around here
The most recurring dream is of me looking for a toilet but only finding ones that for one reason or other can’t be used (clogged, full of water, built in a way one cannot sit upon them, extremly dirty etc.).
I’ve had similar dreams, intermingled with the military stuff. Such as trying to find restrooms and functional toilets in a barrack.
speaking of nightmares…
i haven’t been keeping up with my Republican mythology, so can someone explain: why are ‘we’ trying to start a war with Venezuela?
the Ledeen doctrine
If your opinion-poll numbers are tanking, start a war you can win.