While it's well known that various prescription medications can affect sleep quality or mental clarity, far less attention is paid to how they can adversely affect your dreams.
Some medications dampen REM activity, dull your dreams, and interfere with dream recall. Others stimulate vivid dream activity, though not always in a good way. Through a couple of recent experiences, I've also discovered prescription meds can impede your lucid dreaming efforts.
Muscle Relaxers and Hyperdreaming
A few years ago, I hurt my lower back and was left with a chronic ache punctuated by frequent sharp, stabbing pains. After an MRI and weeks of physical therapy, the problem got worse instead of better. Acupuncture and massage therapy had no effect either. I couldn't sit or stand for more than twenty minutes without pain, and I couldn't find a position comfortable enough to sleep in.
My doctor prescribed Flexaril, a muscle relaxer that was supposed to dull the pain. I don't like taking medication of any kind, and I was resistant to the idea of taking a muscle relaxer but gave in because at that point the prospect of being without pain overrode any misgivings I had. The prescribed dosage was one 10mg tablet three times per day, but the doctor recommended starting with only half a tablet before bedtime so I could get a better idea of how the medication would affect me.
Half a tablet, only 5mg, makes you very sleepy but also has the entertaining effect of …Read more about how prescription meds can interfere with lucid dreaming
The dream blogging zone has been unusually quiet over the past couple of months. With the exception of Ryan, who continues to post great new articles over at the Dream Studies Portal, many of the folks who blog about dreaming have been silent lately.
I'm guilty of it myself. I like to think it's because we're all deep thinkers and need some time to ourselves to spend in quiet contemplation. In my case, the silence is partly because I've had an unusually long span of nightmares not worth writing about and partly because I've been working on content for a different project.
Last month, we added a new blog to my company's web site. We'll be posting articles, book reviews, relaxation and meditation techniques, and other new content a few times each week. Any articles related to personal growth and wellness that I would have posted here will now be posted to that blog instead.
The Reality Shifter blog will continue to focus on dreams and lucid dreaming, with occasional forays into the realms of consciousness and mysticism. Here is a taste of what's to come (listed in no particular order):
- Can a Computer Become Conscious?
- What Dreams Teach Us About Reality
- Feeling Physical Pain In Dreams
- Why You Should Stop Trying To Be An Early Riser
- Brain-in-a-dish Study Raises Questions About Consciousness
- Discovering the Hidden Meaning in Recurring Dreams
- The Most Common Dream Themes
- Can Prescription Meds Interfere With Your Dreams?
- Prophetic Dreams: Can Your Dreams Tell the Future?
Stay tuned for these articles and much more. The first of the new articles will appear on the site this week. If you'd like to receive it via email as soon as it appears online, please subscribe to receive email updates.
I came across this comic about dreaming on the xkcd web site. It's funny but it also makes you wonder why we take dreaming so lightly.
I'm always on the lookout for simple and practical methods to help people get a night of deep, restful sleep. When an easy technique accomplishes that much and also encourages vivid and interesting dreaming at the same time, it's definitely worth sharing.
These two tricks take very little time, can be done while lying in bed before falling asleep, and will work for just about everyone.
If you are already able to remember most of your dreams, or are at least able on most mornings to remember the last dream you had before waking up, you'll probably notice an almost immediate benefit in the form of more interesting and meaningful dreams. If you aren't yet able to remember your dreams, it might take longer for you to notice a difference in your dreams but in the meantime you'll probably notice a slight improvement in your dream recall. Regardless of whether or not you remember your dreams, the quality of your sleep will improve.
Technique #1 — The Daily Rewind
I very briefly touched on the concept of a Daily Rewind in a previous article titled How to Analyze Your Dreams More Effectively, but I'll go into it in more detail here and will provide some tips and suggestions to help you make the most of this technique.
A Daily Rewind is a swift and painless way to clear all the clutter out of your mind in preparation for sleep and dreaming. All that is involved in the technique is a quick mental replay of the events of your day. You can do this in one of three ways:
1. Start at the beginning of your day and mentally replay the events of the day until you reach the end.
2. Start at the end of your day and mentally replay the events backward until you reach the beginning of your day. You don't have to imagine everything moving backwards as if you're rewinding a video. Just start with the last event before bedtime and review it, then proceed to the event prior to that one and review it, and so forth.
3. Write about the events of the day in a journal.
As you mentally replay the day's events, you don't need to recall every little detail or replay every action or every conversation in a minute-by-minute recount of the day. Replay each event calmly and objectively and then move on to the next event. The entire process should take only a few minutes.
Also keep in mind the point is not to get caught up in regret about how the day went but instead to simply acknowledge each event that occurred throughout the day and release it. Don't get stuck replaying a situation over and over in your mind and thinking of all the things you could have done differently. As you replay your day, let go of any mental attachment, anxiety, or concern about the events. The goal is to perform a quick review of your day so you don't spend the night tossing and turning, dwelling on the "should haves" and "could haves". If you clear out the mental debris now, you'll sleep deeply and peacefully and your dreaming mind will be free to explore other things rather than rehashing trivial everyday events in symbolic form.
Use this time to relax your body as well. As you mentally replay the day, check your body for any tension associated with the memory of the events. Consciously release the tension and relax.
Stay tuned tomorrow for Part 2 of this article, which will describe the second technique for improving your sleep and your dreams.
If your local cable television network offers the Discovery Health channel, keep an eye out for a new series called Dreamzone. The first episode is scheduled to air on December 22nd. Here is a description from the Discovery Health web site:
"Do you ever dream that you're flying? Or being chased? Your dreams be telling you something. Unravel the mysterious world of dreams on Dreamzone, premiering Saturday, December 22 at 9:00 pm.
This series examines, in some depth, but in a fast moving style, our inner universe as dreamers. Everybody dreams. Some people remember their dreams, some don't. But we all dream several times per night. And we are all fascinated by what they might mean. Are they the remains of the day? Could they be foretelling the future? Or could they be our subconscious helping us sort out life's problems? Dreams are a very mysterious, yet common everyday experience."
The Discovery Health site also features a section called the Sleep & Dreams Center, which includes information about sleep cycles, theories about why we sleep and why we dream, and a series of articles called "Sleep Expedition" chronicling journalist Vince Rause's quest to find a good night's sleep. Rause interviewed Stephen LaBerge, Jeremy Taylor, Gayle Delaney, Patricia Garfield, and several other prominent sleep/dream researchers, so his series is worth the read.
Last night I watched a new movie called Paprika, and I think anyone who studies dreams might find the movie interesting. It's an anime film, but even if you don't like anime or if you've never seen an anime film before, you'll probably enjoy this one because it features everything a dream enthusiast could want — lucid dreaming, shared dreaming, technology to tap into dreams, dreaming used as a form of therapy, and more.
The story involves a small group of scientists and therapists who have developed a device that allows one person to enter the dreams of another person. It also allows other people to view the dreams on a computer screen at the same time. Their goal in creating the device was to provide a way for therapists to enter the dreams of their patients, to see what a patient is dreaming about and to use the dream to help the patient work through problems or anxiety issues. They're still in the process of testing the technology and its existence hasn't been made public yet.
The problems begin when they discover the device has been stolen. Things get even worse when they realize the mind of anyone who was ever connected to the device is now …Continue reading
