All About Bipolar: Very lucid dreams?
Posted By atorturedsoul on July 13, 2009
Dreaming or not?
Oh, the things medication used to treat bipolar disorder do to your brain. I have had much worse side effects while taking other medications but this is down right annoying. I don’t feel like there is much difference between this and psychosis.
Psychosis is when the lines between reality and imagination are blurred and it is difficult or impossible to distinguish between the two. That sums up what my mornings are like now. It’s horrible to wake up and not understand what is going on and sometimes I am not really sure of where I am. It takes me a little while to figure out what is real and what is not. Doesn’t that sound like psychosis to you?
I have taken medications before that caused lucid dreams but this is much worse than anything I have ever experienced. Lamictal, or lamotrigine, is what has caused this. Sadly, I need an increase in dosage so I am sure it is only going to get worse. Wow. I have something to look forward to. (Note the sarcasm.)
I have these dreams every single night without fail. I have taken Xanax several nights hoping it would make them stop so I could rest but even that doesn’t help much. Most of the time, I am very active in my dream and I wake up feeling like I ran a marathon overnight. Waking up and feeling tired doesn’t help the situation.
Let me give you a little taste of what my “night life” is like now. (I feel like Walter Mitty, for crying out loud.) A few nights ago, I went to sleep only to wake up in just a few minutes. I went back to sleep and was in and out for what felt like a few hours. My husband’s phone rang and it woke me up but I laid there with my eyes closed trying to go back to sleep. It only took a minute to realize that he was talking to a woman and the conversation was very vulgar. I felt him get out of bed and turned over to see him walking through the hallway, still talking on the phone. I went back to sleep and it woke me up when he got back into bed. I asked him if he had been talking to a woman. He looked stunned but admitted that he had been. I was livid but refused to talk to him and rolled over and went back to sleep.
I woke up around the time he was getting ready for work and told him I wanted a divorce. He called his supervisor and told him he wouldn’t be coming to work. He again tried to talk to me and I told him I was going back to sleep because I was tired and we could talk when I woke up. I turned over and went back to sleep and woke up a few more times. The alarm clock went off at 5 AM and woke me up. I immediately nudged him like I do every morning to get him up for work. I was still angry so I asked him again if his phone had rang during the night. He immediately picked it up to check for a missed call and told me no. I was confused and about to say something when I looked at the window and realized the sun was not yet up. The last time I remembered going to sleep was after the sun was up. I laid there a few minutes and then started putting the pieces together.
I went to sleep that night and dreamed that I woke up. I repeated this in my dream for quite some time before the phone rang. The phone never rang. I checked. It was all in my dreams. I asked my husband all of this in my dream and when I asked him again once the alarm clock went off, it was actually the first time I asked him which explained why he checked his phone to see if someone had called. The reason why it was daylight when I went to sleep and then nighttime when I woke up is because I had dreamed I woke up but I was still very asleep. When I woke my husband up for work it was dark out. When I woke up later on, the sun was up and he had left for work hours earlier. He didn’t call in and none if had ever happened. It took over an hour to sort out what was real and what was not.
This has happened every night this week and several times a week for about a month now. It’s never the same dream but I always wake up believing everything really happened. If psychosis is defined as being out of touch with reality, then wouldn’t this technically be a form of psychosis? Sleep psychosis, perhaps? It’s new to me and I am trying to figure it out so I can find a way to tell the difference between my dreams and reality.
In lucid dreams, you understand that you’re dreaming. This is the opposite of that. I don’t realize that I am asleep and mistake my dreams for reality. Xanax isn’t helping and I feel like I haven’t slept in days even though I really have. Ugh. I have to figure out a way to deal with this.
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Hello ATS,
I too am bipolar. I also have PhD. in pharmacy. I understand what you feel and may be able to offer assistance.
If you are trying to get real sleep, you need to be cautious with the Xanax. It can interrupt your sleep pattern and actually decrease the amount of time you spend in REM. You can use certain SSRI’s to get some REALLY good sleep.
PM me if you would like to talk
rodr0069@hotmail.com
SSRI’s tend to throw me into manic episodes. I have been lying awake every night until 2, 3 or 4 AM. It’s ridiculous.
Howdy,
I don’t regularly follow your blog but came across this article and thought I might throw out a suggestion if you had interest. It isn’t a very well received suggestion by many, but I am bipolar and out of fear of playing the drug game have been using cannabis to treat the disorder. It works incredibly well for me (however you do have to either build a tolerance or limit your usage before the sensation becomes manageable).
Many bipolar individuals seems to suffer from troubled dreams of some sort, and I have found that when under the effects of cannabis, the brain doesn’t drop into REM sleep as easily. Admittedly, the effects only last for around 4 hours with a tolerance like mine, which only provides me with a half-night of dreamless sleep, but its enough to keep me from being completely swept away into the reality of the dream state.
I recognize that REM sleep is important, but I know firsthand how terrifying uncontrolled dreams can be and it may be something to look into.
tortured soul:
i just woke up for the fourth time this week dazed and confused, feeling exactly the same as you described in your post. i too am currently on lamictal (lamotrigine) for bipolar type 2 disorder and like you i can not shake this horrible dreams. its taken me about a month to be able to be lucid while dreaming but i dont know if it makes it any better or not. it would be wonderful to be able to control my dreams if they were pleasant like flying or being with a beautiful woman but it only seems worse when under the influence of this medication. every single dream is of a horrible situation, more often dealing with family but sometimes with friends or acquaintances. just this not i dreamt that my sister and i had to take my mother to the doctor, when we got home the house was rearranged with the bedrooms being changed for everyone except my sister, my father terrorized me by wrestling me to the ground and not letting me up, and when i later asked him why my mother was acting so strangely he said that we dont want another ike johnson. having read about lucid dreaming earlier in the week (needless to say brought there by the realistic nature of my dreams) i slapped myself and pinched myself iIN THE DREAM thinking it was happening in real life but nothing happened furthering the illusion that i was AWAKE rather than dreaming. i only seem to awake from these dreams after or while i am saying something or yelling. this is what finally woke me tonight. as a matter of face, it is 5:10 in the morning after another one of these dreams and i was so scared by it the first thing i did was look up ike johnson and then the side effects of lamictal (which by the way did NOT list this as a side effect). this is what brought me to your blog / site.
i cant get any restful sleep since it is so fitful and wonder if these dreams are leading to or feeding off of inner feelings of inadequacy. i did not have a very enjoyable childhood with my parents constant belittling and disappointment with me and my constant and consistent efforts to make them happy (often resulting in a loss of self and efforts to be my OWN person). this is the most consistent recurring theme of my dreams. for some reason i always am turning to my sister for help in these dreams as well.
please let me know if the specifics i included in this letter to you ring any bells and feel free to write back with your thoughts and insights.
scrap-iron
I had always been a people pleaser until just a few years ago. My dreams are always about people I know and are sometimes bizarre but they are usually things that could happen in reality which is why it is so hard to figure out that it was a dream.
I have yet to figure out a solution to this problem. I tried taking Xanax at night to sleep but it did not help the problem at all.
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