Dreams

I am not using a CPAP just to clarify and I have a question about dreams. I have heard a lot about the drowning dreams that many people have pre-CPAP and am curious if this could be something similiar. I've dreamt several times lately about being in trouble. Usually someone's trying to murder me or something like that and I feel like I should scream but I just can't and I try and try and try. Finally I scream but I'm screaming in real life. (Not really loud just a small scream.) Anybody think that this may be related? My body's way of waking me up? Or is this just an unrelated weird thing that happens?

I really don`t know much about explaining dreams, but I used to have this repeated dream of always falling in my dreams. I feel it comes from when I fell thru the old boards on an old farm outside well. It had water over my head and left me with fear when water is over my head. I always felt the scarry falling dreams came from what happened to me way back when I was about 10 yrs old. Never started having these dreams till years later.
Could your dreams have something to do when you were a kid? It was years after falling down the well when I started having the dreams, so they can show up years after what might have caused them. Just an idea.
Or did you read a post talking about water building up in the lungs from the pap machine and did it leave you worrying if it could happen?
Of course these are just ideas, and your dreams could be from something completely different. maybe others can be of more help.
Good Luck.

Many years ago I did a lot of research on dreaming & dream theory. It is a fascinating topic - there were and remain many lines of investigation regarding dreams and what they mean.

The following points seem to me to be as valid today as they were years back.

1) Dreams are one mechanism by which our sub-conscious mind attempts to deal with physical and emotional issues that usually come from our conscious state.

2) Dreams were once called "‘the royal highway to knowledge of the unconscious aspect of the mind’ by a very famous dream researcher. I still believe this to be a meaningful description. http://www.psychoanalysis.org.uk/budd.htm

3) If our dreams are troubling us then it is probable our unconscious mind has a message for our conscious mind (over some conflict, a desire, a fear, an anxiety, a past and forgotten but disturbing memory).

4) Dreams can be totally random and meaningless, just a way that our physical mind activates & deactivates circuits and trigger recollections of stored data in a random way. Some think this is like a health system check & the result is we can remember dreams as vivid images that seem odd or strange or fascinating or at times entertaining, also to appear real.

5) Parts of dreams can be and often are influenced by external stimulus such as temperature, physical contact (perhaps even cat walking over chest), a cold, noise, etc: etc:. But often there can be a theme to a dream such as repeated situational dreams.

6) Troublesome dreams are best dealt with when they are occurring but the 64,000 $ question is how ?. The best technique I ever heard about was perfected by a famous SFO psychiatrist in the 1970s. He used to get the person (wanting to understand their dream) in a chair & get them to relax - he had them sit opposite an empty chair (perhaps with a pillow on it) - he would explain to the person that because the dream came out of their own mind, only they really knew what the people, things & events really mean.

He would get the person to close their eyes and go back into the dream and to talk about what they were seeing, sensing and feeling as they revisited it. He would hone in on any obviously disturbing part of the dream. His brilliance was in then getting the person to imagine their self as sitting in the other chair whilst the actual person was told to become the object causing the disturbance - when he sensed the time was right he would often ask the 'disturbance' to tell the person directly why they were wanting to disturb the person. This was often the circuit breaker that allowed the peron to bring the sub-concious part of the dream into their concious mind. Kind of an 'aha - so thats what I was anxious about' result.

The technique proved to be remarkably effective and very quick to get to the cause of a disturbance compared to most other dream analysis techniques I have read about.

What you are describing doesn't sound too disturbing but only you know the depth of this. The fact you have written about is says it bothers you enough that you want to better understand it. That too is a good way to progress your dealing with it.

The message I am conveying is that no one else can really interpret your dream for you, only you can, other people can help you along the path. some may try to guess for the dreamer but guesses aren't really that helpful. Often the answer really is a simple matter and staring the dreamer in the face. Rarely is the cause complicated, just something we fear or are avoiding hence it pops up as a dream.

Anyway, this has turned into a long post. But I hope it may a least provide some insights as to what is going on when we dream. My apologies if it fails to achieve this.

DSM

Sorry if I was unclear in my original post. I was not looking for intrepretation of my dream as I really don't think that it has any meaning. What I mean was this. I know a lot of people with sleep apnea have dreams that they are drowning and then they wake up gasping. I was wondering if this dream where I wake up screaming could be something similar to those drowning dreams. I hope that makes more sense.

I haven't remembered a dream in years!

Don't think I was reaching REM.

Hoping to change that!

-B

Prior to my CPAP treatment, I was having dreams of being suffocated, like someone was holding their hand over my mouth...

Nitro Dan wrote:Prior to my CPAP treatment, I was having dreams of being suffocated, like someone was holding their hand over my mouth...

Aha, A classic dream pattern. Very common amongs OSA sufferers & abductees


Cheers

DSM

(PS do you have the full picture of the cute lil cat used in your posts - while working in HK a couple of years back, a chinese girl sitting in the next desk to me had the full image in a frame on her desk & I was somewhat taken aback )

1) Dreams are one mechanism by which our sub-conscious mind attempts to deal with physical and emotional issues that usually come from our conscious state.

My first week on CPAP seemed to be catching up on a decades' worth of nightmares and creepy dreams, living out all the anxieties I'd had for all that time but hadn't dreamt about yet. Fascinating technicolor misery.

Now the dreams are dark and murky.

(And I've become more depressed from all this REM rebound since starting CPAP -- hope this is just a stage!)

gracie97 wrote:
My first week on CPAP seemed to be catching up on a decades' worth of nightmares and creepy dreams, living out all the anxieties I'd had for all that time but hadn't dreamt about yet. Fascinating technicolor misery.

Now the dreams are dark and murky.

(And I've become more depressed from all this REM rebound since starting CPAP -- hope this is just a stage!)

Gracie,

The reality is that these lurking issues have to be dealt with else they keep will just keep popping up. REM state in CPAP will mean that your nighttimes become a lot more vivid in regard to issues you yourself want to or need to resolve.

Rather than becoming depressed, you could look at it as an 'at last I now have the health and a mechanism to move forward' - I can tell you that your perception of increased depression is most likely to be the welling up of emotion that you need to kick the wall of depression down. The very fact that you can write about it in a plainly lucid way says you are already understanding what is happening and are moving forward.

In fact, I am sure I can state on behalf of many (if not most) here that anyone who takes on CPAP and has the determination to see it thru, comes out the other side able to deal with all sorts of life issues in ways that may have escaped them in the past prior to CPAP.

The 1st week is one small week in many - go for it

Cheers & god bless

Doug Marker

I hadnt had many dreams at all for years, but at my sleep study, with the mask on for the first time, I slept for 3 hours and the technicians were laughing at me when they woke me up - they said were you ever DREAMIN!
And I recalled the dream - and I've been dreaming actively and vividly ever since! Is that a sign you're getting good deep sleep?

Anyway HisServ, I had just the dream you are talking about last week- can't remember what was scaring me but woke myself up making a noise. And I'm a happy cpap user, so it wasn't a call for air.

Getting off of HisServs subject -but gotta ask DSM who seems to be our resident dream master a question. One of the things that has always intrigued me is how dreams can play into whats happening around you. How sometimes you can be having a long dream and there is a sound in that dream thats part of it - and the sound turns out to be real.
For example - when in the hospital following surgery, I was sleeping a morphined sleep and was dreaming that we were looking for our cat. The dream was long and drawn out - I could remember that all kinds of things were happening. In the dream, my husband was making that psssb psssb psssb you make to call a cat, then (in real life) someone poked my arm to wake me up, and it was my surgeon visiting and he was making that sound to wake me up!
Now how did that fit into the dream at just that right moment?

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HisServ I don't know if the attempted scream dream is related to sleep apnea. I do know that this sense of trying to scream, and waking up eventually with a rather small real life scream is the result of the physical paralysis of voluntary muscles, which always happens in REM (dream) sleep.

qrlylox wrote:Now how did that fit into the dream at just that right moment?

Well, it's actually the other way around: the sound is there, it enters you brain through you ears, your unconsciuos hears it, and in the beginning it just puts in into the dream - so you weave that part of your dream around the sound, until you wake up.

O.[/quote]

This is an interesting theme.

Studies were done many years back about what a person in an operating theatre whilst under anesthetic could recall of what went on around them.

Hypnosis studies showed that most if not all people hear *and record* everything going on around them even when asleep this includes what may be being spoken nearby.

On interesting sideline is that studies were done many years back about what a person in an operating theatre whilst under anesthetic could recall of what went on around them. That can occur due to inadequate anesthetizing or due to the person's ability to record all events around them even when apparently asleep or unconscious. (see http://aana.com/patients/aware/factsheet.asp )

Dream sleep is REM sleep & we go through this before going into 'deep' sleep. In REM sleep we can be dreaming a dream that is being fed by mental images coming from different parts of our brain (including conscious & unconscious parts) mixed in with external stimulus.

Ever have that horrible experience of dreaming you were going to the toilet to urinate only to realise to late (or just a little too late) that you were still tucked up nicely (well perhaps were once tucked up nicely) in bed. It has happened to me on the odd occasion. The dream was very real & was impacted by realworld needs & events.

One fascinating theme re dreams that has been made into thriller movies, is where a particular person dreams something evil is trying to kill them. Their waking life is a battle of coping with the recurring dream & at the same time trying to convince others that it is happening (family, doctors, psychiatrists etc). In this story the person dies from something like a brain tumor & it is only then that everyone understands that the dreams were natures warning to the person but too late to do anything about because it was not picked up by anyone else because - only the dreamer really knows what the dreams & dream symbols mean -. Everyone else is merely guessing even though some educated guesses can be pretty accurate.

As said before, if a dream is disturbing, try to think what lurking worries you may have (family worries, finance worries, job worries, competency worries, self control worries, anger management worries, etc: etc:). There are certain aspects of our lives that we try to deny to our conscious minds but it always gets back at us (in our sleep).

Unconscious motivations can be primitive (love hate kill want). We have evolved to manage these primal urges but some sit on them more effectively than others

Cheers

DSM

Dream sleep is REM sleep & we go through this before going into 'deep' sleep. In REM sleep we can be dreaming a dream that is being fed by mental images coming from different parts of our brain (including conscious & unconscious parts) mixed in with external stimulus.

After and before.
The sleep sequence is
Stage 1 (drowsiness)
Stage 2 (light sleep)
Stages 3
Stage 4
Stage 3 again
REM
then 2, 3, 4, 3 and REM again

The first REM period of the night lasts only about 10 minutes. Each subsequent stage lasts longer until, if all goes well, the final REM period is about 1 hour -- entirely too much time to be mucking around in one's subconscious each night IMHO.

If you're really sleep deprived, you'll do make-up REM when you catch up on your sleep, the reason I guess REM is considered a signal of CPAP success.

But does lots of REM indicate sufficient Stage 3 and 4? Or can one get REM without the deeper stages having occurred?

(Once dreamed I was holding a pill in my hand. I put the pill in my mouth and swallowed it, then woke up immediately afterwards to realize that I'd just eaten a foam earplug I'd removed from my ear in my sleep and had been holding in my hand.)

hello guys!
i used CPAP before and had very simillar dreams....
what is the cause for that ? if you have more information
please let me know
thanks
nirp from DiscussFitness

Before anyone starts discussing dreams of one kind or another (?) note the newcomer has resurrected a thread form 2005, told us nothing about his present cpap therapy (whyever did he stop?), asked no cpap related question, and did post a link.

There is more than one kind of dream mentioned in the thread.
Bottom line:
I think its spam, and didn't click on the link.

O.