Something extremely strange happened the other day

kteague wrote:I am having a ball with the dreams I remember, now that they are no longer frightening. Usually I can see a that a hodge-podge of influences came together in a nonsensical way.

Stop reading here unless you're either into dreams or really bored.

Couple nights ago... Family loading into an RV to move away. (Had earlier been discussing the what-ifs of winning the HGTV home giveaway in Sonoma.) I got out of RV and said I wasn't going because there was no electricity and I couldn't sacrifice my sleep for that long (self explanatory), and 7 is too many for any bed. (Daughter's family was earlier piled on their bed for a movie.) Stepped out of RV onto the driveway - a pink tiled driveway (too much HGTV) - and expressed my concern it might crack. (Daughter's new plaster job is cracking.) Ran into neighbor who was our cause of moving (we have neighbor issues), and he was waving a clipboard with a petition and wanting signatures. (Talked with a friend earlier who is gathering support for her nominee for a playwrite award.) Neighbor's petition was to force the pickup of apples fallen in our back yard. (Friend nominating playwrite won an award for sculpture titled Applicious and I'd looked at it online, and high winds had blown garbage across our back yard the night before.) I woke up and just shook my head, self entertained.

Now I'm gonna go try to catch another one of those dreams.

I really enjoyed your dream : ) Thanks for sharing it.

I started dreaming again, too. They aren't very vivid (yet) but at least I am remembering some of what happens. I used to get the "ghost" or "demon" dream too, along with sleep paralysis (rarely). That must've been my brain interpreting the crushing feeling of suffocation!

I'll try to remember to post my first vivid dream.

Congrats! You're a "real boy" now...

(obscure Pinnochio reference)

luvsbutv wrote:A few months ago my 15-yr old daughter was telling me some of her wacky dreams. She asked if I ever had any weird dreams. When I told her I don't dream her words were, "Mom, everyone dreams. Maybe you just don't remember them."

I think your daughter is right.

I think there's a BIG difference between "thinking" you had not dreamed at all, ever, for _X_ number of years, and simply not waking up enough and/or long enough from a REM cycle of sleep, when most dreaming occurs, to commit the fact, "I was dreaming" to memory.

True, a person's OSA can be so bad that apneas repeatedly knock them out of REM (which is where apneas hit most people most often and hardest), so they might have very fragmented sleep with very short snippets of REM. And in a sleep study, it's not unusual for some people to have such difficulty trying to sleep in the strange environment that they might not hit REM during the diagnostic study. Particularly if it's a split night study with only two hours of diagnostic before they are put on CPAP.

Anyway, I think it would be a mistake for people to think either of these things:

1. Gosh, I don't have any dreams. I must not be dreaming!!! Maybe that means CPAP is not working effectively for me? Shouldn't I be having dreams if my treatment is going well???

My thought would be: Perhaps your CPAP treatment is going so well, that you're sleeping peacefully through REM, just like you should.

2. Wow, I'm dreaming!!!! Dreaming every night!!! For the first time in years! Must mean my CPAP treatment is going great!

Another possibility is that yes, the CPAP treatment may be letting you settle into REM better than before, but... even so.... if you are waking up enough/long enough to be AWARE of a dream, that's not a good sign, imho. Unless it's the last dream of the night, and you get wakened by the household stirring, an alarm, etc. in the morning.

Dreams can happen in other stages of sleep, but the most vivid dreams (if one wakes enough to be aware of it) probably usually occur in REM ("rapid eye movement" sleep.) REM is also when apneas/hypopneas are most likely to happen for most people.

Normal "REM latency" (amount of time it takes to go into the first REM cycle) is about 90 minutes after a person falls asleep. The first REM cycle usually lasts just a few minutes. Each succeeding REM cycle usually comes at 90 minute intervals, and each REM normally lasts longer than the preceding one. So, most people are in their longest REM cycle just before morning.

I don't think we normally wake up in the morning straight out of REM. I think as we are getting close to waking up for the morning, we'd probably move out of REM, into Stage 2, and then perhaps up more into Stage 1 (very, very light sleep...more like kind of drifting in and out of wake/sleep)...and then finally wake up for the day.

So, unless an alarm clock -- or something -- jolts us awake, and we happened to be in REM right then, it's unlikely that a person would remember "dreaming." That's why I believe that blissfully sleeping through each REM cycle and never even being aware of having been dreaming is a better sign of good CPAP treatment than is frequent awareness of "dreams."

Example: I had three consecutive nights of PSG sleep studies.
1st night - all diagnostic.
2nd night - titration with the lab's machine.
3rd night - letting my autopap titrate.
Hooked up to full PSG equipment all three nights.

Each morning, if I had been asked, "Do you remember dreaming?" I'd have said, "No." As far as I could tell each morning, I had not dreamed at all during any of those three nights. I knew, of course, that I probably had dreamed and simply didn't remember it... just as luvsbutv's 15 year old daughter said to her mom.

The PSG data for each of those three nights showed that I went into 3 - 5 cycles of REM each night, just as expected. But each morning, when I waked up, I didn't have even the wispiest, vaguest remembrance of having dreamed at all.

I'm no expert on dreams, sleep stages, etc., though. That's just my layperson's opinion, and I could be very wrong. Here are some interesting discussions:
LINKS to dreaming - dreams - REM rebound
viewtopic.php?t=3524

Rested Gal

All very interesting info and good points. I'm scheduled to go tomorrow for my titration study so I haven't started cpap therapy yet. I'm just looking forward to waking up rested - dream or no dream