Dreams and lack thereof

[pptillery]

I have been having a terrible time sleeping for the last 3 months (usually 3 to 5 hrs per night, sometimes none). I usually have no concious memory of dreaming. I can only think of two times in the past couple of years when I actually remembered dreaming anything.

One of those times was last night. The doctor finally put me on Ambien last Wednesday. I am now sleeping 8 to 10 hours a night.

Does the activated rememberance of dreams mean that I am getting more of the restful sleep (REM?)

Would appreciate the input of someone more knowledgeable than myself.

I am hoping that this means that I am having less apnea and that rest will become more refreshing. Have been having heavy duty barely functioning fatigue. Affecting BP in a very negative way.

Thanks.

[snork1]

USUALLY increased dreaming is a good sign of apnea therapy working better. I use it as a barometer to a certain extent, combined with how I feel the next day.

[pptillery]

Have noticed that the fatigue was not as bad today. Hoping for even better results tonight now that I have my new full face mask and my machine set on a higher pressure.

The new mask and the higher pressure don't seem to bother me. It is quite comfortable. I am looking forward to trying them out.

Thanks for your post.

Paula

[rested gal]

While having REM sleep and dreaming is good, I've often wondered if actually REMEMBERING a dream the next morning is a good sign or not. Perhaps remembering a dream upon awakening means sleep was disturbed enough to arouse us when it shouldn't?

On the other hand, perhaps since the amount of time spent in REM sleep gets longer as the night goes on, we should normally be in REM during the time we wake up in the morning, thus more apt to remember that last dream? I don't know.

For that matter, do we have to wake up while IN REM, in order to remember a dream? Or can we remember a dream if any other sleep stage occurs briefly between the REM dream and actually waking up?

When people talk of having had "many dreams" during a single night, are they really remembering isolated stages of REM dreaming, or are they remembering just one - the last dream of the night - a single dream that might have incuded many "scenes" that were very different from each other? Perhaps making the person think there were many "separate dreams" throughout the night?

Bottom line, imho, is... if we feel rested and good when we get up, we've slept well. Thus, we've had sufficient REM sleep with dreams, even if we don't remember them. I rarely remember any dreams when I wake up, unless the alarm has gone off, rousing me in the middle of a dream. If I wake up on my own in the morning - not remembering any dream at all - I usually feel my best. (Of course, a poor memory from years of untreated Sleep Disordered Breathing may really be why I usually don't remember dreaming. heh.)

Maybe not remembering dreams can be bad or good: "Bad" when our sleep is so disturbed that we truly haven't dreamed. Or "Good" when we are sleeping so well that we don't get disturbed during REM dreaming... so that we wake up in the morning from a light sleep stage, and consequently don't remember having dreamed.

Would be interesting to know for sure which, if either, really indicates "good sleep" - remembering a dream upon awakening - or not being aware of having dreamed at all, even though we had plenty of REM (and dreams) during the night.

[<Debbie>]

My sleep doc said that you only remember the dreams if you wake up for some reason or the other during the dream or right after the dream. He said that remembering dreams isn't an indication of "good" sleep. For instance a friend of mine says she dreams all night long, wakes up 5 or 6 times a night, and she is on bipap. She also feels like a train has run over her most days.

[rested gal]

Thanks, Debbie. I had a feeling that what your sleep doctor said was the case, but didn't know for sure. I did start becoming aware of dreams more during my first couple of months of xpap therapy, but probably that was because "things" were waking me up a lot during the night - uncomfortable mask, air leak, dry mouth (before I got a heated humidifier)...all the things we have to learn to cope with or get used to. However, even with those disturbances, I was feeling better than during the years of no treatment. So, it would have been easy to jump to the conclusion, "Wow, I'm aware of dreams now - great!"

I appreciate your sharing what your doctor told you. And am glad that I don't usually remember any dreams!

[<dizzy>]

if you can remember dreaming at all that is good, but the content of those dreams are only remembered if they are committed to your working long-term memory contained in the prefrontal cortex at the front of the brain. Longer term or permanent memory is contained deep within the brain in the hippocampus. If you can remember what you had for lunch yesterday that is working memory, if you can remember things you did as a child that is permanent memory contained in the hippocampus.

in order to commit to memory you need to recall the thought/dream several times or repeat it, the more it gets repeated the longer it will stay in long term memory. For example if you were awaken and then had breakfast and talked about your dream with a family member, by this act of repeating it you have committed it to long term memory.

We forget most of our dreams for this very reason. Keep in mind you may go through several dream cycles during the night, nearly one every 90-minutes. Why is it that you only remember the one dream? If you are awaken during this dream your more likely to remember it.

[ArjayCT]

Paula,

I don't know about this one. I dream very often, and commonly remember my dreams, yet my sleep is terrible, with an RDI over 100 and nadir O2 desat of 75% or so.

Most of my dreams are very unpleasant, they're full of fear and feelings of intense, unspecified dread, courtesy of our friend Mr. Apnea.

FWIW, Arjay

[frequenseeker]

Just discussed REM with my (board-certified) sleep doc. She says: restful sleep is that which has good architecture i.e. several cycles of Stage 1-4, especially 3 and 4, and no disruptions/arousals. REM is separate and different. It seems important but it is not well understood. Many people do fine without it. Depressed people do better without it, maybe a serotonin connection. On the other hand, research has suggested a connection between REM and the ability to learn and remember. So REM might be necessary to "encode" information into the brain. But it is not the restful part of sleep, as previously thought.
Those who are dreaming but still feel like a train ran over them need to look at arousals particularly, which are preventing them from getting Stage III and IV. No home machine can give you this data, so you have to work on everything that might get in the way: mouth leaks, rainout, apneas, bedtime timing. Also, it seems that people feel better when they get up at the end of a sleep cycle and not in the middle of it. So if you wake real early but feel pretty good, get up don't doze and go into the sleep cycle again or you may have to wake up in the midst of it to be on time for your day's start and then actually feel worse despite having had more sleep hours. I certainly have experienced this one.
Hope this info is helpful. With Ambien the question is are you getting the proper sleep architecture? There are is a doctor who has written a book about Ambien and other pills and who is a contributor to TAS info elsewhere on this site, maybe it was the insomnia fact pages where I saw that. Perhaps there is more information there.
REM is when the body tissues get paralyzed too, throat can collapse and OSA risk is high.

[ June 18, 2004: Message edited by: frequenseeker ]

[pptillery]

To frequenseeker:


I have fibromyalgia, IBS and sleep apnea.
The Ambien does seem to be helping. It has allowed me to sleep a full 8 hours which has not happened in over a year.

The crushing fatigue has gotten better (the week before I went to the Dr. I dozed off and ran off the road but woke up before I did any damage except to my nerves when I realized what could have happened).

I am still tired but not exhausted like before. My BP has returned to normal levels since I am sleeping again. Don't know what will happen when I go off the Ambien (only on it for 2 weeks).

I did get my CPAP reset to my higher pressure per the pulmonary drs. prescription and got a full face mask.

All of this seems to have helped.

Thanks to all who posted.

Paula

[-SWS]

Well, as long as we're on the topic of dreams, can I ask one slightly unrelated (to sleep disorders) question?

Am I the only one here who almost always dreams with entirely unfamiliar settings? Seldom any buildings, landmarks, or even landscsape that I am remotely familiar with. It's almost always a strange and fictitious setting that I have absolutely no attachment or experience with. More often than not all the people in my dreams are absolute strangers as well. Did I mention how absolutely estranged I feel in most of these dreams?

I'm sure Freud would have a field day with my dreams. Anybody else ever experience this?

[rested gal]

I rarely remember dreams - usually only if the alarm clock happens to wake me in the middle of a dream. Generally it's just me alone in the dream. But not with any unpleasant feeling of "alone-ness", even if the dream itself is about something unpleasant. Sometimes the dream is set in vaguely familiar surroundings, but rarely recognizable in any kind of detail that tells me, "oh, that was my grandparents' house" or "yeah, that was in my town." When there are other people in the dream, they are almost always people I recognize and am at least passingly acquainted with "in real life".

[<Sleepy>]

My dreams are usually in settings that are familiar, but combined in weird ways - like the time I dreamed of coming out of my house where I live now, and the sidewalk outside was from the campus where I went to college 25 years ago, and for some reason, it didn't seem strange during the dream. I rarely have a truly disturbing, scary dream now, but I sure had some doosies when I was a child. Even the "drowning dreams" that happen during apnea events aren't really scary to me, perhaps because of my lifeguard training.

I told my biology students about the dreams I had about holding a screech owl, seeing a black-and-yellow spider the size of a salad plate (if it's not on me, it's another beautiful creature), and the beautiful, green luna moth that fluttered through my dreams one night. They said, "Wow! Even your dreams are scientific!"

The occasional return of REM is one of the things I enjoy about CPAP. Hopefully, it will be more than occasional once I get on BiPAP next week.

[rested gal]

Sleepy wrote:

quote

Quote:

The occasional return of REM is one of the things I enjoy about CPAP. Hopefully, it will be more than occasional once I get on BiPAP next week.

Sleepy, while your scientific dreams sound like fun (I loved all the Biology classes I took in high school and college), I'm hoping just the opposite about my dreams! My dreams (even unpleasant ones) have never been heart-thumping scary, so I don't really mind remembering them, but I still think waking up remembering a dream that is in progress means REM was disturbed by "something". I still wonder if the "normal" way to wake up (or the best way to feel good upon awakening) is maybe to awaken at the end of a light sleep stage cycle? Coming to the surface easily, so to speak. And with the REM dream so far behind that it is simply not remembered. Dunno.

[<Sleepy>]

I know that for me, a night with lots of dreams is often followed by a day of feeling better.