Dreaming and healing

So I have been having some crazy dreams lately.  They range from unsettling snake dreams to pleasant sexual dreams. Sometimes I wake up and cant shake the feels from the dream all day long. Other days I forget them and my day goes on as usual. I started looking into tramatic brain injury and Dreams.

    I found out that during the acute period after a TBI, patients typically have violent, scary nightmares. It is also very common for survivors ( months to years after) to have short, broken periods of fragmented sleep with little to no dreaming whatsoever.    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1978305/

 

    Sleep disorders are very common with head injuries.      http://www.tbiguide.com/sleepdisorders.html

I sometimes feel there must be a sort of brain damage going on with benzo wd, the similarities are there. In regards to benzo healing, I have an idea. it seems that the more you dream, the more pleasant the dream content the more you are healing? I had nightmares 24/7 during tolerance wd, now they are mostly good (if a bit creepy sometimes). Any thoughts? What are your dreams these days? 

Hi there,

 

According to Dr Ashton benzos inhibit both dreaming sleep and deep sleep which now makes sense to me as I rarely had dreams when I was taking my benzo unlike now where I dream almost every night and I can remember a lot of the dreams. Towards the end of my taper and when I was first benzo free I was having a lot of disturbing nightmares. The nightmares have now mainly petered out but I am still having very vivid dreams. Dr Ashton says this is a normal reaction to benzo withdrawal and that it's a sign that recovery is beginning to take place.

 

Here's a link to the excerpt from Ashton where nightmares and sleep disturbance are discussed, I hope it helps :

 

http://www.benzo.org.uk/manual/bzcha03.htm#5

 

Debbie

 

 

Hi Debbie, that makes sense. I remember not having an dreams on restoril. That should have been my first clue this stuff is poison. I've never cared much about my dreams before, now they are so vivid it's hard to ignore. At times it's almost as it I feel more intense emotion during my dreams then awake! Lets hope they get better as time goes on.