• Guest - w'd love to know what you think about the forum! Take the 2025 Survey »

Diabetes, nightmares and vivid dreams.

Omar51

Omar51

Well-Known Member
Messages
1,082
Location
California
Type of diabetes
Prediabetes
Treatment type
Diet only
Individuals with Blood Sugar Fluctuations, poor glycemic control or low blood sugar, may experience more nightmares or vivid dreams. My blood sugar is well in control, still there are seldom any nights where I don’t have vivid dreams. Good thing, strictly my personal opinion, there is nothing true in dreams. So I get up, shake my head and say oh heck with it and move on with my day. Obviously we all are different and probably have different impacts of dreams.
 
I've had some very strange vivid dreams when hypo.....
 
I have always had vivid dreams, often quite unpleasant ones. I think it's more about what is happening in your life. A number of us here, including me and you, @Omar51, have very well controlled BG but still have the dreams. Interesting comment about the hypos @EllieM, and others may well find the same too. Every day is a schoolday!
 
I have had them all my life, but I hate the more weird vivid Technicolor dreams.
had another recurring theme last night.
it was from my old job that I retired from nearly eighteen years ago.
I couldn't cope with the work!
it has been a common theme since my breakdown and anxiety levels were OTT. Panic attacks etc.

a lot is going on in our lives at the moment, changes are inevitable, but it is necessary to get them done.
and I don't want to mess it all up. Typical anxiety!

pleasant dreams, I hope!
 
"Why we Sleep" by Matthew Walker is well worth the read, and may give you a different insight to otherwise difficult dreams.

It's also worth reflecting that only more complex species that had evolved the ability to regulate temperature can dream, yet everything sleeps, and there is a good line of thought that life evolved asleep, and then gradually evolved the ability to wake...

There is fascinating brand new research that suggests that during non-REM deep sleep, the brain releases pulses of nor-adrenaline (nor-epinephrine) which acts as a vaso-dilator... all of which to say that this acts together like a pump, to clear toxins from the brain...

As for dreaming - of course we still know relatively little, but it's surprising how much we can observe with modern techniques, and people trained in lucid dreaming techniques. The hypothesis I like the best is that most dreams have a function of stripping the emotional content from the memory of a thing, so that when you remember the event, it's less painful. So - PTSD is when someone is trapped with a memory too strong to separate, and you end up with recurring nightmares..
 
This is all very interesting to me. I used to have nightmares and I knew this was a nightmare. I could force myself to wake up and interrupt the nightmare. I had some nightmares years ago and I still remember those nightmares. Thanks for the interesting information.
 
Hmm... I practically don't dream, no matter what kind of bg I have. Sometimes it's 5-7 mmol per night. I usually just wake up from hypo, but it's not related to nightmares.
 
I had some awful dreams when my blood sugars kept going too low at night, my BS was well inside the hypo range. They were nightmares. Other than the odd ‘weird’ dream , I hadn’t suffered with nightmares since I was a child.
 
Not directly on topic, but close enough - I've only ever had one nightmare; I was seven, and the dream was that the family was in the house we were actually living in, in an expatriate community in Nigeria. Someone was in the house, and killing everyone, one at a time, until it was just myself and my father, hiding behind the curtain together.

Now - a neighbour of ours had just been broken into and murdered, so it's not too difficult to see where this dream originated from, but that isn't the point -

I woke up, and couldn't get back to sleep, seeing the same image of the knife coming around the corner of the wall, through the curtain fabric (as I see it now, after all this time)... but eventually I did..

... and my mind played out a cartoon. Literally - "Hagar the Viking" - complete with a logo and credits.. a cute cartoon Viking that my father and I had a snowball fight with, laughing and having fun, then the credits rolled, and I drifted into a deeper sleep. Nearly fifty years ago now, but I can remember the entire thing.

Never had a nightmare since. All my ...interesting... dreams are in the form of thrillers; they can be scary at times, but fun scary.
 
And of course, humans have dreamt as long as there have been humans - nothing to do with glycaemic control. However, if blood glucose is falling, the brain will see that and release stress hormones, so it isn't too surprising that your brain (which is creating an environment to experience in real time, that really being what dreaming, but also what being awake... is) would interpret that as anxiety and map that to something inside the dream.

The word nightmare itself actually comes from the way that we interpret something specific going wrong in dreaming sleep. There is a specific sleep disruption that confuses the muscle immobility switch, leaving you aware, but immobile. It's fairly common, and it's quite claustrophobic, leaving the person with a memory of feeling trapped and pushed down on the bed. Through the Middle Ages it was described as a horse in the night; pressing its hooves on your chest. Descriptions (and rates of experience) are surprisingly similar to "alien abductions" in California in the seventies.
 
Back
Top