HPPD, Sleep and Dreams

[xspecm]

Hi, good afternoon guys, would like to discuss with you a symptom that I have to come after the HPPD, very real and psychedelic dreams, long, etc .. whenever I sleep, I have dreams, but when I take clonazepam 2mg it's alright, I don't have dreams, this would be HPPD one symptom? real dreams, psychedelic, very long, and etc?

[Duster]

I have had very real and psychedelic dreams all of my life but since the onset, I've seen much more nightmares. Probably every second night. I take no medication but when I took clonatzepam, I felt more relaxed when waking up.

[Jagermeister]

I have had vivid dreams all my live, but crazy nightmares or crazy vivid dreams after hppd. Fuck it nigga, I hate it, there are more the bad than the good dreams, so fuck it!!

P.S: I dreamed ago two nights that my ex-girlfriend who I still love was talking me to the ear saying: I hate you, I hate you...

[415_stylee]

I have always had insane dreams, but they managed to get even more insane since I got HPPD. More psychedelic and unearthly..

If I wake abruptly from them I get lasting spiraling tunnels overlaying my open and closed eye vision. So there seems to be quite a lot more psychedelic activity than before IMO.

They say endogenically produced DMT causes dreaming, and I'm very sure that's correct.. Plus HPPD-caused latency problems, and bam you got lasting visuals up to 15-20 mins by only dreaming!

The dreams can be anything from Inception-like shifts of physical laws, weird colours and creatures. Lack of logic. Exciting but a bit too intense.

Then the nightmares.. Getting psychosis in the dreams, The Grudge-like types of entities, faceless demons killing, hunting or tearing your soul to shreds.

I've also had sleep paralysis occasionally.

For me I can identify atleast three factors;

HPPD seems to have added the intensity and psychedelic unrealness to the dreams, as I only had more "grounded" dreams before.

ADHD messes a lot with the sleep (brain waves which resembles wakefulness intrudes on sleep type waves) which causes tossing and turning, sleepwalking etc. Basically sleep is always unsteady.

Stress/anxiety I have identified as being able to cause sleep paralysis and "wake by becoming insane or killed" type of nightmares. Losing control in the dreams.

Since I got Keppra, and the fact that it alleviates a lot of overactivity in the brain (both with HPPD and ADHD), has reduced the frequency of both surreal, intense, and horrible dreams. Unfortunately, I rarely dream at all anymore, and when I do they're forgettable.

It's a reasonable price to pay to get rid of many these of these parasomnia tortures though! I get refreshing sleep at least..

Which leaves only stress/anxiety left as a culprit, which can for me cause temporary rebounds of the above mentioned parasomnias.

Long lasting benzos though, they cause a kind of sleep which is more like unconsciousness. No dreams, because the sleep is too shallow. Which might be good, or bad. Very unrefreshing sleep also, since the deeper stages of sleep gets hindered, the body repairation stage never really occurs.

For me these benzos also triggers a weird kind of sleepwalking in which you can do things you do during the day, I dialed numbers and called two people, without remembering it. The phone was on the floor next to the, off the hook for 2.5 hours and no memory whatsoever of doing it. Unsettling..

In conclusion:

Can HPPD change your dreams? I would say yes.

Anything overactive in the brain might affect sleep, since it's a delicate mechanism which relies on a set amount of specific brain waves, a small disturbance can create ripples on other waves, upsetting the balance.

What happens when you take a benzo then?

You'll get sedated, neural overactivity will be suppressed. But it can make a glitch in the lock for the body muscles, making you act out things as you were awake when you're unconscious in sleep, which can be dangerous. If you have been sleep walking before or have ADHD, you have a large risk of doing it under the sedation of a benzo.

Sorry if the reply got much too long (as is usual with my replies!).

Hope it can make some kind of sense into the whole sleep-HPPD question.

These are a combination of personal experiences mixed with a whole lot of the science behind it (I read a lot).

It's an addition to the common knowledge, not an absolute fact.. ;-)