Weird dreams

[raincat]

I don't think this is HPPD related because I had these before I got HPPD. It seems like they mightve possibly been drug induced though?

Last year I was prescribed valium to take before my dentist appointment. I took quite a bit (and it still wasnt enough to curb my anxiety at the dentist so they could actually clean my teeth). I ended up taking more the next day and the day after cause they gave way more than was needed for the appointment and it did help generally even though it wasnt enough to make me not cry and be terrified at the dentist.

On the nights after taking it, including a couple after I ran out, I had sleep paralysis dreams. I also had this really weird one that lasted a few seconds where my vision was black and i could see a repeating fast moving pattern of white lines or something its hard to describe but I felt like I was falling and my head felt weird and it came with a sense of absolute terror.

A few days after I ran out of valium sleeo paralysis dreams stopped. But they came back a few months later and I was having them every other day more or less. Sometimes I would wake up before falling asleep again and slip into that state, sometimes it would happen before I woke up. When it happened I could hear loud rushing and sparkling in my head, my whole body and especially my head felt tingly and uncontrollably vibrating, I am unable to move or speak, or I am only slightly able to move and able to speak very very quiet so no one can hear me and if I manage to move substantially at all I will either be snapped back into place or I will start slowly sliding across the floor against my will. My vision usually looks like my surroundings but its often distorted in some way or theres something that isnt there, or my surroundings don't resemble where I went to sleep at all. I would often wake up and fall back asleep into sleep paralysis multiple times before managing to keep myself awake. Sometimes there would be a sleep paralysis demon but usually its invisible and would manipulate things around me to scare me (like putting my brother in front of me and disorting his face), which has a similar feel to my regular nightmares cause when I'm having a nightmare I get the sense that I'm fighting my mind who is a malevolent entity and it has domain over everything around me, and I am powerless. It's like trying to fight a god. I've had many nightmares and because of that I have been able to develop ways of making it less bad while it's happening and to wake up if I can manage to do that. I had never had that very specific sleep paralysis kind of dream before I took valium though.

I mostly stopped having sleep paralysis and nightmares when I started taking mirtazapine, then the nightmares (not the sleep paralysis) started getting more frequent a bit when my hppd got worse and I went into weed withdrawal, then they stopped almost entirely when I started taking lorazepam. I am writing this now because this morning I had sleep paralysis again, it was scary but luckily it was tolerable. This time it was a little different cause I kept imagining weird patterns of movement and color and my non imagination vision was zoomed in and covered in psychecelic patterns. Hppd has changed my dreams to have various psychedelic aspects, I've also had some psychedelic nightmares where the visuals were really intense and everything quickly became gigantic and wavey and made of rainbows and growing rapidly and morphing into each other becoming unrecognizable and nothing stays concrete at all. It seems the psychedelic stuff in my dreams will also apply to sleep paralysis.