Bipolar and dreams?

Hello there people!

I wanted to ask you if what I sometimes experience is actually a significant sign of BP or if it's just a normal thing that we all experience.

Namely, I usually sleep pretty bad and have bad dreams (not necessarily nightmares but just bad, repetitive, irritating and exhausting dreams).
Every now and then (read pretty darn rarely) it happens that I actually have a nice dream. In such dreams I don't even need to dream about anything nice in particular, I can be dreaming about a damn brick, and I'll be like "OMG A brick! That's so inspiring! What an awesome brick!!!"
Which kind of implies that during sleep some kind of chemical is released in my brain that makes me feel good and makes everything seem better including dumb ordinary dreams, such as me going to shop, me talking with a brick etc...

That feeling that I have in such dreams is the only thing that I can put my finger on and say "that felt unusually well", and that I may consider as hypomania, but I never experience something like that when awake.

So I wondered how many of you experience stuff like this, and if you do, would you attribute that to BP or is it something that regular people experience too?

Judging by the saying "beautiful like in a dream" I assume that what I experience quite rarely, may actually be the very same thing that normal people experience quite often. In that case I have some serious dream disorder as the last thing I would ever associate with the word "beautiful" is my dreams (excluding those nice ones).

I would appreciate your opinions a lot!

Hi, there!
I know what you mean. I'm not sure if I can relate the symptom to BP. It is possible. Many articles claim that people with BD have vivid dreams.

Nekoneko wrote:Namely, I usually sleep pretty bad and have bad dreams (not necessarily nightmares but just bad, repetitive, irritating and exhausting dreams).
Every now and then (read pretty darn rarely) it happens that I actually have a nice dream. In such dreams I don't even need to dream about anything nice in particular, I can be dreaming about a damn brick, and I'll be like "OMG A brick! That's so inspiring! What an awesome brick!!!"

Exactly the same. Word to word.
I've been having this since a long time. Recently, things were getting over the top and I created a special thread, here - http://www.psychforums.com/bipolar/topic134135.html
I rarely have good sleep. Most of the times I wake up feeling exhausted and that I didn't get enough sleep. The most annoying thing about my dreams is that they affect my mood a lot. The feelings are too strong when I dream and even after I wake up, I still feel weird, like the feeling still lingers throughout the next day. I can't read/watch/do anything intense before sleeping. Otherwise I dream about the same thing, and the quality of sleep is worse and I wake up every 5 minutes.

Recently, I had a good dream though. Just one, but yes, it was significant. I felt so great after waking up. I was in a good mood through out the day. Like, you said, after waking up, I realized the dream didn't make much sense but, it somehow made me feel good.
Also, I had this pretty weird s*it happened to me - I love dancing, so, I was once dreaming about dancing. Obviously, it can be exhausting and it increases heartbeat rate. At one point, suddenly, I woke up breathing heavily, like exactly one would breathe heavily after dancing. It took me about 5 seconds to realize that I wasn't dancing in reality. It was just a dream.
And then this - **trigger warning** In the dream, I was cutting my neck standing in the middle of my room using the knife (the exact knife I use to cut veggies). I remember cutting the neck totally while looking in the mirror, and then wondering why I have not died yet. I woke up after a while, sweating heavily. **trigger warning ends**

I've been trying to fix it. I don't know why, but, no matter what I can't make these vivid dreams stop happening. I told the doc, he gave me sleeping pills. No help. Nothing.

Hey there zetamex123, thanks for your reply man!

I am glad to hear that I am not the only one to experience this and to associate this whole mess with dreams and sleep. Actually if they told us "we have discovered what BP is caused by" my first guess would be - something related to sleep, dreams, melatonin, pineal gland or something like that.

The most annoying thing about my dreams is that they affect my mood a lot. The feelings are too strong when I dream and even after I wake up, I still feel weird, like the feeling still lingers throughout the next day.

Word to word, literally. I see we definitely have a lot of symptoms in common. And I have bolded up the part, because that's the exact same description I use when I explain people how this feels.

And this symptom is definitely the most annoying thing! It makes me feel so different and weird, it's just awful!
I've been researching a lot on it, and so far it seems to be a symptom of Narcolepsy, Depersonalization, Derealization rather than that of Bipolar. Now since Depersonalization and Derealization are more of a symptom and not exactly a separate disorder on their own, I've researched further for a long time. And while there are a lot of potential causes such as narcolepsy, sleep apnea, significant hormonal imbalances, anxiety etc etc. I find narcolepsy as the only cause that sounds convincing enough.
Hence I believe we should somehow get our hands on Modafinil, I bet we would finally "wake up" and feel more connected if we were to try it.

Nekoneko wrote:Hey there zetamex123, thanks for your reply man!

I am glad to hear that I am not the only one to experience this and to associate this whole mess with dreams and sleep. Actually if they told us "we have discovered what BP is caused by" my first guess would be - something related to sleep, dreams, melatonin, pineal gland or something like that.

The most annoying thing about my dreams is that they affect my mood a lot. The feelings are too strong when I dream and even after I wake up, I still feel weird, like the feeling still lingers throughout the next day.

Word to word, literally. I see we definitely have a lot of symptoms in common. And I have bolded up the part, because that's the exact same description I use when I explain people how this feels.

And this symptom is definitely the most annoying thing! It makes me feel so different and weird, it's just awful!
I've been researching a lot on it, and so far it seems to be a symptom of Narcolepsy, Depersonalization, Derealization rather than that of Bipolar. Now since Depersonalization and Derealization are more of a symptom and not exactly a separate disorder on their own, I've researched further for a long time. And while there are a lot of potential causes such as narcolepsy, sleep apnea, significant hormonal imbalances, anxiety etc etc. I find narcolepsy as the only cause that sounds convincing enough.
Hence I believe we should somehow get our hands on Modafinil, I bet we would finally "wake up" and feel more connected if we were to try it.

Oh, I'm glad that you could relate. I really wish I could stop those dreams, seriously. I'm pretty much tired of it. Stupid s**t. I'm sorry, I feel like it's over the top. Those dreams affect the way I feel about some people/friends in my real life.

As for the potential causes, for me, I think it might be anxiety. I was referred to a different doc, and I'll talk about my anxiety issues tomorrow.

Thanks for the reply. And let me know if you find anything which provides relief. I'd be grateful.

I'm glad too man! Let's keep this topic up because I firmly believe that there is a strong correlation with BP and sleep.

I absolutely hate it too and it affects my view on people, friends and even family, which scares me so much, but through time I've learned that being scared of it can only exacerbate anxiety so I have to learn to relax and not worry about it and indeed that itself helps. So yes, it's all basically a form of anxiety.
Also I've noticed that nice weather definitely helps this symptom a lot (I guess I may have Seasonal Affective Disorder on top of my BP, anxiety and OCD).

But what mostly helps this is relaxing and not being afraid of it. You should act as if you're fine with experiencing these episodes for the rest of your life, and only then that symptom will start to get weaker and weaker I'm telling you this out of my own experience, cause these days it's not that bad for me, cause even when it happens it doesn't stay longer than a day.

Let us keep investigating on this subject. We will all beat this one way or another, ourselves or with the help of some med combination....cause science never sleeps!