One of the symptoms of CFS is nightmares. Meaning that when you’ve finally quieted down the digestive rumbling, the agonizing pain, and everything else that’s keeping you awake, you just about fall asleep and you wake up screaming.
We had noted the correlation long before I read about it, that I seemed to have nightmares right about the time that I started a CFS relapse.
The question is, and remains, chicken or the egg ... was I having the nightmares because my brain chemistry was changing to relapse mode, or was I relapsing because of too many nights waking up at 3 AM and either not being able to get back to sleep, or getting back to sleep only to have the same nightmare again? We all know that not enough sleep will make you sick, even if you don’t have CFS.
Of course, those ever-helpful people think they can psychoanalyze me out of this. "The dreams have something to do with what’s happening in real life." Yuh-huh. I get chased by dragons every day in my waking life. Suuuuuure. I have this same nightmare whether I’m employed or not, relaxed or stressed, financially secure or down to my last couple bucks; the only thing in common is that shortly after the first dragon nightmare, I go into relapse. That fire-breathing dragon has absolutely nothing to do with what’s going on during the day, because it only comes out when I’m in relapse (or as a harbinger that I’m heading for relapse). I don’t read novels that have dragons in them, I don’t watch movies that have dragons in them. Never did. So I’m not sure where he comes from. But there he is.
He’d been gone for a while, which I took as a sign that I was finally going into remission, but he came back the other night. There was nothing different about the day he came back, just another run of the mill day of sleeping, eating, reading the newspaper, watching TV, and doing a little stitching ... nothing that should have triggered a bad dream (well, except for the bad dream quality of the life I’ve been leading the past 8 years since this relapse started). But, there he was again, and when I tried to go back to sleep, he came back again. So I got up and did something to take my mind off it, and when I tried to go back to sleep an hour later, he came back again. And has been dogging me ever since.
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