Dreaming delusions

Common side effects of dopamine agonists are nausea, confusion, hallucinations, lightheadedness, lower-extremity edema, postural hypotension, sedation, and vivid dreams. Less common are compulsive behaviors, psychosis, and sleep attacks. Hallucinations and delusions can be managed using a stepwise approach (Table 55-4). When added to L-dopa, dopamine agonists may worsen dyskinesias. 

Schizophrenia is a devastating mental disorder characterized by abnormal thinking, psychosis (delusions, paranoia, hearing voices), lack of emotion, and loss of function in one s school or workplace. The bizarre thought patterns of schizophrenics often resemble that of dream content, and in fact it was once hypothesized that people with schizophrenia suffered from intrusions of REM sleep into wakefulness, much like that seen in people with narcolepsy. However, most scientific evidence suggests that this is not the case. 

That meant that both Freud and James had been correct in predicting that hallucinations and delusions could be chemically mediated, but it remained to specify how altered chemistry could lead to altered consciousness. The 1953 discovery of REM sleep and its associations with dreaming promised to provide an answer. If the hallucinations and delusions of normal dreaming were themselves chemically mediated, we could compare that chemistry with the chemistry of psychosis and the chemistry of psychedelic visions. 

I can appreciate how completely taken over my perceptions could be were I to hallucinate. I understand, on contemplating my delusional lack of insight when dreaming, how unwelcome and futile it would be to try to talk me out of a paranoid belief. Because when dreaming I believe the most bizarre dream events are real, I know that weirdness is no sure tip-off that I am out of my mind. And, more importantly, I can use the experience of dream hallucination and delusion to create an alliance by directly (sometimes) and indirectly (always) communicating my understanding of the power and subjective reality of psychosis. 

Now we need to tie the priming with its residual activation of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex neuronal networks to the emergence, in REM, of a reactivation of those networks. I propose that the residual activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is amplified by the REM activation of these other cortical networks that produce dream bizarreness via the associative resonance that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex has been primed to detect. And indeed, the dawning awareness that this must be a dream feels, subjectively, like a positive feedback process. Once the recognition has been inserted into delusional process it is enhanced by the mounting evidence of delusion that it observes ... 

The slippery slope from acceptance of the veracity of the subjectivity of these accounts to acceptance of the veracity of the objective implications of the accounts is difficult enough to understand in the patient informants. But patients are already functionally marginal in one way or another, otherwise they would not be patients And to understand why one cannot easily overthrow delusions, try teaching yourself lucid dreaming. It s not easy, especially if you are middle aged or older, as are most abductees. And, as with all of us, there is a lot at stake—personal credibility and personal worth, among other things. 

As in dream psychosis, the hallucinations and delusions of schizophrenic psychosis are referred to as positive symptoms, implying an increase in excitability of the upper brain circuits mediating perception and its associated cognition. Anticholinergics can precipitate... 

Now we turn our attention to the antipsychotic potential of drugs that are also useful in treating epilepsy and speculate about the reason for their efficacy in controlling the affective psychoses, especially mania. Manic psychosis is formally like dream psychosis in its delirious aspect we see the ecstatic elation, the grandiose delusions, and the poor judgment leading to social indiscretion in both states. Only organic delirium itself more closely resembles dream psychosis. What could account for these similarities ... 

The visual delusions now share with natural dreams the sense of continuous motion that prompted us to characterize them as visuomotor rather than simply visual. This is an important point, because it supports the theory that both TSD and dream visions may have their origin on the motor side. This could be due to changes in the excitability and circuit dynamics of the oculomotor and vestibular control systems of the brain stem. 

The Jivaros believe that only in dreams is true reality revealed. Normal, waking life is held to be a delusion. In dreams, the truth is told through the agent of spirits and demons, who act as friends and advisers. There are no ene-... 

They introduce thoughts, feelings, and percepts related to the laboratory situation, but this has no effect on dream hallucinations, delusions, or bizarreness. 

Like Da Orta, Acosta had found that bangue was used by different people for different reasons "some take it to forget their worries and sleep without thoughts others to enjoy in their sleep a variety of dreams and delusions others become drank and act like mertry jesters others because of love sickness."... 

The earthly Human Being is the Son of the "Moon." Even when his external sensory life appears to him as much as it can, as a reality, it is nevertheless nothing else but a confused dream-life and his self-consciousness is nothing but a delusion. Not until the earthly Human Being (the old Adam) has ascended into a divine Human Being (Christ), does the Son of the "SUN" (that means = God s) come into the consciousness of immortality, and the true life begins for him. 

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