Recurrent dreams

The B-criterion, reexperiencing, involves persistent intrusive memories, sudden reminders, or flashbacks associated with the trauma. In children these symptoms may involve repetitive play reenacting traumatic themes, recurrent frightening dreams, or intense distress at reminders of the trauma. 

Recurrent distressing dreams of the event. Note In children there may be frightening dreams without recognizing conflict. 

Case (ii) A 25-year-old female patient with idiopathic spontaneous hypoglycemia. Symptoms recurrent hypoglycemic shock, blood sugar 18-20 mg/lOOml during the episode, hot patient, excessive craving for sweets, short necked, fanciful dreams. Earlier she had recurrent tonsilitis and skin disease treated by antibiotics. 

Night terrors are pure emotional experiences that occur on awakening from sleep. Typically, they are associated with non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, as are the recurrent dreams of post-traumatic stress. Together with the arousal from NREM sleep, there is intense activation of the heart, the breathing rate increases, and the blood pressure may rise to extremely high levels the person awakens drenched in sweat and terrified, and often has little dream recall whatsoever from these awakenings. 

Dreaming has remarkably consistent features from individual to individual and from night to night. We call these features formal to indicate the difference from what we call content. By formal, we mean that dreams are visual and intensely emotional, have a peculiar logical quality, and times, places, and people are infinitely plastic and changeable. In other words, dreaming is recurrently bizarre, and it is the recurrence of the bizarre features that we think determines the assumption by most people that the content is repetitive. 

We know that content itself can be repetitive, especially in the case of traumatic dreams, which we discussed in Chapter 6. But when we ask normal inidviduals to produce records of the recurrent dreams they claim to have, we are impressed by the fact that what is recurrent is the formal features, e.g. anxiety may be a common element to dreams. Well, anxiety about what Anxiety about exams, for example. That s not a bit surprising if we think that anxiety or emotion play a large part in dream construction. What things are people anxious about They are anxious about performance and performance evaluation, and what performance evaluation is more stressful or important to people than exam performance Consequently, we may have exam dreams as one of the recurrent themes. 

It may seem to the reader that we are attempting to explain away rather than explain recurrent dreams, but this is not the case. What is recurrent are certain emotionally salient themes that depend on certain formal properties of dreams, and these are deeply repetitive. Every dream is characterized by visual perception and strong emotion, most often elation, anger, or anxiety. With these emotions come our own historical experiences - the experiences that are associated with these emotions are likely to appear in our dreams. 

Antidepressant drugs, such as tricyclic antidepressants and SSRIs, suppress rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the period of sleep during which dreaming occurs. Despite this, antidepressant treatment is sometimes associated with recurrent nightmares. Venlafaxine also suppresses REM sleep and was associated with nightmares in a 35-year-old woman with body image disturbance the nightmares remitted when the venlafaxine was withdrawn (12). The authors speculated that indirect activation of 5-... 

The resulting PTSD symptoms include persistent reexperiencing of the traumatic event, avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma, numbing of general responsiveness, and persistent symptoms of hyperarousal (Table 70-1). Patients must have at least one re-experiencing symptom that can include recurrent images, thoughts, perceptions, or dreams of the event dissociative flashbacks,... 

Depersonalization—change in an individual s self-awareness, during anxiety disorder, such that one feels detached from his or her own experiences, with the self, body, and mind seeming alien or distant Persistent or recurrent experiences as if one is an outside observer of one s mental processes or body (e.g., feeling hke one is in a dream). 

I didn t come here to have you read my palm," he said, already regretting having come. He thought for a moment that it would be better to pay her fee and leave without learning a thing, that he was giving too much importance to his recurrent dream. 

But before they left, he came back to the boy and said, "You re not going to die. You ll live, and you ll leam that a man shouldn t be so stupid. Two years ago, right here on this spot, I had a recurrent dream, too. I dreamed that I should travel to the fields of Spain and look for a mined church where shepherds and their sheep slept. In my dream, there was a... 

Ultimately the perennial fascination of the master narrative of alchemy is that it tells a story of what we both desire and fear to know- the story of power beyond our dreams but also beyond our control. Paradoxically, no century has had more control over the material universe than ours, and yet we are still confronted with an unpredictable world where we are stalked by terrorism, by AIDS and other pandemics, and by a latent and recurrent nuclear threat. Caught between terror and desire, we are a captive audience for stories that make sense of our uncertain existence by embedding it in the archetypal legend of the powerful mage, the sinister alchemist, the perplexed chemist. 

Emergence from ketamine s anesthesia may be associated with psychological manifestations such as pleasant dream-like states, vivid imagery, hallucinations and emergence delirium, sometimes accompanied by confusion, excitement, and irrational behavior. The duration is ordinarily a few hours however, recurrences have been seen up to 24 hours postoperatively. No residual psychological... 

Patrick says he has finally made peace with who he is now (although he has recurrent dreams of returning to work and getting found out by the board of medical examiners). He takes out a big folder filled with letters from former patients and reads one. The woman writes that because of Patrick s skill, because he discovered something suspicious on her mammogram and insisted on a core biopsy, he found her breast cancer in its earliest stage. She thanks him from the bottom of her heart. There were so many patients like that, he says, choking up. 

Bizzari A, Crupi P (2013) Linking the recurrence time of earthquake to source parameters a dream of a real possibility Pure Appl Geophys. doi 10.1007/s00024-013-0743-1... 

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