| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| shawnsmith |
Posted - 09/16/2007 : 16:43:04
Here is what Dr. Sarno says about dreams in Healing Back Pain. Below that quote read what Deepak Chopra says on the topic:
"The unconscious is subterranean, the realm of the hidden and mysterious and the place where all sorts of feelings may reside, not all logical, not all nice and some of them downright scary. We get some hint of the kind of things that inhabit the unconscious from our dreams. Someone said that every night when we go to sleep we all go quietly and safely insane because that’s when the remnants of childish, primitive, wild behavior that are a part of everyone’s emotional repertoire can show themselves without being monitored by the waking, conscious mind. The unconscious is the repository of all of our feelings, regardless of their social or personal acceptability. To know about the unconscious is extremely important, for what goes on down there may be responsible for those personality characteristics that drive us to behave as we do when we’re awake—and the unconscious is where TMS and and other disorders like it originate."
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Where Do Nightmares Come From?
Posted by Deepak Chopra, M.D.
on Fri, Sep 14, 2007, 1:44 pm PDT
http://health.yahoo.com/experts/deepak/1643/where-do-nightmares-come-from;_ylt=Ai2Xjfi39b.ErHuQbr_b.Kvc1IZ4
Question:
Please can you tell me where nightmares come from? Is there any need to fear them?
I have been having nightmares for some time I do not understand, as they are filled with violence and blood, and I am not a violent person.
Do the nightmares mean I am violent? What are they trying to tell me?
Answer:
Nightmares are usually the organism's way of processing some intense experience during sleep.
The content of the nightmare does not necessarily correlate with a similar real life experience; rather it is the emotional response that is similar.
So having violent nightmares doesn’t necessarily imply that you are violent under your social veneer, but more likely, the emotional reactions during your nightmares indicate the quality of some psychic trauma from your past that is now being released.
Love,
Deepak
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Sarno-ize it!
Read chapter 4 of Dr. Sarno's "The Divided Mind." Also chapers 3, 4 and 5 in Dr. Scott Brady's "Pain Free For Life" are very important. |
| 8 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| AnthonEE |
Posted - 10/26/2007 : 07:59:36
quote:
Originally posted by armchairlinguist
... where you can look at things from a lot of angles and more than one of them can yield insight.
I like this idea. Think about it, when does one ever get the best insight from looking at something from one angle exclusively. By looking at several angles entire new depths of perception are opened... literally! Maybe content of dreams should be best viewed with this idea in mind too (?) |
| armchairlinguist |
Posted - 10/25/2007 : 20:24:19
It's interesting to get other people's perspective on my dreams as well. :-) I actually thought that the dream might have to do with the inner child, and how I'm beginning to see how I am most myself when my inner child is shining through. I think it's a bit like tarot (which I've also written about a bit on here in the past) where you can look at things from a lot of angles and more than one of them can yield insight.
--
It's not 100% belief that's required, but 100% commitment. |
| stanfr |
Posted - 10/25/2007 : 18:37:58
Dreams have been a huge component of my recent treatment--the most common of my reccurring dreams have been anxiety dreams where i am either taking a test in school and running out of time, or about to miss an important class. The funniest dream along these lines was a dream i had once where i sat down to take a standardized test. The first question was convoluted and i had no idea how to answer. I thought no problem, next. Then i discovered that every question on the test was exactly the same as #1. That's when i pannicked 
ACL: Lidge is right on target. Always look to yourself first or people closest to you (father) for what the main subject in the dream represents. Father and son here clearly seem to be one and the same (different aspects of same person). |
| AnthonEE |
Posted - 10/25/2007 : 15:08:47
quote:
Originally posted by lidge
AnthonyEE- I often wonder what part any meds I take play into this. But the pain is very specific so I'm baffled. I wish I knew a nice healthy way to sleep through pain!
Me too! But sleep is a very funny thing, and I've learned there are few if any sleep meds that I feel comfortable with. With a few exceptions they all target parts of the nervous system that probably should be left alone. And dependence is a huge concern with many of them. When you can't sleep it can be one of the worst forms of torture. It may be that taking medication to sleep is for you better than the other alternatives. But if medication can be avoided in any area of your life, sleep is probably one of those areas if you can swing it. Just my opinion...
Obviously Shawn's post was intended to discuss the content of dreams and what it may reveal about the inner psyche. But it opens a very rich subject for discussion about quality of sleep, how medications affect that quality, and how it relates to physical health and recovery from pain and injury. But maybe that's not too apropos for a TMS board however (?) Probably more appropriate for conventional medicine to sort that out prior to a TMS diagnosis. But if people are willing to open a thread to discuss this further I'd be interested to explore it further. |
| lidge |
Posted - 10/25/2007 : 14:49:40
AnthonyEE- I often wonder what part any meds I take play into this. But the pain is very specific so I'm baffled. I wish I knew a nice healthy way to sleep through pain!
Armchairlinguist- is it possible that the characters in your dream are substitutes for you, your parents etc.? Separation issues?
That is what pops out at me. So many possiblities but the walking backward is interesting. Maybe symbolic of someone receding from your life but still wanting to connect with them? Just a thought |
| AnthonEE |
Posted - 10/25/2007 : 14:12:58
quote:
Originally posted by lidge
...I have heard anecdotally that Ambien reduces REM sleep and wonder whether the use of it exacerbated some of my problems.
Lidge, it is well known and documented that drugs in the benzodiazapine family: valium, klonopin, ativan, restoril, xanax, etc., have significant impact on the structure and quality of the sleep cycle, often increasing the latency of and shortening duration of REM sleep. The irony of this is that when you take these medications for sleep you wake up feeling totally refreshed and as if that was the best sleep you've had in years. But it may not be the type of sleep your body needs. And there is a rebound effect. I looked up Ambien and it is supposedly not in the benzodiazapine family, but several doctors strongly advised me against taking it while struggling to rebound off of a benzodiazapine.
Benzo drugs work by binding to a wide subclass of GABA receptors in your nervous system. Different subtypes of this receptor are each responsible for myorelaxant (muscle relaxation), anticonvulsant, sleep, anxiety/antianxiety, etc. These receptors are the very gears and wheels of the autonomic nervous system. Benzos hit many of them at once, each specific drug a little more of this and a little less of that. Ambien, while advertized as a non-benzodiazapine, is still targeted (selective) to a very particular subtype of the GABA receptor that promotes only sleep (so they say). And incidently, alcohol indiscriminantly hits most if not all of the receptors in one broad "dirty" sweep, that's why they give benzos to people suffering acute alcohol dependence and withdrawal.
Anyway, from all that impressive technobiobabble you can probably guess it might be better to let nature do it's own work when it comes to the autonomic nervous system, and not mess with what we shouldn't be messing with. These medications all screw up the sleep cycle in ways that are not good. And probably a bunch of other stuff too (did you key in on the myorelaxant receptors?)
Sorry to stray off topic, but I latched onto the Ambien comment. |
| armchairlinguist |
Posted - 10/25/2007 : 12:56:45
I have gotten a lot of good psychic info out of my dreams since I've started focusing more on the emotional content. The literal content is usually strange and rarely makes much sense; it's most often a repeat of an amalgamation of events and possible events from my daily life in a way that is a bit surreal.
Last night I dreamed that I was talking to this guy that I know vaguely, who has a daughter. In the dream he also had an austistic son, and I was meeting the son, and he was a nice-looking little boy but obviously very caught in his own world. Eventually the guy said that his son had to go home now, and the son went away (I don't know how because the guy was still there). But the guy also had to leave and as he was leaving he was walking backward up the stairs so he could still talk to me, and he smiled and I said to him "When you smile you look like your son. I know that sounds strange because people usually say that kids look like their parents, but when you smile there's something about you that changes and you look younger and happy."
I'm still a little mystified by what this dream might mean, but the strongest impression that I came away with was the feeling of happiness that I got from seeing him smile and then look like his son. It's kind of what I think of as the 'keymoment' when a true emotion comes through. It may be that I was happy to see his 'inner child' shining through, or something like that. But I think pre-TMS I would have concentrated on the surreality of the surroundings (which also involved driving down to Pool Blvd to go to the pool, and doing spring cleaning at my office) and not necessarily have noticed the important moment.
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It's not 100% belief that's required, but 100% commitment. |
| lidge |
Posted - 10/25/2007 : 12:31:42
Shawn's quotes below regarding dreams as a form of psychic information ( and release) got me thinking. The most widely held belief about fibromyalgia is that it is in someway related to "unrefreshing sleep" ie lack of REM sleep. The meds typically prescribed were low dose antidepressants like Elavil which presumably acted more as a type of sleeping pill.
Is it possible that the reason lack of REM sleep leads to physical pain (fibromyalgia) has more to do with the inability of the unconscious to discharge or process our psychic pain, which then manifests as physical pain (TMS)?
I wonder too whether some of the drugs we take for pain and to sleep actually wind up denying us REM sleep and perpetuating the problem. I have heard anecdotally that Ambien reduces REM sleep and wonder whether the use of it exacerbated some of my problems.
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