These Six Health Problems May Show Up in Dreams

Anybody who has ever had a fever knows the feeling of being vividly and often sick. upsetting dreams that can accompany a high temperature—after all, that’s where the saying “fever dream” Where it comes from. However, a dream can be a clue to a bigger problem than you think. You may be surprised to learn that your dreams can reveal more than you realize.

Dalia LorenzoMD neurologist at Baptist Health Miami Neuroscience InstituteI spoke with Best Life About sleep and our brains. “Sleep is super important,” She said. “If you calculate that you need seven hours of sleep every 24 hours for 80 years, that’s a lot of years of sleep time. There must be an important function behind us sleeping so much—and there is. When you sleep, you enter an orchestrated set of different stages. It’s a very active process that is very important for the neurons, who make us the people we are, to refresh themselves.”

Learn more about six common medical conditions that can creep into your dreams. Also, what doctors think about the surprising connection between our physical health to our subconscious.

READ THIS: Experts warn that if you’re having these dreams, it could be a sign of Parkinson’s disease..

If you’re anxious, that feeling is likely to invade your dreams—and the same goes for depression, according to researchers. “Chronic nightmares” Very common in psychiatric conditionsAccording to a study published by the Journal of Clinical Medicine Dec. 2020

Although data is not available and doctors may not agree on the same, there have been instances when patients were diagnosed with cancer following a disturbing dream.

Deirdre Barrett, PhD, Dream researcher Harvard Medical School author The Committee of SleepThe story was told Explore You can use Aspirations to diagnose and treat a medical problem “is controversial in broader medical professions.”

However, her book recounts the story about a dreamer who believed that a panther had attacked him on his back. The spot he had seen was cancerous when he woke from his dream. Another patient went to the doctor to have a spot looked at, and after being told it was benign, had a series of dreams about the spot—including one in which she was told to get it checked again. It was an early form of melanoma.

According to Explore, “Anecdotes like these are not uncommon, and some are far more dramatic.”

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An article published in 2003 Climacteric Women aged 40-64 had irregular heartbeats and chest discomfort. Have you had more nightmares? Their peers are often more attractive, especially after menopause. Researchers theorize that this is because heart disease decreases the amount of oxygen that reaches your brain—which can lead to bad dreams.

“I think dreams can access anything in our body or our mind, in the broadest sense, including things we’re not at all conscious of,” Barrett told Explore. “I think that dreams sometimes tell people about an illness that they’re not already aware of, and [before] any very obvious clinical symptom.”

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Scientists say that vivid dreams can be caused by excessive wine consumption. Real Clear Science explains that when you fall asleep while under the influence, rapid eyes movement, or REM, is suppressed. When your body has metabolized alcohol, you will experience REM sleep. “REM rebound,” Their experts will explain.

“When our brains are deprived of REM sleep, even for only a matter of hours, they compensate by boosting the duration of REM sleep and increasing the ease at which we enter this phase,” they write. “During REM rebound, dreams can also be more intense.”

If you’re consistently having upsetting dreams that keep you from getting a peaceful night’s rest, it could be a red flag to reconsider your drinking habits.

It may not be too surprising to find out that people with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), a chronic condition in which they stop breathing throughout the night, often dream that they can’t breathe. “Patients have had terrifying dreams of drowning or suffocation,” William Kohler, MD, medical director of the Florida Sleep Institute, told HuffPost. “In reality, their airway is blocked off.”

A 2019 study published in Frontiers in Neurology shed further light on the connection between dreams and OSA.

“Contradictory results have been reported concerning dreams in patients with OSA; while some investigators have reported less dreams in OSA patients, others have described that patients with OSA have increased dreams with emotional content, mainly violent and hostile content,” the authors wrote. “Although there are reports of respiratory-related dream content in patients with OSA, most studies that have assessed the dream content of patients with OSA revealed that respiratory-related dream content was unusual.”

Still, if you’re having dreams of not being able to breathe, it’s worth a visit to your healthcare professional to get checked for OSA, as the study also found that subjects who used a CPAP (short for continuous positive airway pressure) machine while sleeping reported having fewer nightmares.

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Do you thrash around in your sleep, moving your arms and legs in response to what’s playing out in your subconscious? If so, you may want to get checked for Parkinson’s disease.

“Not a lot of people know about REM behavior disorder, but it’s where individuals start to act out their dreams,” Lorenzo tells Best Life. “In order for us to not act out our dreams, the brain sends stimuli to paralyze us, so our brains are active, but our muscles are paralyzed. What can happen is some people can later lose this paralysis. While this can be caused by certain medications and alcohol consumption, if it’s not, it can be a warning sign that Parkinson’s disease is on the horizon in the next 10 years.”

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