Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007
Status: offline
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To the OP,
It's just nightmares.
Unless it's really messing up your sleep for a long period of time, just let it resolve on its own. Practice good sleep hygiene (look up the term on Google or Wikipedia). Spend a bit of time soaking up the impressions from your new environment, and write letters to your family, telling them what the new place is like. That will help consolidate the new impressions during your waking time. Phone calls also work, but are less effective. Tea, exercise, lucid dreaming and so forth is pointless in this connection, and may even be counterproductive. Your brain has a lot of new impressions to process and correlate, and needs to make adjustments. It does so during sleep, or as a part of the process of structuring the impressions to convey them to others. The unfamiliarity and stress are adequate to cause the dreams to become nightmarish.
It will pass.
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ORIGINAL: windchymes
She said her doctor determined that her brain didn't produce enough serotonin and the nightmares were a reaction from that.
In all likelihood, the doctor didn't determine anything at all. However, he was also most likely correct. Rapid drops in serotonin activity are associated with vivid dreams, nightmares, night terrors, difficulty waking, dreams inside dreams, and a host of other symptoms, something which has been well documented in patients tapering off older (i.e. effective) antidepressants, particularly those tapering down from very high doses of Parnate, where a slow taper is critical to avoid sleep disturbances. Some patients find sleep aids useful while tapering. Nightmares alone are insufficient grounds for any conclusion. In the case you mentioned, the doctor had more to go on: the vivid nature of the dreams, and the failure to wake from them.
I know intimately how this works.
quote:
ORIGINAL: Termyn8or
You're out on a limb here, and it doesn't look sturdy.
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ORIGINAL: subMark23
Lucid dreaming is not the answer. That engages parts of the brain that diminish the efficiency of the sleep cycle. Don't get me wrong, lucid dreaming is a powerful tool, and can be well worth learning. The hand trick is nice, but in my experience, few people have the ability to consciously remember to do so while caught in a dream. It is generally more reliable to establish waking-time habits that will reveal whether one is dreaming, whether in response to specific situations (e.g. looking at one's hands every time one sees a specific thing that tends to be present in a dream), or as a general habit (e.g. checking that text doesn't change in books, etc.).
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ORIGINAL: FangsNfeet
Reducing sleep time to six hours, as a general rule, is not advisable. It is too short for most people, and may result in microsleep episodes, which can be quite dangerous if the timing is off. Making do with less sleep is a predictor for abbreviated lifespan. As a general rule, the total amount of sleep, whether it is normal monophasic sleep, or some polyphasic schedule, should aim for eight hours or two sleep cycles, whichever is more. Polyphasic sleep allows less sleep without health effects, but will generally cause difficulty in a culture that relies on monophasic sleep to regulate schedules and business activity. The cognitive effects are variable, ranging from none to improvement in some areas with decline in others.
Health,
al-Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: Natural remedies- Nightmares - 
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