Thread: Pain after waking up

I had a non-lucid dream once where my right hand slowly got crushed between a large metal bar and a wall. The pain I felt kept getting worse until I woke up, after which I could still feel the pain in my hand. This pain faded quickly, however, and within a minute it was gone.

I don't know if the pain I felt when I was awake was a result of my dream, or that I felt the pain in my dream because I somehow hurt my physical body.

Originally Posted by Enjyu

I don't know if the pain I felt when I was awake was a result of my dream, or that I felt the pain in my dream because I somehow hurt my physical body.

I think that it was a result of your dream. As I had written, the same happened to me once. I wonder how long can my brain (ongoing feelings) be affected by dream state after waking up and how intense may it be. It is known that you can feel happy after satisfying dream and so on... Well, why you could not feel pain, or something else? How could you not retain this condition? Eventually, why could you not bring the dream sensation into the real world??? O_o

I've had a handful of similar experiences that I'll share:

I once was bit by a snake in a dream. The place where it bit me had two little bruises.

I once hit a sign in a dream with my head. I had a migraine that day.

I once pulled a fire elemental out of a fire pit that it was magically bound to. It burned me, my hand throbbed all morning.

The worst one ever, however, was when I devoured a demon sword to keep it from hurting anyone else. This requires some back story. I have engineered my left side to absorb and my right side to emit. The terminology I use is that I've got a personal void, the chakra on my left hand is a conduit to said void. Imagine Miroku's wind tunnel from Inuyasha. I absorbed the demon blade through my left hand, which sliced me up on the way in. It was quite the task and left my entire left side feeling heavy for about three days.

Some of these can be attributed to possible injuries sustained during sleep. Some, however, defy such explanation. I imagine that it is essentially the nocebo effect. Nocebo is like a placebo, except that instead of thinking yourself well, you think yourself ill. Our minds are powerful things. I would not be surprised to find that we can effectively conjure symptoms from the ether simply because we believe it hard enough.

I've had a lot of dreams in which I felt actual pain ... I can't recall it ever carrying over into my waking life, though. That's interesting.

This seems to be a common theme among many people, or at least those who pay attention to these kind of things. A quick search revealed not only threads about this here but elsewhere on the net.

Here are a couple relevant threads from DreamViews:
http://www.dreamviews.com/general-dr...ain-dream.html
http://www.dreamviews.com/nightmares...our-dream.html

I'm sure there are others around this forum also.

If done right this could make for an interesting research topic.

That happens to me every now and then, one most recently I had a dream that unimaginable amounts of thick puss will run out of an area of my body for awhile, in the dream the puss came out of my right cheek and when I woke up my cheek felt extremely irritated half the day.

This also makes me wonder if in-dream-therapy could be an effect treatment for pain.

Yea I've been getting this recently. Bad places to get pain.

I think it must be something to do with the brain reacting to things happening in the dream as if it's actually happening to your body (for what ever reason, maybe chemical based) and reacts as if it were to actually protect it, so the brain simulates pain and may seize up trying to protect your body as best it can as if something were really happening. One guy said he had bruises so this would kind of make sense. Your mind helps your body to heal by doing certain things.

By any chance do you have slight OCD?

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