Thread: Do headaches affect dreaming?

I can't speak from any scientific stand point, but I agree than a bad headache seems to affect my dreams. I'm not sure if it is my ability to recall my dreams or the dreams themselves that are affected. I know when I sleep with a bad headache the pain can keep me from entering REM sleep (or from staying in REM for long) since I wake up every few minutes. In that case I sometimes have some vague, short, simple non-REM dreams.

Well if you are trying to induce a lucid dream, then the headache can definitely break your concentration and ruin your chance of getting a lucid.

For regular dreams however, I don't really know. When I go to bed with headaches I recall fewer dreams than I normally would, but I'm not sure a headache is the exact cause.

I often resort to sleep as relief for headaches.

Whenever I have a headache, I have like this crazy dream of me looking for something. I usually have control of myself, but I can't control the whole dream though. It's wierd.

A headache would likely affect your dreams. A migraine probably really would. Migraines being associated with low serotonin. Serotonin being pretty well associated with dreams(e.g. that's why 5-hydroxytryptophan affects most peoples dreams, it's a serotonin precursor), albeit not specifically lucid ones. Of course it's more the low serotonin causing the migraine than the reverse. I have very infrequent migraines (three four a year) so i can't really speak from experience. Incidentally i've noticed a reverse correlation as well. Any night I recall more than 5-6 dreams, which is a good bit, 344 is my normal, last night i wrote down 8 and i know i forgot at least a couple and I've had a mild headache all day. I've noticed that on nights with many dreams (at least many recalled ones) the next day i have a headache all day,

whenever I have headaches or feel sick at all, my dreams become very repetitive. I dont mean having the same dream every night but in one dream the same thing will happen over and over and over. Something random, like I'll ride my bike, crash, get back on then it seems to start over where I crash again in the same exact place and it goes on and on. that's just me, though, I'm not sure how many others would have the same experience

There may be a correlation however between migraine sufferers and LDers. Well, that's what I read a while ago.

When we feel a headache, we're experiencing enlarged blood vessels in the brain tissue. Often, the cerebral cortex is vastly affected, which means our memory is also affected to some degree. It's like trying to lift weights with a sprained wrist. Another major area of the brain affected while experiencing a headache is the corpus callosum. This is the right-left brain connector. Often a person who normally excels in math, for example, will have a difficult time focusing on a simple mathematical equation while experiencing a major headache on the left side of the brain. If experiencing a headache on the right side of the brain, your creativity is compromised. This is often where dreamers notice a lack of substantial dreams. Taking an anti-inflammatory, such as Aspirin, will help in not only relieving pain from the headache, but will bring down gray matter swelling, and thus increase overall neuron synapses.

Okay, I totally made all that up! If you thought it sounded plausible, then perhaps I'm a better liar than I originally thought! Oh, and don't go taking Aspirin without a doctor's note!

It's a matter of high arousal. High arousal in migraine and arousal in lucidity...