Is LD a "psychotic breakdown"?

**largelylivin** · 10-29-2005 12:43 AM

Intro: Have clinical depression. On meds since 1995. Recently I started seeing a Psychologist who is both more helpful and alot more interesting than my Psychiatrist. Don't worry. Not suicidal, yet. Recently I started been "hearing things" while awake and concluding that it was something semi-normal like my wife coming home or my wife crying, but nobody is there. So, I was primed when this happened.

I was alone on my boat trying to go to sleep. From the beginning I had this loud engine sound running in my head. At first I thought my AC unit (under the bed) was on its last legs, but it got too loud , and listening to details I concluded that it was some other type of engine. I tried to ignore it and African drums joined in the rhythm with growing complexity and layers of percusion. I finally decided to investigate outside and see what this noise was. Before I reached the door I already knew it was inside my head because I was moving and the sound wasnt changing. Suddenly, I heard a loud whisper, clear as a bell, say "Help me". There was nobody around and no noise outside. I eventually went to sleep accompanied by an engine and an impressive array of African rhythm instruments.

This was enormously upsetting. I beleived that I had just had my first halucination since giving up drugs 30 years ago.

I ask my Psychologist to verify that at 50+ you can't develop Schizophrenia. Odds are strongly against it. He said the daytime experience was just my subconcious connecting noises with some reference point that my brain understood....my wife and I live alone, so its a natural association. This last event though he said was a hypnagogic event, which means that I had a "waking dream". If you google Hypnagogic you get 12 references to Startrek and one to this forum.

Now, I am remembering how I was a frequent sleep walker when I was child and early teen. Scared my mother to death. I'd sit and talk to her but she says I was always a much younger incarnation of myself, including my voice and vocabulary. NOw I remember my girl friend in college, now wife, complaining that when I was exhausted late at night I seemed to lose a solid grip on reality and slip in and out of some dream state.

So, does any of this hit home with any of you.

Maybe this is not the right forum, but I really didn't want to start with the trekies.

Maybe there is a scary story forum someplace.

**Khaz** · 10-29-2005 03:07 AM

I don't know what to say to all that....

I'm not very experienced, but none of that sounds like anything I've heard of.

I really am at a loss for advice, which is unusual for me. If this is an isolated incident, then I don't think I'd worry about it all that much. If it happens regularly..... Consult someone with some real experience.

Once again.... Really kinda freaky.

Feel free to explore for yourself what lucid dreaming is, just in case you're interested.

I didn't vote on your poll, by the way. I know I'm not insane, but that doesn't mean there's nothing you can learn here.

**justme** · 10-29-2005 03:52 AM

im not sure about that but were all crazy here or is it justme?

btw welcome to dreamviews

DV: Dream Views
LD: Lucid Dream
DJ: Dream Journal
DG: Dream Guide
BS: u should know that one

**Callista** · 10-29-2005 10:33 AM

LD is not a "psychotic breakdown"; if it were, the majority of the world's population would be in mental institutions! Basically, what we're doing here is exploring a normal part of what the brain does while we're asleep.

By the way, I have depression, too, though it's currently being nicely controlled by meds and counseling; and depression is awfully common anyway. It doesn't make you insane or dangerous or anything.

My advice? Stay here, figure out how your own brain works, and you may be able to figure out why you had that funny experience. And, at any rate, lucid-dreaming is fun and a nice escape from "real life".

I do wonder, though--what sort of drugs did you use when you were younger? Sometimes you can get flashbacks from some of them... maybe that's another possibility?

**nina** · 10-29-2005 12:18 PM

Hey there, welcome to the forum!!

And no, a lucid dream is certainly not a psychotic breakdown hehe. Hypnogogic hallucinations occur right before you enter a dream, we have them all the time we are just usually not aware of them. When you do something called a wake induced lucid dream, where you lay still and let your body enter sleep paralysis and you are completely conscious as you enter a dream and therefore automatically become lucid. Because you are aware through those stages you are aware during hypnogogia (hypno hallucinations, audio and visual).

What you described...the loud reverberating...like an engine running and the drums to me sounds alot like hypnogogic audio hallucinations. I used to think I had a brain tumor or something because before I knew what lucid dreams were I knew that before I would enter one I would get this loud pounding in my head and this loud buzzing/humming noise and sometimes it would sound like tibetan monks doing that low throaty chant. Strange.

I would say this was hypnogogic...except for the fact that you said you were moving. If you were laying in bed, say, and about to fall asleep or something that's fine. But if you were actually moving around and aware that you were moving around (and not sleep walking) then this couldn't have been hypnogogic. Now...it makes me wonder if you are sleep walking, or have some sort of sleeping disorder...and you are lucid during this sleep walking stage...then you would actually think that you were experiencing those hallucinations.

Wow! That's an odd thought, I wonder if that is even possible. In fact this is an interesting subject I think I'm going to start a new topic on it.

But since you've had strange sleep issues I can't help but think it has something strange to do with your dream self sort of meshing with your real world around you. Of course another explanation could be the drugs...in that they can stay in your system for years and years or even the rest of your life depending on the drugs and you can have flashback sort of experiences and hallucinations as a result.

My suggestion to you would be to attempt to explore this further. Try to have a wake induced lucid dream (read in the tutorial section about WILD) and see if what you experience during sleep paralysis and hypnogogia isn't already familiar to you.

Good luck and hope this helps.
-nina

**largelylivin** · 10-29-2005 04:18 PM

Oh Aguanina... you and your friends are so lovely. I am in a better mood now.

I didn't do any of the dangerous stuff that I know of. Just weed and speed. My friends always had LSD and mushrooms but they always managed to live me behind. I have always wonder if it was standard protocol to avoid introducing 'virgins' to the wicked stuff or if they sensed that I couldn't deal with it. Don't know. I understand a lot more about myself now than then. Maybe its good that I didn't do those other things.

With the exception of those random earlier conscious-dreaming-wlaking expieriences, this is my first. My Dr did suggest that maybe I actually did fall to sleep and didn't know it. I could have slept walked to the door or I could have dreamed that too. I don't think so, but maybe.

We I was a child I loved to dream and I became very good at deciding what I was going to dream about. (Say 50% successful). Sometimes I decided to continue the dream I had the night before. I also recall being able to 'direct' dreams at times, making them go inn some direction, or making them back-up and restart in a different way. Back then I remembered most of my dreams in great detail and they would sometimes become the subject of that days daydream.

I am 50 and a long long way from the innocence of childhood. For years I have only rarely been aware that I had a dream of what it was about eventhough I know that everybody dreams. Before I started taking the meds and a few times since then I have had periods of crazy twisted dreams. Not criminal, just so twisted that I felt like if I tried to explain them then I would surely be put away. More often than not, the twisted part would be when a dream character that I know in real life would morph into someone else that was real.

Well, this certainly is a interesting place. THink I'll hang around a while.

**nina** · 10-29-2005 05:31 PM

Thanks...glad you are going to hang around nice to have you here.

Hey quick question...what sort of meds are you on? Do they happen to be any sort of hypnotics like anti-anxiety stuff or tranquilizers or anything?

-nina

**largelylivin** · 10-29-2005 06:23 PM

I don't remember the dosages but they are generally high. Per day: 3 Effexor, 3 Welbutrin, 4 Buspar, 1 Clonasapan. I've have had pretty much everything, but always had trouble finding something that works and keeps working over the long haul.

The first was Paxil perscribed by my GP. Three weeks later I was in heaven. For the first time I understood that I was depressed and couldn't believe that (maybe) everyone else felt this way most of the time. It made me 100% impotent. I don't beleive that anyone can understand what that is really like unless you've been there. Hence, it is not possible for a woman to understand. I felt so good that I didn't even care. If that was the price of happiness I was prepared for a life of celebacy. After 18 months of celebacy I started gett.ing a little wierd. (a topic all in itself) and decided to see a pro. THe only bad experience that I've ever had to meds is when I was on Prosac. When I came off it after a year or so I realized that it was making paranoid and unstable.

Nowadays, I am stable but not that good and not improving. I have been essentially unemployed for three years. I've had contract jobs but the stress brings out the worst in me and I'm let go.

At the suggestion of my Dr I am trying to get on disability.

I should probably avoid talking about my problems in the forum as its too much of a downer. As you can tell I want to talk about them, probably need to. Anyone who is interested should email me directly.

**nina** · 10-30-2005 02:37 PM

Originally posted by largelylivin
I should probably avoid talking about my problems in the forum as its too much of a downer. *As you can tell I want to talk about them, probably need to. *Anyone who is interested should email me directly.

Hey don't think that! Alot of us are really just here to help in any way we can. Feel free to talk about anything you need to here, really.

I was just asking about the meds cause I was wondering if they would have some effect on your sleeping and causing what you talked about earlier to happen. It is possible though, especially if you are on benzodiazepines and such or others that it can have a large effect on being able to distinguish between wake/sleep at times. Just something to consider I'm no expert.