Or not necessarily nightmares, but weird or vivid dreams or hallucations. Anything along these lines.
I'd been having insomnia and depression due to a slightly malfunctioning thyroid and was put on Lexapro. I still needed something for sleep so was given Lunesta samples. I also had some Ambien from an earlier issue.
I don't recall any weirdness from Lunesta, but Ambien gave me some odd dreams and one very vivid one, though nothing terrible.
Then the thyroid condition cleared up and along came cervical radiculopathy, which is still getting on my nerves--literally--and the doc gave me a bottle of Lyrica to take instead of the other sleep meds.
I've since found that I have to be careful what I watch on TV or DVD before taking it, or else I will have the most profoundly disturbing, violent, psycho nightmares I've ever had.
Has anyone else here had similar experiences? With what sort of meds?
I have horrible nightmares whenever I have to take pain medications like Percocet, so I avoid that kind of drug when I can. I’ve used Lyrica and currently use gabapentin occasionally and never had dreaming issues with either of those.
I also had very vivid dreams when I was using nicotine replacement, even though I was taking the patches off at night. If I left them on I had nightmares.
Lots of people have had extremely vivid dreams when they fell asleep with a nicotine patch on, and Chantix is notorious for this too. I’ve taken Paxil for many years, and if I take more than 20mg a day (at one point, I was on 40), I have this as well; I did stop taking it for a while and did not get the “brain zaps” that many people complain of when they discontinue an SSI.
Ambien should never have gotten on the market, period.
Have taken virtually every sleeping medication known to man - and to the best of my memory - only melatonin seemed to significantly effect my dreams. I think some other drugs have to some extent, but I was surprised at how melatonin did - as a doc had previously told me it didn’t work any better than placebo (which may be true for sleep - but it does SOMETHING).
Ambien definitely has unusual nighttime effects on me (sometimes make food at night - with only a vague recollection - woke up with pudding virtually all over my face one time - but nothing with my dreams that I can recall).
Pretty much any opioid seems to do bad things to me. They make me jumpy and paranoid and cause weird physical sensations–the main one, I describe as a feeling of a cold wind blowing through my bones. If I manage to sleep under their influence, I usually have horrible Lovecraftian nightmares.
I find myself getting overly emotional and defensive whenever I hear negative things about Ambien. Probably that’s a bad sign, huh? I feel like it made me human again, since it’s the only thing that lets me sleep when I’m going through a bad bout of insomnia. I do have to be careful not to take it for more than four or five nights in a row, though, because then I have to relearn how to sleep on my own.
Sometimes I’ll have vivid dreams when I take Ambien, but not nightmares. In fact, it’s one of the things I like about the drug - other sleeping pills just made me feel like I’d been knocked out and hadn’t really slept.
Mr. Legend had to stop using nicotine patches because he started having “weird” dreams. He said he didn’t get nightmares, exactly, but his sleep wasn’t restful because of the dreams.