When I went to India I had to take anti-malaria medicine. The pharmacist warned me that one of the more common side effects were “vivid dreams”.
Vivid dreams, indeed!:eek: That stuff gave me the craziest, whacked out dreams EVER.
I’ve had some real doozies in my life, but the dreams those pills gave me put anything Stephen King or Clive Barker ever wrote to shame. They were a real hoot.
I’ve noticed recently some meds being advertised that state the side effects also being vivid dream.
My questions are, what is in some medication that causes such dreams. And, would it be feasible to market a pill whose sole purpose was to cause such dreams?
I must say that while I don’t know the answer to your first question, I really kind of like it. Also, I’m pretty sure the answer to your second question is, “Maybe, but somebody would put a stop to it.” And, garlic.
My dad took Chantix, the anti-smoking med, and he reported odd, vivid dreams. Apparently that stuff can have some other shitty side effects like making you want to kill yourself/others. We joked that dad was gonna kill me and mom in a drug-induced homicidal rage. And he went back to smoking after taking it anyway :dubious:
Weird. I had to take it a lot for skin probs in the past but I never got any strange dreams. I kind of wish I had…I like weird dreams. Sometimes I have crazy ones even now, off meds.
I used Chantix about a year ago to stop smoking. I rarely, if ever, remember my dreams. When I do they are all about really boring tedious stuff like packing for a trip or bargan shopping for groceries. (anyone want to take a stab at what that says about my sub-conscious!?)
So, on Chantix, at first my dreams were extremely vivid and bizzare and I could remember them clearly. After about a week I started being able to have lucid dreams. Never could before or after. But during the 3 month time I was on it all I wanted to do was sleep because of the cool stuff (and people) I could choose to do.
Man I miss flying above the snowy town to my love nest with Kelly Kapowski!
Lortabs/Vicodin make me have krazy dreams. Cough syrup containing DXM will do it too, and can also make you mildly trip at lower doses (and wildly trip at higher ones.) Indeed, I always take a little extra of the stuff whenever I have a cough, and enjoy the low-level hallucinations before I drift off to sleep. You sort of have “waking dreams” for a while, like dream-y stuff will flow through your head but you’ll be conscious and fairly lucid at the same time.
This is a possible (and in your case actual) side effect of Wellbutrin. I’ve taken it and my dreams were no different. The panic attacks, on the other hand…
Yeah, when I was quitting smoking on patches, the instructions said take 'em off at night: if I forgot and left 'em on while I slept, I’d get incredibly lucid, almost hallucinatory dreams. I’m prone to nightmares, but these were quite different.
FWIW, here are nine pages of patient reports of vivid dreams associated with a whole host of medications (just search the pages for the phrase “vivid dreams”). In addition to SSRI’s (Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, etc), doxycycline, nicotine replacement, and anti-malarial drugs, another fairly common culprit in this regard are meds of the beta blocker class, e.g. metoprolol, atenolol, etc.
I’ll chime in and confirm that hydrocodone in its many forms (like the Vicodin mentioned upthread) can cause lucid dreaming and in one particularly disturbing personal instance, sleep paralysis (when I took a Percocet and a slow-release form of Oxycontin).
I take B6 to relieve PMS symptoms and notice that when I take it close to bedtime I experience XtremeDreamn (my new made up word :D) I know B6 is not a drug.
Ambien. Take it and it suppresses dreams. Come off it, and you enjoy “rebound REM.” Most vivid dreams I’ve had in years.
Interestingly enough, I took Ambien to help me sleep while on Wellbutrin. Wellbutrin alone never gave me vivid/crazy/bad dreams, but it did give me wicked insomnia when I first started taking it, so the Ambien counteracted that in the beginning.
(Other than that, I will swear by WB… miracle drug for me, minimal side effects).