[nitpick]IANAD, but IIRC you actually have at least two dreams every night–it’s just that you mayn ot remember them all the time.[/nitpick]
Sorry to hear about the nightmares. I haven’t heard of that effect before. Does it matter what time of day you take it? Have you changed the time of dosing around to experiment with this variable or any other variables?
When I got off Effexor, I had the worst headaches I can remember, and I was very dizzy.
I also gained weight as a side-effect of taking Effexor, and it made me sleepy, which is part of why I stopped taking it.
Still haven’t found an antidepressant that’s effective for me. I’m trying the “stop it” self-help method. It was a joke, a skit on SNL or MadTV, can’t remember which. The guy goes to his therapist and says he has a fear of snakes, and the therapist just yells “Well STOP IT!”. I do that to my depressed thoughts.
Weird thing is, it’s been working quite well for over a year now. Maybe I should publish my research. 
You’re correct of course: The proper way to say it is that I have one dream a month that I remember. 
However, going from that to four a night was still a bit of a shock.
Actually, it turns out this isn’t all that uncommon a side-effect of many anti-depressants. The doctors whom I had spoken with about it were familiar with it. And I dealt with it by using (with doctor supervision/permission) a medication I’d been given once as an anxiety med. I’m innured to the nightmares, they’re a lifelong thing, I just wanted to be able to, if I needed it, guarantee a night of dream free sleep, and the anxiety med would do that. Please note, this was not a drug being taken daily, but something I had at home that I could take if the dreams got to be too much for me.
I took over ten weeks to come down from Paxil, which was about right for me - I’d decrease by 1/8 of a pill every week-ten days or so. It really does take that long.
Glad to hear you have relief when you need it. I don’t think I could handle that side effect. I’ve never had nightmares consistently, and I don’t think I’ve had one for a couple of years now (maybe one or two).
I did a Psychology project on psychiatric drugs and never came across nightmares as a side effect of antidepressants–I believe you, it’s just interesting that this didn’t come up in the research I did, which included scouring the American Psychiatric Press Textbook of Psychopharmacology. Maybe this tells you something about the APA? I dunno.
Wow. I am so glad I found this thread. I take 150mg of Effexor a day, and recently switched from taking it in the morning to taking it at night. I missed a couple of doses due to this, and had the woozy head for a few days. Good to know what caused it, and now I don’t think I’ll miss any more doses.
It’s NOT addictive. You don’t HAVE TO take it and it is not like an addictive substance in that you don’t crave it. There are just some interesting effects when you stop taking it, be it from forgetfulness or, as in my case, pure laziness. Hell, most of us wouldn’t know about those effects if the stuff were addictive–have you EVER heard a heroin addict tell of going cold turkey because he was too big of a deadass to to score?
And these effects aren’t all that bad; as Hamadryad says, some of us whose earlier lives were less, um, well-balanced than today can even find them kinda fun. And so what if we have the occasional auditory hallucination if we’re late for a dose? It still beats the hell out of what we were going through before we started. Though I admit I miss the VISUAL hallucinations.
I haven’t had the bad dreams; mine have continued to be the boring and mundane ones I’ve always had. But I try to cherry-pick my side effects. Effexor can cause one to be constipated but the Prozac I took before loosened me up so bad that my bowels appreciate the vacation.
I’m on Lexapro, and my dreams are definitely more vivid than before meds (they were with Paxil and Celexa too). They aren’t violent but they just seem much more real and close to the surface. Sleepiness and yawn bug me too but I am used to them after this many years. Better to sleep through the night then wake up with panic in the wee hours.
I also have a just-in-case bottle of Ativan for when I do get panicky despite the SSRI.
I am working on weaning myself off Paxil, and something that I’ve found to be effective is to balance out the dosage decrease with St. John’s Wort. So, if you’re taking 40 mg of Effexor, try taking 30 mg Effexor and 10 mg St. John’s Wort.
My doctor recommended stepping down very, very slowly—for example, if you’re taking 40 mg, take 40 one day, 30 the next, and alter 40-30-40-30 before going all the way down to 30. Do 30 a while before stepping down to 30-20-30, etc. I started at 40 and now am at 20-10-20-10, etc. after a period of about five months.
Additionally, I’ve also found that Dramamine (motion sickness medicine) is really effective for the peculiar dizziness and some of the “zapping”.
Interesting reading how Effexor affects everyone differently. I lost about 20 pounds when I first started taking it, then gradually gained it back, never went beyond my original weight though.
I had very, very weird dreams also. Mostly violent and always in the third person perspective. Strange.
The problem for me was I went from one extreme to the other. From deeply depressed and angry to I don’t care if the sun doesn’t shine. We seriously suffered with our finances because I just could not be bothered to pay the bills! Everything just seemed too much of a hassle. My poor DH had to do everything the last year. I didn’t care if we ate, had clean clothes, nothing affected me. Everytime I tried to think about something important, I had the Scarlett O’Hara syndrome - I’ll think about that tomorrow. Crap!
I personally think no anti-depressant should be given without therapy to go along with it. The whole point is to try to find a way to live without the pills, well to me anyway. I love the saying, “Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm”. It seems to fit my circumstances.
I wouldn’t combine St Johns Wort with an SSRi or an SNRI unless my doctor said it was a good idea. Personally if my doctor said it was a good idea to combine the two I’d be shocked. SJW appears to work similarly to an SSRI and herbal medicines are not famous for being consistent in their contents. there’s no way to be sure that the combo is safe.
SJW’s good stuff but for the love of OG don’t combine it with other meds.
This is a fun thread to read on a Saturday morning. I just started on a double dose of the stuff. *:: making sure I have post-it notes everywhere to remind me to take my Effexor on time :: *
Please understand, I don’t claim the nightmares are an effect of the medication. The medicine makes it so that many people have many more dreams that they remember, and they tend to be a bit more vivid. My problem is that I’m the one coming up with the nightmares 95% of the times that I recall my dreams.
And I don’t know about textbooks, but all the providers I’ve ever discussed this with were well aware of the increased dreaming rates. 
I was on Celexa last year, and my doctor warned me of the more frequent and vivid dreams side effect, and I’m pretty sure I was told the same thing when I was on Welbutrin before that.
When I was on Effexor, I never really had nightmares, just very odd dreams for a little while. When I wanted to stop taking it, I was able to wean myself off in a week or so, just by lowering my dosage from the 300 mg to 175 mg capsule. I do remember, however, forgetting to take my pill once while on the 300 mg dosage…let’s just say, I never forgot again. I felt like total dookie, and had to be at work while suffering.
Oh, OK. Sorry for misunderstanding you.
Strange. I don’t have the book anymore, so I can’t tell you whether I somehow missed it or not.
Sorry…had a blonde moment and got my dosage amounts confused. :rolleyes:
[QUOTE=fetus]
Oh, OK. Sorry for misunderstanding you.
[quote]
Not a problem.
Well, it’s quite possible you didn’t think of it as a potential drawback. Many people whom I think of as normal dreamers would find the idea of more frequent and vivid dreams a good thing, something to be welcomed. I know I had one roommate in college who took 9 months before he actually began to believe me that I didn’t want to remember my dreams.
Hadn’t thought of that–that is indeed quite possible. However, I can’t tell you for sure what I was thinking at the time, so I guess we’ll never know. Oh well.
I used to have lucid dreams all of the time (not just vivid, but lucid–to the point where I could often control what was happening in my dreams). I hardly ever remember dreams now, which is actually pretty comforting to me. It’s not that my dreams are bad–as I probably mentioned earlier in this thread, I haven’t had a nightmare or especially unpleasant dream in years–it’s just that I’m perfectly comfortable with the fact that I can remember what happens to me when I’m awake and not when I’m asleep. I rather like it–it almost seems like a burden I don’t have to deal with anymore.
Just wanted to say that I really hope you didn’t mean to say that your roommate took your Effexor for 9 months. :eek:
Sidenote: Your code apparently forgot its meds.