Every time i am sick and have a fever and try to sleep, i either have strange, vivid dreams or i am sort of half asleep and delerious. Why is this?
Hell, we don’t even know why people have regular, non-vivid dreams.
I guess that wasn’t real helpful, but I doubt there’s a valid answer to that one. Lots of hypotheses, but not much real knowledge. Fever itself can cause altered perception and even hallucinations in an awake person, so doubtless such effects would be enhanced during sleep, with less “real” visual and audio stimuli to help focus on reality. But that’s just a wild-ass semi-educated guess. Higher temperatures do also cause altered release and uptake of neurotransmitters in animals, so there’s probably a mechanism there which applies to humans.
QtM, MD
That’s your brain cookin’, son.
My WAG is that when you are sick, all the pain and/or discomfort means you are more likely to wake up in the middle of a dream and thus remember the dream.
Yes, but the dreams are qualitatively different. I’m someone who remembers my dreams on a regular basis. When I’m not sick, they’re very vivid and complex, but they have a certain logic and structure which I can easily recognize. When I’m sick they become completely bizarre and unpredictable. My normal dreams are crisp and clear, like watching a movie, while dreams when I’m sick tend to be hazy and distorted, like some of the weird camera techniques used in a movie from the 1960’s.
Well, you’re very likely not sleeping very deeply, and dream sleep occurs when you are close to being awake. This leads to a much higher dream awarness, and if you’re drifting in and out of sleep, you’re likely bordering on lucid dreaming. The hazy, distorted aspects likely arise from the hypnogogic/hypnopompic hallucinations that occur right on the border of awake/asleep.
Trigonal is correct.
Usually, my feverish times is with an illness that leaves my nose stopped up, makes me hurt all over, and running hot and cold. All these things add up to not sleeping peacefully. Thus, the results that Trigonal points out.
Normally, one only remembers the dream that one wakes out of. When the REMs of sleepers are noted, it shows that they have several dreams a night, but they report they only remember one dream – the one they wake out of.
If you’re feverish, stopped up, in pain, too hot or cold, then you’re gonna wake up often to all sorts of weirded out dreams affected by your physical discomfort.
Also, if you’re not getting four hours of uninterrupted sleep, then you’re probably not getting enough deep sleep (stage four, IIRC). That also scrambles up your brain.
I remember one cold I had which made me so stuffed up and so restless, that I didn’t sleep more than two hours of sleep at a time over the course of a few days. It got to the point that whenever I closed my eyes, I would start to see dream-like scenarios quite vividly, even though I was still wide awake. Though I’ve never been high in my life (with the exception of a few seconds of consciousness before anesthesia kicked in), I imagine that is what far out trip is like.
Peace.
Oh I don’t about that Qadgop.
We (psychologists) have been studying dreams for quite some years, millennia actually. Granted then we were not called psychologists but soothsayer’s.
In the area of cognitive psychology, the idea that dreams somehow change when one is sick either with a fever or not, is not a new one. Some psychologists have attributed it to infection, germs of some kind, lowered white blood cells do to the fight against the illness, Viral origins etc…etc…
In the case of the fever, your body is most likely allowing you to go into a deeper sleep, theta-state I believe and when this happens, if you are not used to it, your dreams become more obscure and far-out.