I love lucid dreams. I guess that's no surprise, since I started this blog about lucid dreams. But one thing about lucid dreams did surprise me -- that I could get a headache or a migraine during one or just waking up from one. In the time I was the blogger at 451 Press' Dealing With Headaches back in 2008, I mentioned this and received a couple of responses from lucid dreamers that also felt ill or had a headache when waking up.
So, at least I'm not the only one. Now, in the waking world, I am a headache prone person. I get premenstrual migraines, migraines from caffeine withdrawal, migraines from lack of sleep, barometric pressure headaches (they're fun), headaches where I received concussions from years ago, sinus headaches and migraines just from getting looked at funny. (Okay, I'm kidding about the last one, but that's the way it feels like.)
Do vivid dreams cause headaches and migraines? This is still unknown. I feel that as someone who experiences headaches nearly every day, it's become a part of my normal life and perhaps my subconscious finds headache and migraine pain to be a normal part of existence.
Here's a long discussion of dreamers' experiences with vivid dreams, nightmares and headaches at MigraineAura.org. One interesting feature is that some migraineurs (people who suffer from migraines) may find that having a lucid dream or nightmare may predict if they are going to have a migraine that day. This would be a very unusual migraine trigger, but not entirely unheard of. How many women dream of taking care of a baby on the day before they discover that they are pregnant?
Still want to read? The issue of lucid dreamers suffering from migraines pops up in Lucid Dreaming: The Paradox of Consciousness During Sleep (Psychology Press; 1994), when a 1987 hypothesis from a book called Answers to Migraine (Macdonald; 1987) is bantered about that lucid dreamers with migraines may have "an enhanced degree of functional disassociation between the hemispheres." Before you start Googling what all of that may mean, the authors ultimately wind up dismissing this hypothesis.
So, what's the point? The point is that you can't expect lucid dreams to solve all of your headaches -- literally and metaphorically.
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Hard to tell if they are cause or correlation. Yesterday was hot and i skipped supper, so maybe it's physiological. But my dream was intense. The sleep is still lingering, like a heaviness in my brain. Perhaps waking up in the middle of a REM cycle is the issue.
ReplyDeleteWell I am neither a regular lucid dreamer nor a person with migraine.. Headaches has been very rare to me but still, WHENEVER I HAD A LUCID DREAM, I GOT A SEVERE HEADACHE AFTER WAKING UP. Incidents of lucid dreams are like 7-8 only from 2-3 yrs back till now, but still every time I have got a headache..:p including today..
ReplyDeleteThat's right, i am lucid dreamer as well as cluster headache sufferer.
ReplyDeleteCluster headache is smth similar to migraine as so far, and i got cluster attack during lucid dreaming. I think it's somehow related to REM sleep phase or smth like that, they are reported to trigger the attack