ways to stop dreaming?

[IrisRavenstar]

I seldom have nightmares, but am often kept awake most of the night by family members yacking at me in their sleep, and had suffered terribly from insomnia for years.

I started taking Melatonin, a chemical produced by the body (but for some of us in insufficient quantity), and found in cherries, to help me sleep. I find Melatonin at the health food store or Stop & Shop carries it as well. I take only a 1 mg tablet, just before bedtime. You could also drink cherry juice or eat cherries and get the same result, but Melatonin tablets are cheaper, as cherries have a short growing season. To regulate your sleep cycle, try to plan to go to bed at the same time every night, or close to it, and try to plan for eight hours of sleep. You might need more than 1 mg... I'm hypersensitive to everything so, I take smaller doses. They usually have 2 and 3 mg. tablets as well. But start with 1 mg. You can also take another midway through the night if you wake up and can't get back to sleep.

When I'm stressed out a lot, I also like a single capsule of Valerian Root (the bottle usually says two or three, but again, I'm sensitive, plus my guide says with herbs it's more an energy thing than a dosage thing), but don't take that unless the melatonin isn't working. And with all herbs, please research them for yourself, and decide whether you want to use them and be sure you understand any possible side-effects. A good book for that is: _Prescription for Nutritional Healing_ by James and Phyllis Balch. He's an M.D. and she's a certified nutritionist and herbalist.

Using dream pillow herbs can also help, especially lavender which is very relaxing, and using the White Light Shielding I posted in the nightmare section can help as well!

I now mostly only remember my morning dreams, but those have always been the meatiest ones anyway, seeming to sum up what came during the night. I actually miss dreaming more, but I don't miss listening to all the yacking from family all night long! But then nightmares aren't a general problem for me, except ones where I beat up my ex shockingly... trying to pay him back for all the emotional abuse that used to be.

Anyway, I hope that helps, and if there's anything that wasn't clear, feel free to ask for clarification.

All best...

[.Nia mor]

Yah, I understand why you want stop dreaming, you shouldn´t fear -try to remember that it is YOUR dream-, listen those who have experience (post above)

[paulg303]

I also suffer from extremely vivid dreaming that makes me feel as if I haven't sleept at all most nights because I feel like I'm awake all night with my dreams. Sometimes I can feel myself slipping into dreams before I'm even fully asleep, which makes me think that dreaming can happen outside of REM sleep. Most of my dreams are pointless tasks (like trying to fix a wobbly table for several hours), and irritate the hell out of me.

This can become a devastating problem and I've been dealing with it for about 4 years, and here's what I've noticed has helped or hurt my situation.

Things that have made my dreams more vivid:
*Celexa (citalopram) - my doctor prescribed me this for anxiety, thinking that anxiety might be the cause of my extreme dreaming. In fact, this made my dream problem many times worse, causing me to wake up very depressed and not able to make the distinction between reality and dream-land.
*OTC sleep meds - some people I've talked to say their dreams decrease when on sleep meds, but I had the opposite response. Benadryl (diphenhydramine hcl) seemed to be the most neutral. But I was experimenting with these to address my dream issue. Since none of them improved my situation significantly, and since I don't really have problems falling asleep at night, I stopped this.

Things that have helped me:
*Marijuana - If I smoke some weed before going to bed, it turns my dreams off like a switch. This is the only treatment that has worked for me, but has some obvious (legal) drawbacks. Of course, there's not really any doctors in weed-friendly states that will prescribe weed for this disorder, since nobody thinks that vivid dreaming is a real problem.
*Drinking (alcohol) - If I've been out having a few drinks, my dreams will mellow out that night, but this isn't a really feasible treatment just because I (obviously) awake the next day not feeling rested (and sometimes hungover).

I've been trying a lot of different things over the years, and wanted to share what I've found. This is such a rare problem that it's hard to get people (and doctors) to take you seriously when you tell them that this is severely affecting your life.