Tag: nightmare | In your dreams …

Episode 137 The Dream Show: Things that go bump in the night

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

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Have you ever woken from a dream only to find yourself in another dream? At first you think you are awake, but it slowly dawns on you that you’re still dreaming. And then it happens again, and again, until you might be excused, on finally waking up, to question your reality. Are you awake or still dreaming? How do you know you’re awake (after all, you were fooled in your dream)?

Or have you ever got into bed and felt the covers lift behind you, as if an invisible someone else has slipped in alongside you? Or have you woken in the middle of the night to see ghostly goings-on unfolding before your eyes or ringing in your ears? Are you as awake as you think you are, or are you half dreaming?

In this episode we explore these, and also look at the movie A Nightmare on Elm Street, where the characters experience some of these phenomena, and more. And, while we’re there, we interpret the nightmare in the movie as if it were a real dream.

Are other things that go bump in the night connected with the cheese you ate, the alcohol you binged, or the movie you saw just before sleep? We go there too, this episode, before ending with the intriguing – and uplifting – encouragement to change the world through your dreams, and how to do this.

Listen

(Our next show, episode 138, will be released in four weeks, on 3 May 2013.)

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A Nightmare on Elm Street

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

“What does the nightmare in A Nightmare on Elm Street mean?” asked Steve and Abbey, presenters of the PowerPack breakfast show where I interpret callers’ dreams.

I’m a movie lover, but horror is not my genre, and it took a few arm twists before I agreed to download it so I could answer the question.

“Don’t watch it alone,” Abbey warned, “I wouldn’t.”

So I watched it with my husband, Michael, and son, Euan, and right from the start we giggled with relief. Thirty-one years on, the movie was interestingly benign from a horror point of view. Maybe it was the acting style, maybe it’s the sophistication of today’s persuasive movie techniques, or maybe I’ve just listened to so many nightmares during my twenty-plus years as a dream analyst that it didn’t engage my horror buttons.

Our first exciting moment came when Euan said, Is that Johnny Depp?

Our first exciting moment came when Euan said, “Is that Johnny Depp?” and we realised we were watching Johnny Depp in his first major movie role, aged 21 but looking about 14. As Nancy’s boyfriend in the movie, he came to a very sticky end. Or did he?

How much of the movie is about a dream?

When Nancy wakes from a nightmare, is she really awake or has she slipped into a dream within a dream? Is she awake at the beginning of the movie? Is she awake when she goes back to school the morning after the first death? Is she awake when she visits the sleep laboratory? If you’ve seen the movie, how did you feel in the penultimate scene where she steps into the dazzling bright morning light, and walks towards the car? Was she awake then?

Craven named the villain after Fred Krueger, the boy who bullied him during his adolescent years.

Written and directed by Wes Craven, A Nightmare on Elm Street is a slasher movie, slasher being a horror sub-genre. I’m glad I didn’t know that going in. Craven named the villain, Freddy Krueger, after Fred Krueger, the boy who bullied him during his adolescent years, so it’s interesting that Nancy and her friends are all adolescents who live in fear of Krueger and what he’ll do to them.

The movie is celebrated as one of the first to intelligently explore the boundaries between illusion and reality – and between dreaming and waking life – by manipulating and confusing the audience. Craven’s original ending (spoiler alert) was for Nancy to kill Krueger by ceasing to give him her energy and time, and then to wake up and realise it had all been one long nightmare, but the studio, New Line Cinema, asked for a twist ending. Both endings were filmed, and the movie was released with the twist ending where the whole plot is a dream within a dream within a dream, with no awakening. Craven pulled out of the proposed A Nightmare on Elm Street sequel over the twist ending.

In the movie, Nancy and her friends all dream the same dream. Two of the friends die during their sleep, slashed to pieces by their nightmare ghoul, Freddy Krueger. Nancy and her boyfriend realise the same fate awaits them, so they try to stay awake for days, and days. This idea was inspired by several newspaper articles Craven had seen about Khmer refugees fleeing the Cambodian Khmer Rouge genocides who were so frightened by their nightmares that they tried to stay awake. Several died in their sleep when exhaustion prevailed.

Craven was also inspired by Dream Weaver, by Gary Wright, which explored the way we each dream up our experiences.

Craven was also inspired by the 1970s song, Dream Weaver, by Gary Wright, which essentially explored our differing perceptions of the world, our illusions about reality, the way we each dream up our worlds and our experiences.

So on one level the film explores illusion and reality, while on another it runs past some sleep theories. Nancy is taken to a sleep laboratory where we learn a little about REM sleep and dreaming – only to realise, of course, that this episode is a dream. We learn about how staying awake for days is fatally detrimental. Severe sleep deprivation kills. And we learn about false awakenings, the dream in which you dream that you wake up but you continue in the dream.

Let’s get back to the original question:

“What does the nightmare in A Nightmare on Elm Street mean?”

In the movie, Freddy Krueger was a real life child murderer who escaped jail due to a paperwork error. The parents killed him to keep the neighbourhood safe, but his ghost returned to take revenge on their children by killing them in their sleep.

It’s helpful to look at everyone and everything in a dream as reflecting something about the dreamer’s conscious and unconscious feelings and beliefs. Freddy Krueger represents danger and risk, and the more we try to sanitise life and play safe, the more these energies are called into being. In Craven’s original ending, Nancy wakes from her dream once she confronts Krueger then withdraws her attention and energy from him. In life, when we face our fears, understand them, deal with them, then withdraw our focus and energy from them, they disappear. In this context, the nightmare is about facing – or not facing – fears about danger, risk, and safety.

In Craven’s original script, Krueger was a child molester, not a child murderer, which is telling.

The other strong thread in the movie is adolescent promiscuity (remember, this is the early 80s), and loss of innocence. In the nightmare, teenage promiscuity leads to slashing, mutilation, destruction, death. No matter how much parents try to protect their adolescent children, the teenagers naturally explore their sexuality, and the results – loss of innocence, guilt, emotional trauma, an end to childhood – are reflected in such nightmares. In Craven’s original script, Krueger was a child molester, not a child murderer, which is telling. As a dream analyst, I notice how common it is for young teenagers to experience violent dreams as they encounter the conflicts of leaving childhood behind and growing into independence.

Finally, for Craven, perhaps the movie is an unconscious working of the bullying he experienced as an adolescent. Bullying continues to cause pain well beyond school years – it can haunt an individual for a lifetime unless it’s confronted and addressed. Maybe Craven did just that, via Nancy.

Have you seen the movie? What did you make of it?

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Episode 134 The Dream Show: Alchemy for all seasons

Posted on January 10, 2013 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

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You’ve heard a lot from me about the healing power of dream alchemy, but can alchemy techniques be used for healing or personal development outside the realm of symbolic dreams?

To set the scene and remind you what dream alchemy is, there’s the story of a dream alchemy visualisation I did for one of my dreams many years ago, with powerful results. Then we move on to explore how dream alchemy can be used to treat PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) sufferers whose flashbacks occur as literal-replay nightmares.

Finally we look at using alchemy practices beyond the world of dreams. Instead of working with your unique dream symbols to reprogram specific unconscious beliefs, waking life alchemy, carefully created to suit individual needs, helps shift limiting unconscious perspectives. Waking life alchemy is something I’ve developed and offered in The Compass, and use regularly with my mentoring clients. In this episode, I give you a taste of waking life alchemy, a recipe you can take and apply to your situation. Let me know what results you get!

Listen

(Ahem, although you’ll hear me announce this episode as Episode 135, it’s not. It’s 134. We only noticed when it was too late, all packaged and complete for you to enjoy.)

(Our next show, episode 135, will be released in four weeks, on 8 February 2013.)

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Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) nightmares: a cure?

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 2 Comments

Are dreams always symbolic? What about recurring nightmares in which the dreamer relives an actual traumatic experience, over and over again, sometimes several times a week, often for decades? This can be the case for people with PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder, a type of anxiety disorder following a traumatic experience). How can these replay nightmares be stopped? Can dream alchemy be applied to transform these kinds of nightmares and their underlying issues?

Nightmares following traumas are generally symbolic, seemingly unconnected to the actual event, but exact replays are more common for people with PTSD.

Nightmares disrupt sleep, leaving you tired the next day, as well as stressed about the scary nightmare and what it might mean about you and your life. Magnify that to exhaustion when you have the nightmares several times a week, compounded with daily anxiety about going to sleep and facing yet another replay of the long-ago trauma, and a sense of hopelessness about not being able to stop the nightmares: that’s what many people with PTSD suffer year after year.

On top of that, many suffering these types of nightmares can punch, kick, and hit their bed partners, adding to bedtime anxiety. When dreams occur in the REM stage of sleep, ‘sleep paralysis’ stops our muscles from acting out our dreams, but the kinds of nightmares associated with PTSD sometimes occur in other stages of the sleep cycle when legs and arms are free to move.

Nightmares following traumas are generally symbolic, seemingly unconnected to the actual event, but exact replays are more common for people with PTSD. So what is PTSD?

Diagnosis of PTSD references three main symptoms enduring more than 30 days after the event: reliving a traumatic event in a way that disturbs your daily life; feeling emotionally numb or detached from the trauma; and increased arousal in everyday situations.

Reliving may mean having flashbacks where the trauma seems to be happening again, recurring nightmares about the event, repeating memories, and strong reactions to things that remind you of the experience.

Feeling emotionally numb or detached from the trauma can manifest as not caring about anything, a lack of interest in everyday life, and avoiding anything connected with the event, as well as not being able to remember key details of the trauma.

Increased arousal due to PTSD can include being startled easily and having exaggerated responses, being hypervigilant, having difficulty concentrating, outbursts of anger or irritability, and difficulties sleeping.

Each sensory reliving embeds the trauma.

The danger of experiencing replays of the trauma, whether by nightmares, flashbacks, or repeating memories, is that these tend to be overwhelmingly sensory in nature, as if they are happening in the present tense. They are not so much thoughts about the event, or feelings that can be eased by considering context. Each sensory reliving embeds the trauma.

The standard treatment for PTSD usually involves cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which helps the sufferer to identify thoughts stemming from the trauma and replace them with less upsetting thoughts. CBT retrains the conscious brain to change perspective and response to situations that would otherwise trigger negative reactions. When CBT is effective with PTSD sufferers, nightmares featuring actual replay tend to stop, soften, or recur less often.

So CBT works with the conscious mind to reframe thoughts about the event.

The unconscious mind may persist with unconscious beliefs, feelings, and responses associated with the traumatic event.

The unconscious mind may persist with unconscious beliefs, feelings, and responses associated with the traumatic event. In this case, the nightmares – or other, more symbolic nightmares – will continue, and underlying issues stemming from the trauma may remain unresolved.

So can PTSD related nightmares be stopped when standard CBT fails to achieve this?

One treatment that is receiving a lot of attention at the moment is Imagery Rehearsal Therapy (IRT). Now, if you’re acquainted with dream alchemy, IRT is going to look familiar to you.

IRT involves rewriting the trauma-replay dream to change the trauma story, and repeatedly visualising the new, positive version, while awake.

In IRT, the sufferer thinks up ways to change the storyline of their nightmare so it’s no longer scary. With help from the therapist, they decide on the best rewrite of the dream and then replay the new version of the dream as a visualisation – while awake – a set number of times. This therapy stops the nightmare in many cases, or reduces how often it occurs.

What’s the difference between dream alchemy and IRT?

IRT involves rewriting the trauma-replay dream to change the trauma story, and repeatedly visualising the new, positive version, while awake.

Dream alchemy involves understanding the dream (interpreting it when it is symbolic), identifying the unconscious beliefs (sometimes based on traumatic experiences) that underlie the key issue, and rewriting either the whole dream or an aspect of it in a way that reprograms those unconscious beliefs into positive beliefs that automatically drive positive responses. The new version is repeatedly visualised*, while awake.

IRT reprograms the conscious mind and the dream storyline. The dreamer either dreams the new storyline or the replay dream stops. Deeper unconscious issues related to the trauma may be reflected in more symbolic ongoing nightmares and dreams, and remain unaddressed.

Dream alchemy addresses and resolves issues by transforming the underlying unconscious beliefs.

Dream alchemy reprograms both the conscious and unconscious mind and these changes are reflected in new, positive dreams. Dream alchemy addresses and resolves issues by transforming the underlying unconscious beliefs.

When therapies such as CBT or IRT assist sufferers to overcome PTSD and stop the trauma-replay nightmares, grief associated with the trauma may naturally resolve. When grief remains, or when unconscious beliefs related to the grief have taken hold (beliefs around perceived guilt, for example), these will be reflected in subsequent symbolic dreams. For those who remember their dreams, dream alchemy is a route to resolution and healing.

* Dream alchemy may be prescribed as a visualisation, affirmation, artwork, writing, bodywork, or other modality, depending on the dream and the dreamer.

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Episode 128 The Dream Show: When redundancy threatens and nightmares begin

Posted on July 25, 2012 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 2 Comments

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Around 20,000 public servants with permanent or long term contracts in Brisbane are expected to lose their jobs over the coming weeks. Some already know their fate, while others turn up to work each day not knowing whether their job will be axed or retained. What kind of dreams are they experiencing as they go through the mix of fear, despair, and perhaps even, for some, a little excitement as they contemplate new opportunities ahead?

My guest this episode is Belinda Reed, founder of The Day Brightener and Servant Hearts. As a Brisbane public servant going through this experience herself, Belinda created a new blog, www.servanthearts.wordpress.com and an associated Facebook page to help provide support, advice, inspiration, hope and heart for her colleagues and co-workers, many of whom are sleeping badly and experiencing nightmares and unsettling dreams.

Belinda Reed established the Servant Hearts blog to help Brisbane public servants facing around 20,000 job losses.

I invited Belinda onto The Dream Show to discuss the kinds of dreams her colleagues are experiencing, to help people worldwide who feel anxious about the security of their jobs, or who are in the process of being let go.

Belinda brings specific dreams to the show. There’s one from a woman who dreamed of chopping off her hair, and one from a man who dreamed of being on a bus of unsure destination. Other dreams included one about a hotel eviction and one about a rainy, flood-threatening day. And while you may read these short summaries and feel that their interpretations are obvious, the value in understanding these dreams at a deep level is that each dreamer gains specific insight into the aspects of their mindset that determine the way they view, experience, and respond to their situation. This leads to new awareness and the choice – aided by dream alchemy exercises – to experience the same situation in a less stressful, more constructive, and potentially richly rewarding way.

Whether you have job worries or not, there’s plenty to learn in this episode about dreams, why we have them, how they relate to waking life, and how we can use them to transform our waking life experiences for the better.

Listen, enjoy, and please share.

(Our next show, episode 129, will be released in four weeks, on 24 August 2012.)

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Best excuses

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

“Sorry I’m late, Miss. The budgie died.”

That’s the second best excuse I remember a student giving me when I was a high school teacher many years ago. I taught biology and general science for two years, which makes the best excuse I ever received quite interesting:

“Please excuse Mark for missing his lesson this week. He sprained his tendril.”

It was hard to keep a straight face when I read Mark’s Mum’s note, but I did. Mark hobbled a bit getting to his seat, whether for real or for show, so I’m guessing his Achilles tendon was the tendril in question.

I didn’t receive a note when another student missed classes for a few weeks because he was in court, accused of shooting his mate in the neck. Fortunately for his mate, the bullet just grazed the surface, destroying a butterfly tattoo but leaving the spinal cord and windpipe intact. The mate had wronged my student’s girlfriend in some way. “I went home and got my Dad’s gun and aimed at his heart,” my student reportedly said in court.

So much for my biology lessons then.

So much for my biology lessons then. Though no doubt my student felt his heart was very much in his throat that day.

This all came to mind when a dream client alerted me to The great Aussie sickie rort, a segment on A Current Affair (Australian television, Channel 9) this week. A sickie is Australian (Aussie) for a sick day off work, for which you sometimes need a medical certificate from a doctor stating that you are indeed sick and not fit for work that day. The segment claimed that Australians take more sick days off work than any other country in the world, and that people who are not genuinely sick – who just want a day off – often get certificates from doctors who sidestep their professional ethics in these circumstances.

Is “I had a bad dream last night” a valid excuse to take a day off work?

The segment showed journalists fitted out with hidden cameras fronting up to a number of doctors, asking for a medical certificate for a sickie. In some cases they said they were perfectly healthy and just wanted a day off. In other cases they gave what they regarded as lame excuses. One was, “I had a bad dream last night”. (Apart from one doctor who said it was unethical and that his practice would be at risk, the others all gave certificates.)

I’m not saying that having a bad dream is a valid excuse to take a sickie the next day, although a bad dream can be extremely distressing until you understand why you had it and how this insight can help you.

Dreams, once understood, help us to see beneath the surface excuses we often rely on to save us from facing our fears or accepting life’s invitations to evolve.

What excuses do you hear yourself give, either in speaking aloud to others, or in that tiny voice at the back of your mind?

What excuses do you hear yourself give, either in speaking aloud to others, or in that tiny voice at the back of your mind that says, “I can’t do that because ….”?

Make a list of your excuses – those you know about and those you notice over the next few days.

Then look to your dreams for deeper insight.

What lies beneath your excuses?

How can this deeper insight free you to move forward – with no excuses?

PS Kindle news

Kindle! I’ve launched my first Kindle ebook today! For all of you who have been asking for Kindle. More to come.

I’m delighted to announced my launch into Kindle.

So for those of you who have been asking for kindle editions of my ebooks, we started today with How to stop bad dreams and nightmares which you can purchase from Amazon here.

The rest will follow!

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Love your bad dreams

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 4 Comments

Here’s a simple formula to apply when you have an unsettling or frightening dream and you want to reduce the chances of having it again. Actually, it’s far more powerful than this. Not only does this formula ease your dreams, it also creates deep and lasting positive change in your waking life by subtly reprogramming your unconscious mind to solve the issue causing the bad dreams. Here’s what to do.

Love your bad dreams into good ones. Do this by rewriting your dream in your journal, or visualising it in your mind’s eye, changing the bad storyline into a good one, making sure that all your changes come from a place of love. Here are some examples.

Love your losses into founds, your deaths into births, your failures into successes, your limitations into freedoms, your lateness into smooth timeliness, your obstacles into open roads, your judgements into forgiveness, your muddy waters into crystal pools, your intruders into friends, your poverty into wealth, your wicked witches into good fairies, your broken down cars into golden chariots, your tsunamis into relaxing spas, your hurts into healings, your heavy luggage into uplifting wings, and your scary shadows into loving light.

When a wicked witch receives love, she can’t help but be instantly transformed into a good fairy.

The key is transformation. For example, don’t kill a wicked witch because this leaves a hole in your psyche. Everything and everyone in your dreams represents something about you and your beliefs and feelings about life, so anything you do to anyone or anything in a dream (or a dream rewrite) you are really doing to yourself. Transform a wicked witch into a good fairy by whatever way feels good to you when you rewrite your dream. Best of all is to use love as the transforming force. When a wicked witch receives love, she can’t help but be instantly transformed into a good fairy.

Finish your rewrite with a bit of wisdom and a happily ever after ending. Reread it, or replay it in your mind’s eye, over and over again, making sure you feel uplifting emotions and plenty of love throughout. Take that ‘happily ever after’ feeling forward into your day.

As you can see, Patricia has transformed the worried male alchemist in my last blog’s image of The Alchemist in Search of the Philosophers’ Stone, by Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797), into a radiant woman.

Today’s blog is from my book 101 Dream Interpretation Tips, and, talking of transformation, I know you’ll love this reworking of the image from last week’s blog, Alchemy and Dream Interpretation. Patricia Mottram, from Ayurveda TLC, reworked the image and sent it me saying, “I had to play with the picture of the old male alchemist who looks very worried that it’s all going to blow up in his face!”

As you can see, Patricia has transformed the worried male alchemist in The Alchemist in Search of the Philosophers’ Stone, by Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797), into a radiant woman. I have it on good authority that it is, indeed, Patrica herself. Nice bit of alchemy, hey?

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Episode 109 The Dream Show: Children’s nightmares

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

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How can you best help your children when they wake in the middle of the night distressed about a nightmare or bad dream?

In this episode, I take you through some simple practical steps that you can follow next time this happens, and give you some tips on what your children’s dreams might mean and how you can use this insight to help them gain confidence and wisdom as they grow into the world.

You might like to share this episode with parents who would really appreciate this help – and the prospect of a good night’s sleep.

A new podcast every Friday. Listen here or subscribe on iTunes.

Talking of which, what should you eat – and what should you not eat – before bed for a good night’s sleep? Listen in to find out.

Listen here (Episode 109) or subscribe to the whole series on iTunes.

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Sleep yourself skinny?

Posted on October 27, 2010 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

Do you ever wake in fright from nightmares? How often? According to new research reported by Victoria University PhD candidate Fabian Elzo, 16% of Australians (that’s nearly 1 in 6 people) wake in fright from a nightmare once a week. Previous research across the world suggests the figures are closer to 4-10%. So, do Australians suffer more nightmares? Elzo’s study group were all students aged 18-34 years, and perhaps that skews the stats, but either way, imagine the number of people all over the world waking in fright on any given night, not knowing how to stop this from happening.

Are you surprised the figures are so high? Many suffer in silence, fearful that admitting to having nightmares might cast aspersions on their mental stability, or – worse – that talking about them may make them come true.

A nightmare is just a dream, but with an added shot of adrenalin. Many of our dreams process our unconscious fears, but the really graphic ones can stimulate our bodies to produce adrenalin (the fear hormone), and it’s that combination of graphic horror and real heart-pumping, creeping goose bumped, frozen panic, that wakes us up in fright.

I give tips on how to stop nightmares in this video clip of today’s segment on Sunrise.

Can you sleep yourself skinny?

But I bet you’re waiting for the sleep yourself skinny bit, right? We chatted about this in today’s segment too. Recent research adds momentum to previous studies suggesting that disturbed sleep can disturb your metabolism, resulting in putting on weight. The new research suggests that people who regularly get only 4-5 hours sleep a night may experience disturbances of two important hormones – insulin and leptin.

Insulin normally controls your blood sugar and fat levels, and leptin helps control your appetite. This research suggests that only sleeping 4-5 hours most nights can result in your insulin storing more of your calories as fat instead of converting them into energy, while your leptin levels are so disturbed that you no longer get that full feeling when you eat, so you just keep on eating.

Can you sleep yourself skinny? No, but if you’re a short sleeper and you’ve been stacking on the fat, longer sleeps might redress the balance and you could well find yourself losing some of that extra padding.

If you really want to ‘sleep yourself skinny’, gather some dreams while you sleep and interpret them. Fat is often a bodymind issue, and dreams can reveal your unconscious emotional patterns and beliefs that are driving you to eat more, or to eat the wrong kind of food.

Food for thought. Sleep (well) on it.

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Bad dreams & dementia?

Posted on August 10, 2010 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

Recent research has got people all excited about a possible link between people who thrash about in bed while they’re dreaming and the later development of dementia, in particular, Parkinson’s Disease. Here’s a video clip of me talking about this on The Morning Show, Channel 7, this morning.

So let’s have a look at this:

Normally, we don’t thrash about in bed while we’re dreaming. We might toss and turn between dreams, and we might twitch during a dream, but that’s about it.

We’re protected from acting out our dreams by a mechanism called ‘sleep paralysis’. Your dreaming brain flicks a switch to inhibit your skeletal motor muscles from moving. You’re kept safely tucked up in bed, no matter what you’re up to in your dreams.

Some people experience a REM sleep behaviour disorder where sleep paralysis doesn’t kick in. When they dream, their muscles move accordingly. They act out the more dramatic parts of their dreams. They may kick, punch, jump, or even get out of bed. Some people experience this sleep disorder every night; others occasionally, maybe once every couple of weeks, and the episodes last about 2-10 minutes. If they wake up and describe their dream, it generally fits the movements they’ve been making.

(This is different from sleep walking and from restless legs syndrome, both of which occur in non-dreaming phases of sleep.)

It’s commonly believed that the dreams people act out are always bad or violent, but it’s more likely that all dreams are acted out but because the bad or violent ones involve more activity (punching, running away), they are more noticeable.

The dreamer, or his (people with this disorder tend to be older men) bed partner may be hurt – or killed – during one of these episodes. Controversy has surrounded cases where people have murdered their bed partners and claimed innocence due to suffering this disorder.

Back to the recent research:

Mayo Clinic researchers found a possible link between this sleep disorder and the later onset of dementia, particularly Parkinson’s Disease. They analyzed the medical records of 27 people who suffered from this sleep disorder and who all developed dementia up to 50 years later, and concluded that there may be a link.

Of course, this is NOT to say that if you have the sleep disorder you’ll develop dementia within 50 years. Plenty of people suffer this disorder and remain mentally fit and healthy into old age. However, this research may provide a clue to help neurologists understand dementia.

REM sleep behaviour disorder is treatable with drugs, so see your doctor to ensure a good and safe night’s sleep, for yourself and your bed partner.

Watch the video of me talking about this on The Morning Show, Channel 7, this morning.

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Tag Archives: nightmare

Episode 137 The Dream Show: Things that go bump in the night

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A Nightmare on Elm Street

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Best excuses

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