This is just something I think about from time to time. There have been studies and numerous acknowledgement a that the mind of someone in a psychotic episode functions remarkably similarly to as if one was dreaming. Delusions are the plot of the dream, which the dreamer is compelled to follow, unless they have learned lucidity. (There has been a study using lucid dreaming as a way to help train schizophrenics to become aware during psychotic episodes that was proven beneficial, but the research was difficult to continue as it was hard to find those capable of lucid dreaming and also psychotic) The hallucinations are the inhabitants of the dream.
Hallucinations and delusions should shift based on the emotional state as well as life themes of the schizophrenic, just as dream content does for the dreamer.
What if schizophrenia is a condition very similar to narcolepsy? In narcolepsy, a person passes directly into REM sleep (where the most vivid dreams are had) and is marked by muscle weakness and basically the person falling asleep all the time. What if schizophrenics pass directly into REM sleep during psychotic episodes, only donât actually lose consciousness and collapse as narcoleptics do, instead living out the dream in real time and losing complete touch with reality, like extreme sleepwalking? Neurons responsible for REM sleep are often seen to be over active in schizophrenics. Also the issue of insomnia with schizophrenics could possibly be due to the fact that much of their time awake is already spent dreamingâŚ(not that dreaming is the same as sleeping, but still.)
Just something to think about. I would love to start research on this some day. Thereâs just not enough of it out there.
Although i suppose itâs related to the interdimensional travels of shaman because they to see almost all of my visual âhallucinations.â Hallucinations that have even physically harmed me three times now.
How does a sleep disorder tell me who will win the superbowl twice, once two weeks before the game?
and why did i wake up exactly at 4:44 today. Always with these numbers, you see an alien and a greek god and you start looking at the same times on the clocks repeatedly? Not a sleep disorder.
Iâm trying to teach my kid lucid dreaming. He has a lot of nightmares and they will go away once he learns to control his dreams. It worked on my older kid. I gave him my motorcykle (from my dream) so that he could escape the monsters. Efter four nights he remembered the bike and turned the nightmare to a controlled dream.
Yes, thatâs what is.You could test out your theory by having observers watch someone in a psychotic episode and see if heâs sleeping. I was wide awake during my 2 1/2 year psychosis except at night. I was fully aware of what was happening around me. And at night, I went to sleep. But yes, occasionally it was like a dream.
Well no, they wouldnât be asleep. If they were asleep it would be narcolepsy. Theyâd be actively dreaming while awake.
You could easily test similarities in brain wave patterns through EEGs. However, getting someone whoâs in the midst of a psychotic episode with little grip on reality to sit still while someone sticks stuff on their head is probably easier said than doneâŚ
I was awake, when I caught 2 cars that followed me yesterday. No delusion thoughâŚit was a legit paranoia. My voices woke me up this morning, but that would be great if that hypothesis became theory. Iâd enjoy sleeping through the episodes.
schizophernia is defintely a sleep disorder .accoring to ayurvedic theory a person whith schizophernia does not have rested sleep and this cuases most of the problems with schizophernia .in ayurveda it is known as false sleep . the herb centella asiatica is used to bring the person ârested sleepâ so that his body recovers .
in alternate medicine called orthomolecular medicine pioneeeroed by abrm hoffer and carl pfeiffer they found many schizopherniacs could not remember dreams a problem which they believed caould be solved by giving extra b6 to the point of dream recall .interestingly centella asiatica is also a high souce of b6
During some of my research I have come across some things and I think there may be something to this idea. The same part of the brain that functions during sleep that doesnât question whether something is probable, likely or possible continues to function while awake. Also parts of the brain that usually shut down during sleep, doesnât.
Its chemical you know, so blaming it on sleep, is a way of saying there is nothing wrong with you.
Normal people can be deprived of sleep and have hallucinations.
BUT when they rest up they will get better.
Not so for sz, that can be a waking nightmare.
I think your onto something with this one my boyfriend says he gets paranoid when hes overtired and he doesnât have mental illness my main problem all my life until I was medicated was insomnia it stopped me doing normal things like going to college.
It is true that psychotic states are very dreamlike, yet there are also differences. I am usually only aware of minor, fragmented parts of my dreams, since when asleep we are largely unconscious. A big difference with psychotic hallucinations is that we are very much consciously aware of them. Some argue even that schizophrenia is characterized by an abundance, or âhyperconsciousnessâ - meaning that all kinds of little things that usually go unnoticed acquire salience and attention in our racing thoughts.
Now, to speculate, sleep is often taken to be a means of integrating new experiences with past experiences. On another theory, consciousness is only invoked whenever the mind has to solve hard problems of information integration - the easy problems are solved below the threshold of consciousness. This can mean for psychosis that we are so intensely aware of its phenomena because there are hard problems of information integration to be solved. This can connect to theories of either past traumatic experiences that need to be integrated into a narrative of the self, or to theories of perceptual systems dysfunctioning, causing anomalous experiences that need to be accounted for - hence our hyperconsciousness of them. It seems to be your idea fits better with the former - integrating past experiences such as possible trauma. In that case, psychosis would be functioning in a similar way as dreaming - integrating past traumatic experiences with new ones- yet above the threshold of consciousness since it is a hard problem due to their incongruence.
So I think for trauma-induced psychosis there might be something to your dream-analogy. But sometimes there are no clear traumatic events yet psychosis does occur. So on the information-integration view in such cases it is not quite clear what information is so hard to integrate with our past experiences that it becomes so conscious. An obvious candidate to look for might be the hallucinations themselves, these are weird experiences that do not fit with our past normal experiences. Yet on the dream-analogy, the hallucinations would have to be an effect of information-integration, not itâs primal cause.
I stop sleeping when I get psychotic. I only remember my delusions from when psychotic, not what happened in âreal lifeâ. Who I met, what they said, what we did. Itâs all gone.
I absolutely believe that Schizophrenia is a consciousness disorder. Elements of the medical science community tend to compartmentalize and classify diseases and disorders. Even symptoms in Sz are relegated to subtypes, where command automatism, for example, is âfiledâ under a catatonic subtype. I believe that command automatism can drive behaviors in phases of any type of the Sz spectrumâŚit just manifests differently.
Researchers should definitely not ignore the similarities between narcolepsy and Sz. I have observed this illness for 20 years and I believe that in some people, somnolence is superimposed over wakefulness, it would explain so much about the disease. However, the violence behaviors that can develop in severe consciousness disorder in a small subset of people (which I refuse to criminalize no matter how horrific the behaviors, because they are symptomatic), are something that researchers need to fix their studies upon. In these cases, there is obviously something very severely disordered going on in the brain that is beyond the control of the person and society is unjustly judging and punishing people. The sleeping brain does not necessarily explain this type of symptomatic condition.
When I web-search the sleeping brain theory, I find very little attention being paid to this very strong possibility by the medical science community and that needs to change.
