When I was about 6 or 7 I would spend summers with my paternal grandparents and sleep in my dads childhood bedroom. I would have dreams about my security blanket flying out the window and chasing it down on the roof of my mammaws Oldsmobile. One night I had a dream about a Bengal tiger with his front paws on the window seal just watching me.
Last night I dreamed I was around that age again in their living room with a panther, a lynx, a bengal and a cute orangutan.  I wasn’t scared but healthily concerned for my safety and otherwise had a very pleasant experience with the wild animals.    The panther was my favorite.  That I can recall, I’ve never since that childhood dream until last night dreamed of such events.  What in the world…
Recently some life changing events led to a change in my habits which in turn have led to changes in my sleep. Most days I wake up rested ready to go, especially if I got to sleep at a decent hour and performed the night time rituals and routine. Wow, routine is a different beast. Anyway, for the last few months since said changes I’ve started having dreams, three sometimes four a night! (don’t suggest I keep a dream journal I won’t)
I have spells of depression, yes the clinical kind, and I was curious if since I was behaving inline with new habits perhaps there was a correlation. So to Google I went a searching for some insight.
Over at dreamstudies.org I read a few interesting links between dreaming and depression. I do not take any SSRI so I’ve ruled this out as a possible contributor.  I do take Lamotrigine, a medicine to treat epilepsy but also treats recurrent depressive episodes. One of the many side effects are vivid dreams or nightmares so I suppose this is a major contributor. I also take Bupropion which is basically hydrochloride salt. This is a non-SSRI anti-depressant but I found no link to dreams or otherwise (unlike SSRI which can have the dream effect).
The article (read it here) mentions something I can relate to:

Rather than waking up refreshed, the clinically depressed dreamer wakes up feeling like he has been in battle all night long and now has to get up and do it again in waking life.

The dreams are often very vivid and most of the time one leads right into another. I wouldn’t say any of them are scary nightmarish dreams but many of them are certainly a little spooky and leave me perplexed the following day: what the hell do they mean?
The article also quotes James Hillman (a psychologist):

The dream takes us downward, and the mood that corresponds with this movement is the slowing, saddening, introspective feeling of depression.  This depression has many faces… we need incantations to help us drop off to sleep, a ritual of prayer, toothbrushing and the teddy bear, of masturbation, food cramming, and the late show, of night cap and sleeping pill.  The basic bedtime story of our culture is that to sleep is to dream and to dream is to enter the House of the Lord of the Dead, where our complexes lie in wait.  We do not go gentle into that good night.

I actually enjoy these dreams.  They are often interesting and even supernatural.  There are the dreams where I feel pinned down, or held back, unable to accomplish whatever task at hand during the dream – these are the dreams that suck…
 
Scary by George Hodan

This post was last modified on April 8, 2013 - learn more.

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