I read that weed makes you not dream, then when you go off weed you have crazy dreams. So heavy, heavy weed users that quit, how long did you have crazy dreams for?
Weeks? Months? Years? Any other interesting experiences?
You have vivid dreams for a few days. It’s just a matter of your hormones equalizing, so it doesn’t take a really long time.
Similar timeframe to getting over nicotine withdrawal which is a few days to a week, which is basically the time it takes your brain to alter its calibration.
I would guess this effect is caused by lowered anxiety, or rather, reduced alertness. I take a medication that includes an adrenal blocker - for my anxiety - and if I miss even a day my dreams go crazy as my body is flooded with levels of adrenaline it's no longer used to.
It wasn't exactly a story that made any sense, as it rarely is. I dreamed of fishing, and sea monsters. Later, I was part of a team fighting off...combatants in a tall building. Humans from another world. The elevators didn't all work and weren't all safe. We had to sneak about to get to the top to fight off the leaders.
This is pretty typical of my dreams.
Edit: It ended when I was watching some whales leaping from the water and one of them became stranded on the land. I woke up very upset about the dying whale.
I've been taking chunks of days off from smoking recently. My dreams' vividness and frequency of remembrance increase a lot around 12-24 hours after being sober. That will last for a couple of days. I find I can avoid dreamless sleep if I just smoke less. Sometimes I'll take one fat rip before bed, I'll have a pretty wild dream vividness if I hadn't smoked for a couple of days.
So by inspecting your memory you see more of a particular thing happening … and your explanatory model is the memories of it happening in the other context just got erased?
What makes you suspect they’re there but forgotten, instead of just absent?
It's a suspicion based on the second point and that our brains naturally want to dream to rehash our day for memory purposes, particularly during REM, though of course there are other types of dreams & timing too. But the mid term memory storage stops working the same.
I’m not much of a user in this regard, so I can only comment on the abstract of the question here - but over the last couple of months I started some new medication that caused this. I’d never remember dreaming for quite a while, and then all of a sudden I did start to have very vivid dreams.
They’re not nightmares, thankfully - but certainly the ones that make you wake up and go “What the fuck???”. Recently I had a dream about a game show being started in my house, and the game was very much a “You can’t leave until you meet X goal”.
Then there have been some dreams that were not necessarily odd, not bad, but not “good” I guess?
Last week I had a dream where my boss had asked me to start working again on a project that I lead that was dropped midway. When I woke up, since it was still fresh on my mind, I was very close to messaging my boss to see if he wanted to better set the goals and requirements for the project… Until I realized that the conversation about reopening the project never happened. Thankfully I did realize that, or else it would’ve been quite awkward…
That last one worried me a bit, because I really don’t want to start having dreams that cause me to not be able to keep an accurate accounting of what is real and what isn’t - but thankfully it hasn’t reoccurred.
I’ve just somewhat woken up, and definitely had another “WTF” dream, though I am unsure of what it actually was about.
I dont remember my dreams when I use. It’s the main reason I do. I have terrible nightmares and weed helps me not wake up screaming… But when I stop for a time, it all comes back. It’s terrible that I have to choose between being too tired to function and being able to pass a drug test
You could talk to a doctor about prazosin. It’s a blood pressure drug that stops dreams for some unknown reason. I have PTSD nightmares and will take it for a week or so when they crop up again. Just something to consider
I took a BP medicine called Clonidine for PTSD nightmares as well. I wonder what it is about them that help.
My biggest issue was having already naturally low BP, so couldn’t take it at the dose they wanted. Luckily, it still worked. Just had to go in frequently to have my pressure checked.
I appreciate your suggestion. I have some of the same issues as a few other commenters. I have low blood pressure from an autoimmune issue which contraindicates BP drugs. I’ve tried a lot of things, but I have a sensitive system and the side effects tend to be worse than the dream.
Plus one for prazosin. I have a family member with PTSD nightmares. Prazosin has made them able to actually sleep for the first time in their adult life.
I don’t find it an insensitive question online. Usually I’m committing horrible acts of violence. Stuff I didn’t even know I knew about. And I’m one of the nicest people you’d meet. It really fucks me up.
Thats textbook my experience. Whenever I do consume frequently I have zero dreams whatsoever, at least I can’t remember even one during that all that time.
During breaks I suppose it all comes boiling to the surface, at least two to three weeks of weird dreams and general sleep issues like very high internal tension and stress levels, and heavy sweating when I actually fall asleep. During those first days and weeks I have essentially zero appetite either.
Essentially it depends on for how long you have been consuming, and how frequently. During my early days when I smoked like once a week I didn’t have those issues.
That being said, while the withdrawal symptoms are unpleasant they are barely worth mentioning compared to other substances. Poor sleep, some general discomfort, lack of appetite. Eventually it sorts itself out
Not a weed smoker, but I am in mental health. Two things:
1.) That little factoid is a falsehood. Plenty of marijuana users remember their dreams.
2.) As indicated at the end of #1, you always dream when you sleep. You just don’t necessarily remember your dreams when you wake up. We don’t know exactly why we dream—there are several theories—but we know it’s an integral part of our sleep. It’s theorized that what we experience as dreams may be our brains encoding our memories of our experiences since the last time we slept into long-term memory and possibly doing a particular type of problem-solving about things weighing heavily on our minds of late.
No, I’m afraid you don’t know how scientific claims work. The OP read a claim that “weed makes you not dream.” They didn’t read a claim that “some people report not dreaming after they’ve gone to sleep after smoking weed,” it was a blanket statement about an effect of marijuana.
The fact that you have gone to sleep after smoking and not remembered your dreams afterward does not mean it was the weed that did it, and it certainly doesn’t mean it has that affect on most people, let alone everybody. The issue isn’t that the OP’s claim is true because it happened to you; this is why anecdotal evidence is not accepted as a basis for factual claims in science. There are too many potential confounding factors in any individual case. Plenty of people claim to have seen ghosts; that doesn’t mean ghosts exist.
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