Does vividness of dreams impact sleep quality?

May 31, 2017 9:24 AM

If you start having more vivid dreams at night due to vitamins, medication, or any other reason, does this improve or harm your quality of sleep, or is it neutral?

I've just started taking b-complex vitamins and they've caused me to have more vivid dreams. Occasionally I'll also use melatonin before bed if I have to change up my sleep schedule, and this also gives me more intense dreams. I know that dreaming is very important to the quality of your sleep and the level of restfulness you feel upon awakening, but I can't find any solid sources on whether the vividness of those dreams has any impact.

posted by One Second Before Awakening to Health & Fitness (10 answers total)

IANA sleep specialist, but the way I understand it, everyone actually has vivid dreams, but you only remember them if you wake up quickly from the stage of sleep during which they occur.

So if you remember a lot of your dreams, or remember a lot of detail from them, if I'm correct in my thinking that means you are waking up a bit more quickly from them, or more often, than you normally would.
posted by greenish at 9:58 AM on May 31, 2017 [4 favorites]

I once took a medication that, as a side effect, made me remember multiple dreams every night for a span of three or four months. It felt like I was sleeping soundly; if I woke up during the night, it was brief and not to full alertness.

It did feel a little tiring, but only after weeks full of dreams. I don't think it was physical fatigue - I was feeling and functioning normally - but all those dreams made me feel like my brain was always on.
posted by Metroid Baby at 10:53 AM on May 31, 2017

I was on medication with vivid dreams as a side effect for several years, and I found that it did negatively impact my sleep, but in kind of an odd and indirect way by making me not want to sleep:

First, vivid dreams includes vivid nightmares. Enough said there.

Second, even the mundane dreams were so vivid that I started showing up to nonexistent meetings I'd only dreamed I'd scheduled, or not sending emails to friends because I'd dreamed I already sent them. It was incredibly disorienting and disconcerting, actually far worse than the nightmares.
posted by dorque at 12:44 PM on May 31, 2017 [7 favorites]

Response by poster: I suppose a key question being raised here is whether "vividness" of dreams is even a real factor, or whether all dreams are equally vivid and the difference in reported experience is actually a factor of how clearly one can remember one's dreams. Intuitively I feel that dreams can vary in vividness whether they're clearly remembered or not, but it'd be great to have some research to back that up.
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 1:27 PM on May 31, 2017

I use the sleep app on my iPhone because I have sleep problems, and even on the good days where I get my 8 hours, it shows me waking several times during the night. In my perception, this happens because I have terrifyingly vivid dreams. As dorque writes, many times the problems is not so much conventional nightmare material as mundane stuff that confuses me and makes me act against my own interest the following day or even week, if I don't figure out what happened.
Obviously, this is not science but in my personal experience there is a huge difference between vivid dreams and normal dreams. I often wake up from dreams where the narrative shifts constantly, I'm on a boat, then I'm with a trapeze artist in a barn. It's almost like you know it's a dream while you're dreaming. Vivid dreams are when you spend time trying to figure out if this happened — just today I was at a meeting where I had somehow lost all the material. This was in itself a problem, but also I seem to have dreamt that I had gone through all the charts and had a thorough overview of the issues. When I got all the material it was something completely different.
posted by mumimor at 2:31 PM on May 31, 2017

Dreams happen during the REM stage of sleep, so it's possible you are either . not getting enough R.E.M or too much. Not getting enough can affect your mood
posted by SyraCarol at 5:38 PM on May 31, 2017 [1 favorite]

I was on medication that increased the amount of dreaming I did, I'd pretty much go from awake to dreaming to awake with none of the other bits of sleep. It was extremely disruptive and tiring and was significant enough that I stopped taking the medication primarily because of it.
posted by deadwax at 12:22 AM on June 1, 2017

My guess is that you are asking about something which science has no answer for. I certainly have no inside knowledge, but I would say that if you get some authoritative answers, and if the answer is really important to you, then check the references, and really ask whether the primary sources are making defensible claims.

I remember very very little of my dreams nowadays, but back in the early 90s I put a lot of effort into having lucid dreams. The books presented the question: is it bad for your health to be having lucid dreams? And the answer at that time was a big fat "dunno".

Your best policy might be to follow the lead of some of the above responses--if you feel that it's affecting you in some negative way, then consider changing what you're doing.

Regarding your question about whether "vividness" is a factor...I think this is part of where science would fail since that must be very hard to measure. For my part, I find that emotionally disturbing dreams will cause me to wake up and have a hard time falling back to sleep, but that might not be the same thing as "vivid".
posted by polecat at 12:41 AM on June 1, 2017

Also, in case you're not aware--I find that sleeping on my back is a pretty sure ticket to nightmare town. It was also thought to be a good way to induce lucid dreaming. This probably varies from person to person, but if you think vivid dreams might be a problem for you, then maybe different sleep positions could help?
posted by polecat at 12:48 AM on June 1, 2017

I was taking some medication for a while that included "more sleep, but more vivid dreams" as part of the package. But I think that just meant "more memorable dreams".

I am off that medication now, but struggling with sleep at the moment. I usually don't get to sleep until about 4:30-5:00AM, which seems to be my sweet spot as far as exhaustion and temperature go. My alarm goes off at 6:30, so it gets me right in the middle of my first lapse into REM sleep. So... I remember whatever crazy crap I was dreaming about at that time, and I'm exhausted... always.
posted by Diag at 5:26 AM on June 1, 2017