The Strange Thing a Person With Schizophrenia and Bipolar Dreams of While War Rages On in The Ukraine

Be Sure To Read the Last Paragraph to Learn How to Control Your Dreams

Cold War Dreaming:

Good morning readers. It is 5:25 am and I just woke up. As per usual, I had a disturbing dream. This one was interesting though, so I thought I would share it in the hopes that someone with knowledge of dream meanings could give me feedback

First of all, during the Cold War that ended when the Soviet Folded, I used to have a lot of bad dreams. Now, whenever a war flares up that relates to Canada, I get ‘War’ dreams, and this morning was no exception.

I forget how some of the dream started, but it seemed I was in a class of some sort. It was near the now reclaimed land our municipal airport used to sit on. They are building houses there and there is an aviation museum and gathering place for large sales and such. In the dream, for some reason, my teacher was laughing and joking about small planes. I kind of took offence to this having been formerly a student pilot who loved flying small planes. She then said something to the effect that she only thought it was funny because it was so rare to hear them overhead.

So Now the Critical Part of the Dream Came

I dreamed about a jet plane. Not just any jet plane, but an old Korean War era jet. My old Air Cadet Squadron used to have one, or a shell of one as a monument, with our squadron numbers on it. I start to realize I am dreaming when I see jets in my dreams. My Dad told me that when Denmark was enslaved by the Nazis in WWII, the sky went dark with planes overhead. So now when I dream about WWIII, I dream about planes. But now there was just one.

As the teacher or group leader said, it was rare to see a plane there, so I took careful notice of this jet. The pilot flew past where I was, then flew past us really low. I could see that he was missing part of a wing and was in trouble. Still, somehow, the pilot was able to come in for what looked like a smooth landing, and then did a touch and go. This is when your wheels touch the runway, but you add power and take off again. The plane then circled around and crashed right in front of me without exploding.

This is where curiosity got the best of me and, knowing he was dead, I went to look at the pilot. He was still moving a little, but after the way his plane crashed, I knew he was dead. Other people from the class came to look too, and I tried to shoo them away. Then there was my bully from junior high. He was much taller and larger from me and from experience I knew he was mean and aggressive. But I did everything I could to keep him from seeing the body, even locking him in the classroom and running around to make sure he did exit another way.

All this may seem just a little strange, but I am thinking that of course, once again I am afraid of a global war, that is obvious. But I am also thinking I am having problems with self-esteem and the loss of my Mom. I think the dead body was partly a symbol of the last moments I spent with my Mom when she was taken off life support. I didn’t want the bully to see because it was a personal, family thing (even if I still considered him a pilot-pilots are a very cliquish bunch).

Taking Charge of Your Dreaming

I would encourage my readers to write down their dreams and if they have a psychiatrist, to talk about some of the more vivid or upsetting ones. As per usual, I also suggest people keep a journal, which is a great place to keep dream content, and that they write down everything they want to discuss with their doctor when they see them and, if they are unable to talk about anything, at least give your doctor the note. The funny thing is, once I was a formal patient for 6 months in a psych hospital, and one day I went to the computer room, typed up a list of what I wanted from my doctor, then printed it up and the doctor for some reason was very amazed that I was able to use a computer and printer and even asked for a copy of the note to show my nursing staff. Though I had a very tough go of things that hospital visit, after I saw that doctor it was few short weeks until I was able to leave.

I just want to say one last thing about dreaming. I learned once that if you want to control your dreams, fly and all that, all you have to do is ask yourself five times a day, “Am I dreaming?” Soon you will be able to tell whether you are dreaming just by using your senses. As that happens, you will be able to take control of your dreams because asking yourself that will increase your dream awareness.

Interesting Things About Dreams and Schizophrenia, Bipolar and Schizoaffective disorder

Dreams. There are different kinds. There are day dreams we all have of the ideal, perfect life, of accomplishing our goals. Then there are the dreams we have when we close our eyes and sleep. I would like to talk a little about both today.

As far as accomplishing our goals or dreams, many of us feel that one day we will get to our goals, that there is plenty of time. The truth is, this is one of the worst ways to approach something you want to accomplish. What a person needs to do is to have written, set goals/dreams that they can take immediate steps towards accomplishing. One of my dreams is to travel, especially to the UK and maybe to Mexico. My main barrier right now is Covid-19. I don’t even know if I went to the UK if I would be able to come back. That actually might not be such a bad thing as I have distant relations there but part of my set, written dreams is to be able to go visit somewhere and return to everything I need without having gone bankrupt. When I was 19 I did this kind of travelling, and I admit it was fun and there was a sense of freedom to it, but I ended up in dire straits in the middle of California one time and it took everything I had to get back (I had no money, it took my health, my sanity, and my physical well being).

So what I am left with now is the strong desire to travel but not the ability. What I have been doing over the past months is saving all that I can. It is becoming a fair bit, and I have heard of people travelling the whole world with less. One of the cool things is that now I have finally taught myself how to save, it isn’t hard at all to adjust my spending to have an excess I can depend on. For anyone who finds this idea interesting, I strongly recommend a very short book, maybe 110 pages called “The Richest Man in Babylon” by Richard S. Clason. This book will give you all the knowledge you need to set goals, build a stable life, work harder and invest wisely.

The other kind of dreams I wanted to talk about are the ones we have when we sleep. I have always been fascinated with sleep and what it is like to go without it. (During my California mishap, I went as much as five days without sleeping or eating). When I finally did grab a small chance to sleep, I konked out but woke myself up and then slowly drifted back to sleep and was actually hallucinating.

If you have bad dreams, possibly because of trauma, I do have some advice for you. I have to give the credit to a guy named Carl Murphy who I knew many years ago. I was over at his house and was sleeping and had a bad dream. He came to see if I was okay, and when he saw I was fine, he gave me a multivitamin. I took it, and for some reason I didn’t have bad dreams again that night.

Over the years, I have learned a lot of little tricks for insomnia or bad dreams. Insomnia can often be treated with warm milk with a little sugar in it to remove the bitterness of warming it up, along with a banana. Another trick I have learned regarding dreams is that if you ask yourself five or six times a day if you are currently dreaming, you train your mind to automatically check if you are dreaming, and when you actually are and you do that automatic check, you realize you are in fact dreaming and you get the ability to control your dreams.

This ability is called lucid dreaming, and is interesting because I just read that people who have lucid dreams actually display the same type of brainwaves that people in psychosis have. Just by itself this may seem like a useless bit of trivia, but I personally find it amazing when breakthrough knowledge is discovered about schizophrenia and psychosis. Lucid dreaming can be taught, and it can also be forgotten about. What if this new knowledge actually teaches us how to modify, improve, better deal with or even eliminate psychosis in patients with schizophrenia? Myself, I would like to see it happen, and am encouraged when I hear that things like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can train people with schizophrenia to better deal with the symptoms of their illness.

Merry Christmas Dear Readers, and a very Happy New Year!

LG

Mental Health Issues and Insomnia (Sleep Hygiene)

My Roommate, Daniel, who is one of the nicest, kindest people I know

     Well, good readers, it is now 3am and for some reason I feel compelled to write about insomnia.  Just about everyone gets it, especially people with mental health issues.  A lot of questions pop up, like is my medication making me sleep too much, should I go on sleeping pills, and on and on.  Personally, I have one pill, called a PRN which basically means I can take it as needed, called Rivotril or Clonazepam.  If I ask for it, I can get a 0.5mg little orange pill and it often relaxes me enough to sleep.  One of the most important things I have to remember though, is that if I don’t get out of bed at a reasonable time, I will have problems sleeping even with the pill.

One of the things I like to do is swim laps and sit in the hot tub at my local fitness facility (thank you Edmonton city government for making these facilities accessible for those with low incomes!)  If I get in enough laps and don’t sleep too much, I find that I am more than ready to get a good sleep in that night.  How much exercise is right?  Hard to say.  I try to get in the pool and do laps until I’m tired, and if I have any energy left over I take off my flippers and swim a few regular laps and even add in push-ups and chair dips afterwords.  Whether or not it helps my sleep to sit in the hot tub is hard to say, I do like to sit in the hot tub for a few minutes before a swim just to get all my joints warmed up to lessen impact on them from going right into an exercise.

Along with my PRN Rivotril, I also have the option of taking a hormone you can get over the counter called Melatonin.  I cleared this with my Doctor and I think the only thing I really have to note about this is that I can’t take it every day.  If I take it too much I find that I get an almost painful restlessness through mostly my spine that often makes it impossible to sleep.  Now and then, when I have taken my pills and it is getting late at night or early in the morning and I can’t sleep I find that sometimes turning upside down in bed or even going downstairs to sack out on the couch helps.

One of my problems is that a lot of my life focuses around laying in bed.  Most Doctors will tell you that all you should do in bed is sleeping and intimacy, but I write letters on my iPad, make phone calls, read, listen to music and many more things that I am sure don’t help.  Another thing that I think doesn’t help my insomnia is that I take naps.  I haven’t discussed this with a Doctor, but I have heard information that I can’t confirm that it is very bad for a person to sleep a little here and a little there.  Sleep can be such a nice experience, as I mentioned before when I take my Prozac in the morning and go back to bed I have the most wonderful dreams and general feeling of well being for a few hours.

So what are the solutions?  I will try to recap.  One would be to get exercise, a good idea for anyone.  Even if you just get out and go for a walk or go up a few flights of stairs it will be beneficial.  The second is medication.  Sometimes I find myself needing Tylenol or Advil or even Gravol or Robaxacet and sometimes cold and flu medication.  These things can help me sleep but I am very concerned about getting dependent on them so I use them only when needed.  It seems I often need Advil just about every day due to headaches, but that is a bit of a different situation.  I have noticed that when I take an Advil I can take a nap and have a very peaceful and happy feeling.  The next step is to try not to nap, then to try not not to lounge around in bed if you can avoid it.  One other thing about staying in bed I should mention is that simply from your orientation against gravity, when you lay in bed too much, especially when you take medications, you can get acid reflux.  I can’t stress enough how important it is to avoid this malady, it can be very painful and disturbing of a person’s natural cycles.  My Mom had acid reflux so bad she required an operation at one point to increase the size of her wind pipe just so she could breathe and eat properly, she had been bedridden for her last five or six years.

So what have we got-use drugs sparingly.  Don’t nap.  Exercise.  Try to fill up your day.  Only sleep in your bed.  Avoid sleep aids that cause dependency.  Getting the right amount of sleep each day is good for your well being, your feeling of healthiness, and almost definitely your moods.  When I pull an all nighter, I often find that my temper gets much shorter than normal and I even get a little paranoid and angry.  There are some good sleep aids out there like Melatonin, I have also had some good results just from taking a multi-vitamin, which, at least in me, seems to keep me from having nightmares, and also by taking what is often labelled stress vitamins which contain some B vitamins among other stuff.  Above all though, these are things that you should clear with your Doctor, I can only speak from my own experiences and everyone’s body chemistry is different.  I hope all of you can have a good rest, and as I say often, Good Night Sweet Princes and Princesses, and may a thousand angels sing thee to thy resting place.  I kind of stole that from Hamlet, the final scene, but still a nice thing to think of when you are on your way off to dreamland.

 One of my favorite things to do, taking pictures in the

park with my favorite person, my Dad