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Nightmares and Vivid Dreams

Outcome Cns

Intense, unpleasant, memorable dreams, usually alongside broken sleep and night sweats. Named separately from insomnia because people report it even when total sleep time is normal, and because it is one of the few effects that reliably resolves within days of stopping.

Relationships

2 connections

Nightmares and Vivid Dreams increases risk of

Sympathetic Tone

How hard the fight-or-flight side of the nervous system is running. Androgens raise tyrosine hydroxylase and change adrenergic receptor density, so a compound can lift this without touching mood directly. It is the shared cause behind a cluster people treat as four separate problems: a higher resting pulse, night sweats, a short fuse, and sleep that will not come.

Nightmares and Vivid Dreams reduces risk of

Sleep Quality

How restorative sleep is, as opposed to how much of it there is. Deep and REM sleep are where growth hormone is released and where memory is consolidated, so this is the measure that connects a sleep effect to a memory effect. A person can sleep eight hours and get almost none of this.