Last night, I had a dream that scared me awake. I suspect that this was some sort of response to a low heart rate, because when I woke, I noticed that my lips were rather cold, and my heart was now beating rather quickly. I’ve often heard of dreams of falling being a way for the mind to correct for this kind of danger, but I’ve failed to find any evidence for that with some quick searches.
If true, though. this would be interesting because it would suggest that some part of my brain has a model of “things I put myself through that I would fear enough to cause an elevated heartrate.” I typically consider things like that to be exclusively (stimulus → response) events in the brain, so some part of me that could work backwards from a visceral response without my conscious faculties would change that perception considerably.
Granted, I can’t say for sure that anything like what I describe happened here, because I don’t actually know that my heartrate was low to begin with, and I think an experiment designed to show that (low heartrate → scary dream to elevate heartrate) in some or most cases is probably beyond my means.
That said, if anyone has a recommendation for a device to track sleep, and more specifically heartrate during sleep, please let me know. It could be worth keeping a journal to see (anecdotally) the relation between the two things.
When I skipped my medication whose abstinence symptom is strong anxiety, my brain always generated a nightmare to go along with the anxiety, working backwards in the same way.
Last night, I had a dream that scared me awake. I suspect that this was some sort of response to a low heart rate, because when I woke, I noticed that my lips were rather cold, and my heart was now beating rather quickly. I’ve often heard of dreams of falling being a way for the mind to correct for this kind of danger, but I’ve failed to find any evidence for that with some quick searches.
If true, though. this would be interesting because it would suggest that some part of my brain has a model of “things I put myself through that I would fear enough to cause an elevated heartrate.” I typically consider things like that to be exclusively (stimulus → response) events in the brain, so some part of me that could work backwards from a visceral response without my conscious faculties would change that perception considerably.
Granted, I can’t say for sure that anything like what I describe happened here, because I don’t actually know that my heartrate was low to begin with, and I think an experiment designed to show that (low heartrate → scary dream to elevate heartrate) in some or most cases is probably beyond my means.
That said, if anyone has a recommendation for a device to track sleep, and more specifically heartrate during sleep, please let me know. It could be worth keeping a journal to see (anecdotally) the relation between the two things.
When I skipped my medication whose abstinence symptom is strong anxiety, my brain always generated a nightmare to go along with the anxiety, working backwards in the same way.
Edit: Oh, never mind, that’s not what you mean.