Does anyone here get headaches after very long dreams?
For me, it’s usually after the 1 and a half the the 2+ plus dreams. Back when I was really young and got longer dreams, I would get more headaches when I woke up.
(I got reminded of this issue because 3 nights ago I had a really long dream followed by a headache.)
Maybe it the brain getting worn out from all the the dreaming or something… but then again, I thought REM sleep was supposed to be good for you.)
I can sometimes get a heavy feeling in the head if i sleep a lot, 10 hours or more! Usually, the last 2-3 hours of that is spent in light sleep, and often long or “looping” dreams. For me it has been the sleep length more than the dream length
Hey there, I’m glad I found this post, albeit 14 years later.
I wanted to respond by saying first, yes, most certainly.
Recently I’ve started noticing that I get headaches after long lucid dreams. I’ve been experimenting and practicing with extending the dream length and having much longer lucid dreams. Lucid dreaming isn’t new to me, but lucid dreaming longer dreams is.
I was inspired by some posts on here , particularly this one
about slowing down time in dreams. Of course, in dreamtime, time itself is a bit relative-- so who knows how many dream minutes or hours pass. I suppose what matters more is the subjective feeling.
I have been finding recently that some of the very long feeling dreams give me a headache. Including this morning.
I was wondering about why this is. My first thought was similar to yours, that somehow the brain is getting overtaxed in some way. Though, I want to speculate on it without forming a concrete belief because…well I don’t want to believe that the ability to extend dream time or to dream in more expansive ways, is limited by our current brain capacity lol! That would be such a bummer. It might be. It might not be.
It had me going down this bunny hole, (come along if you want lol) about consciousness and physicality.
I’m not personally a “consciousness is produced by the brain” person. What feels more true for me is that consciousness is a much larger, more mysterious, “non-local” presence/field that permeates and influences everything in ways we don’t yet understand and probably never fully will.
There have been plenty of documented experiences of people with NDE who have been considered “brain dead,” and yet have had some sort of unexplainable awareness post-death. Unfortunately, since these are subjective, it’s hard to verify with a scientific method… That’s alright with me LOL. I still think of it as valid data. Besides, trying to measure consciousness with scientific method is like trying to measure water with a ruler lol. I digress…
It is for this reason that I believe that consciousness has no limitation. It is, “God-stuff” if you want to put it like that. So I really feel optimistic about human potential, especially when it comes to dreaming brilliant dreams and having incredible, magical, and meaningful experiences. It’s like we can tap into an inexhaustible well of brilliance and creativity, if we know how to. Like touching the source of creation itself.
On the other hand, the perspective that conscious experience is produced by a brain also makes a lot of sense. While we haven’t been able to pin point where consciousness is produced, we certainly know that manipulating the brain in a certain way can color the conscious experience of a person in radical ways.
Okay stay with me… lol!
Then there is the age old philosophical expression that the “soul is imprisoned in the body.”
Again, I don’t actually believe that to be true , but, why would that perspective come to be? After my headache this morning I realized that, it’s not just because we have the experience of seemingly, being “located inside” of a body and feeling all of its senses… but also because the body affects our experience so deeply, they are so intertwined. Just ask a woman who is on PMS lol!
(((Jokes aside, though. Something as simple as a hormonal imbalance can be the difference between a life experienced as joyful and bright, or a life in the abyss of despair and on edge of crisis. I’ve often been ping-ponged between the two, and I admit that, at one point I thought I had a serious mental health issue. It wasn’t until I started tracking my inevitable “crash,” finding that it followed a perfect cyclical pattern, that I realized it was more of a physical issue, then a mental issue.
Once I addressed the physical aspect, a lot of it cleared up. My biggest takeaway from that experience was realizing I couldn’t think my way beyond physicality, into enlightenment… rather, my experience of peace and well-being and higher states of consciousness are radically affected by the state of my body. And that is not a bad thing. The body can become an ally, can lift us up into greater experiences than we even thought possible at first.)))
So maybe there is a way to bride these two perspectives.
A lot of people poo-poo this idea, but there is that third idea that the brain/physicality is a conduit-interface for consciousness. This seems to make a lot of sense to me and is a theory that can hold data from both sides without negating either.
If for example you have an electrical current running through a wire, and the physicality of the wire is compromised in some way, so is the outcome of that electrical current. Similarly, if you have an improper container for that current, like improper wattage for a really strong current, the whole line might get fried. The electricity exists as its own force whether or not you have the conduit or container in place, yet the experience of the electricity is almost totally dependent on the integrity of the conduit/container.
Maybe it could be that way with consciousness and our own physicality. Maybe as our brains evolve, we will have even more capability as a species to do things that, at present, seem miraculous. Like have a lucid dream that went on for months or years!
Again, I don’t want to form a concrete belief about limitations yet – maybe there is someone out there right now who successfully has really long dreams, or really wild dreams of multiple perspective, without waking up feeling like someone shoved a steel rod through your brain lol. If so, please come talk to us!
Still, I wonder how much of our current dreaming and consciousness capabilities are affected by our physical limitations. It’s a hard thing to answer because even as we are in our current stage of evolution, still, we don’t even know what the capacity of our brain power is. We are STILL trying to understand our own brains.
Furthermore, your average joe has one experience, but a saint, master meditator, speed-reader, wim-hof, or lucid dreamer, can have an entirely different experience. As a collective, we haven’t yet made human excellence our priority, so we don’t know what we are capable of, except by these outlier examples.
I wonder what, if any, limitations on dreaming we have due to our current brain capacity (or other physical elements) as a species. I also wonder if brain hacking/training, healthy bodies, balanced hormones and hearts, and/or proper supplementation, could assist us to be powerful dreamers beyond what we currently know.
