Can OCD Cause Intrusive Dreams

You’re riding a dinosaur through the hallways of your middle school when your teeth begin falling out one by one. A deceased relative links arms with you so you can fly through the night sky together. Suddenly, you’re hurtling toward the earth, and before you hit the ground, you open your eyes and find yourself in bed, your heart racing. You try to understand how these odd, stressful scenes fit together, but the details seem to dissipate into the morning air before you can figure them out.

For most people, shrugging off an utterly bizarre dream like this one is easy. Like an intrusive thought, a dream—even a distressing one—can be dismissed by most as just a strange phenomenon that our brains occasionally send our way. But for people with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), these dreams can be intensely worrying, triggering fears about what they mean, what they say about a person’s identity or values, and whether they could be connected to other distressing, intrusive thoughts in daily life.

In this article, we’ll examine whether OCD could cause intrusive dreams, discuss triggers that might make intrusive dreams more likely, and discover how a type of treatment specifically made to treat OCD can reduce the power these dreams have over people with the condition.

How can OCD affect your dreams?

While the most prominent theory is that our dreams are a way for our brains to process and consolidate information from our daily experiences, their exact purpose remains unclear. What we do know is that everybody dreams, and the majority of our dreams take place when we are in REM sleep, a sleep stage that makes up around 20-25% of a good night’s rest.

An intrusive dream is a vivid and often disturbing dream that occurs during sleep and intrudes upon one’s thoughts and emotions even after waking up. Anyone can have an intrusive dream, but according to NOCD therapist Lisa de Guzman, LCSW, PPSC, intrusive dreams can be particularly vivid and distressing for people with OCD.

“Aspects of what we do in our day-to-day lives often show up in our dreams,” she says. “It stands to reason that if someone is spending so much of their waking life trapped in the OCD cycle, echoes of their obsessions, anxieties, and compulsions will show up when they’re asleep.”

The OCD cycle refers to the pattern of thoughts and behaviors that people with OCD experience. This self-perpetuating, four-stage cycle looks like this:

Obsession: An intrusive and persistent thought, image, or urge that creates significant distress. The obsessions are typically irrational, unwanted, and inconsistent with the person’s values or beliefs. Common obsessions include fears of contamination, doubts about safety, or concerns about harming oneself or others.
Anxiety. The presence of obsessions triggers intense anxiety or fear.
Compulsion: People engage in compulsive behaviors or mental rituals to alleviate this distress or prevent something unwanted from happening. Examples include excessive hand washing, checking, counting, or seeking reassurance.
Temporary relief. The compulsions provide short-lived relief, reinforcing the person’s belief that performing the compulsive behaviors is necessary to prevent harm or alleviate anxiety. The cycle then repeats, stronger than before.
Meeting the diagnostic criteria for OCD entails spending a good portion of your day—at least an hour—stuck in this distressing cycle, with impairments to your normal routine, how you function at work or school, and how you show up in your social or romantic life. If, as is widely thought, dreams are the brain’s way of sorting out what we’ve experienced that day, it’s easy to see how OCD makes its presence known when people with the condition are asleep.

While someone’s obsessions can impact their dreams, people’s dreams can also lead to new obsessive thoughts about their dreams. Thoughts like:

What if my dreams actually materialize?
What if my dreams are telling me I need to take a certain action in my life?What if my dreams trigger new obsessions?
What if my obsessions manifest in my dreams?
What if I never stop having these bad dreams?
What if I get stuck in a dream?
What if I can never wake up from a dream?
What if I die in my dreams?
What do my dreams say about who I am?
That last thought can make intrusive dreams particularly distressing for people with OCD. “I work with a member who has OCD themes around incest and bestiality,” says de Guzman. “She often wakes in a panic because the condition has her searching her dreams for significance, just as it compels her to look for meaning in the obsessive thoughts she wrestles with throughout her day.”

Either on their own or with the help of others, humans have sought to analyze their dreams for thousands of years. However, just like intrusive thoughts, no scientific data links dreams to anything meaningful in our daily lives. They aren’t a window into our souls, or a cipher for our innermost desires, even when we have physiological responses to them.

“If someone with, say, pedophilia OCD (POCD) wakes up aroused after a dream about engaging in sexual activity with a minor, they may take it to mean that this is something they want,” says de Guzman. “In fact, the dream is just an expression of their biggest fear and has nothing to do with their reality.”

Still, anxiety around dreams’ ability to reveal some truth about their desires is enough for some people to engage in a range of compulsions, including:

Delaying sleep (avoidance)
Researching scientific basis of dreams
Rumination about what previous dreams mean and/or how they may relate to reality
Mental review about most recent and old dreams
Seeking reassurance from loved ones or others who are thought to have insight into dreams
Confession about an action or decision made in a dream
Tracking dream content
How intrusive dreams can affect your waking life

Intrusive dreams can have profound psychological and emotional consequences for people with OCD. Upon waking, the residual anxiety, fear, and distress from the dreams can linger, impacting their emotional well-being throughout the day.

Intrusive dreams can amplify existing obsessive thoughts and increase overall anxiety levels. The disruption caused by these dreams can lead to heightened stress, irritability, and difficulty regulating emotions. People may experience a persistent sense of unease, apprehension, or foreboding, undermining their overall quality of life.

Source:

By Grant Stoddard
Reviewed by Patrick McGrath, PhD

Sleep and rest are not the same

So how do you truly understand the power of rest. Rest should equal restoration in seven key areas of your life. First and foremost, we need physical rest which can be passive or active. Passive meaning sleeping or napping, while active physical rest means yoga, stretching, massage therapy etc. Mental rest means scheduling short breaks to occur every two hours throughout your day. These breaks remind you to slow down. Sensory rest is a break from bright lights, computer screens, phone screens, background noise and multiple conversations whether in the office or on Zoom calls. Simply close your eyes for a minute and intentionally begin to undo the damage inflicted by the over stimulating world we live in. Creative rest is especially important for anyone who must solve problems or brainstorm new ideas. Think about the first time you saw a waterfall, taking in the beauty of the outdoors, even the birds in your lovely garden, provides you with this rest but don’t forget the arts too, that may inspire you or resonate with you. Emotional rest helps when we fail to differentiate between those relationships that revive us from those that exhaust us. Try and surround yourself with positive and supportive people, even if your interactions must occur virtually. Spiritual rest which is the ability to connect beyond the physical and mental and where we feel a strong sense of belonging, love, acceptance and purpose. This would mean engaging in something greater than yourself and add prayer, meditation or community involvement in your daily routines. Fatigue can also be associated with numerous health problems, so visit your GP if this persists. REFERENCE Dr. Saundra Dalton- Smith