I've recently come to terms with the fact that I'm battling depression.
One of the main things that's been bothering me is the excessive dreaming. Like most people suffering from depression, I have a hell of a struggle falling asleep. But when I finally do sleep, I'll wake up every half hour or so because of intensely vivid and disturbing dreams. I've always dreamt more than others, so I just assumed this was normal for me, but I came across some research today that shows sleep like this is a result of depression and causes a catch-22 that can prevent people dealing with their depression.
I found out that people suffering from depression tend to get very little of the type of sleep needed to actually rest the body. Instead they spend most of their sleeping hours in REM sleep, the part of sleep that takes all the excess emotion and works it out so your brain is clear and ready to deal with the next day.
Depressed people, however, tend to become very introverted (which I've been since I was a kid) and have far higher levels of pent up emotion and worry. The fact that depression stops you from being able to talk to people causes further introversion and an inability to work out the problems in waking hours. This means the brain gets stuck in REM sleep trying to work out this emotion and doesn't get chance to completely shut down into deep sleep.
Because of the excess dreaming, more energy is used in the brain. This, combined with the lack of deep sleep, is why we wake up so exhausted. This exhaustion makes people less able to deal with their problems and as a result, more REM sleep is needed. It can become a vicious circle.
Basically, I thought I'd post this in the hopes of hearing other people's experiences of dreams, and opinions of this theory, as I read that it's not particularly accepted in the medical world of people who think depression is purely a chemical imbalance.
