Anxiety dreams
«I never used to dream very much. When I did, I was usually spared those worrying, frightening dreams which people speak about. Now it has all changed. Horrible. Terrifying. Wake in a sweat. Heart pounding. Often don’t know what it was all about. Just awful. Just the feeling of it being awful. »
These are known as ‘anxiety dreams’. They are the product of anxiety resulting from stress.
An interesting point arises here. I have seen a number of patients who complain like this. But when I have shown them how to let their mind run easy in meditation, so that their coping ability was increased and their stress relieved, the nature of their dreams has changed. Their dreams have lost their horrible, terrifying quality, and have come to concern matters of common experience without any great emotion at all. This change in the nature of their dreams is, in fact, a common occurrence in patients as their anxiety is relieved.
Nervous headache
«Headache. Headache on and off all the time. I know what causes it. Just the worry of this damn problem. It won’t go away. »
We all know that stress is a frequent cause of headache. But we do not know with any certainty the actual physiological mechanism which produces the pain of headache. It is easy to think of the over-active nerve cells causing the headache. The trouble is that brain tissue itself is insensitive. It can be cut or cauterized in the conscious patient without producing pain. So it seems likely that the pain of headache is mediated through stimulation of pain receptor nerve cells in the blood vessels of the brain.
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