Pain in a dream
Last reviewed: 23.04.2024
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If a person has pain in a dream, this is rarely seen as an independent problem. Often, it has an exclusively speculative, everyday character that points to sleep as a physiological phenomenon that facilitates and heals.
In fact, in many cases, sleep is credited with relief functions. For example, it can act as the only means of removing certain types of headaches.
At the same time, large-scale epidemiological studies conducted in the US indicate that sleep disorders due to tolerable pains occur much more often than the favorable effect of night sleep on the course of the disease. Thus, among the population over the age of 18, about 94 million people complained of pain in a dream, and a normal sleep (31.6% of the respondents) disturbed 56 million sleep pains. So, it turned out that every third citizen of the United States suffers from a pain in a dream that leads to disturbances in a night's sleep (insomnia).
92% of people who suffer from pain in a dream, can experience them in the daytime. But about one third of them note the aggravation of pain at night.
Among the pains in the dream, back pain (64%) and headache (56%) prevail. Myalgia and other types of pain are observed in 55% of cases.
Persons who experience pain in a dream, according to the conducted study, lose about 2.4 hours of full sleep every day, which leads to a steady decrease in the quality of life, which affects the body's health, efficiency and mood.
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Diseases in which there is pain in sleep
Pain in sleep is a more significant factor of disadaptation than pain that occurs during the day, so the doctor should give the correct assessment of the pain syndrome in the wakefulness-sleep cycle, choose medications, taking into account the duration of their action, the time of appointment, the effect on the sleep mechanism and pain.
Over the past decades, sleep medicine has developed, which is a very important section in functional neurology, which deals with the study of clinical manifestations of the disease in relation to a certain functional state of the brain, in our case during sleep. Thus, during sleep, the clinical picture of a variety of pathologies is intensifying or developing, under which the pain syndrome predominates:
- migraine;
- cluster headache;
- neurogenic pain.
It is known that pain has a signal value for the body and is capable of triggering a number of physiological responses of the device that are aimed at reducing the harm caused by an external or internal stimulus. This pain is physiological.
In addition, there is another kind of pain that does not perform a protective function for the body, and, on the contrary, causes a number of pathophysiological reactions that aggravate the course of the disease and the general condition of the patient. Such a pain is called pathological.
Pathological pain can possess somatogenic or neurogenic origin. As an example of somatogenic pain in a dream, post-traumatic or post-operative pain, a wide variety of myofascial syndromes, pain in cancer patients, and others can be cited.
Neurogenic pain is caused by disorders in the central or peripheral nervous system. These include neuralgia of the trigeminal nerve, radiculopathy, traumatic neuropathy, phantom-pain syndrome, thalamic pain and others.
Pain, which is the direct cause of insomnia, can have a different origin, depending on the nature of the disorders, among which can be identified:
- headache;
- backache;
- dysfunction and pain of the temporomandibular joint;
- arthritic pain;
- Fibromyalgia, which can provoke pain in the tendons, ligaments and muscles;
- neuralgia;
- premenstrual spasm.
Severe injuries, surgical intervention and serious ailments, for example, cancer, can also be the cause of pain in a dream.
The intensity of the pain syndrome is not the main reason why you can not fall asleep. Variable pain, which intensifies on certain days, is the main cause of insomnia. If you feel pain for months, then you probably know how to fight it. But if the pain in the dream arises spontaneously and each time has a different color, you can get used to it, and it will constantly interfere with the full flow of sleep.
Migraine sleep. The appearance of these attacks is associated with specific stages of sleep, in particular, distinguishes from the migraine of wakefulness, high intensity, the presence of aura, left-sided localization, emotional lability, asthenia, pronounced sleep disorders. A number of patients are experiencing disability, weakness, lethargy, daytime sleepiness, which intensify in the afternoon. Most of them need extra sleep during the daytime.