Dealing With Headaches

I haven’t been having a good week, head-wise. I’ve lost track of whether I have had a series of migraines or one long migraine that just has been waxing and waning like the moon. I’m even having migraine pain in my dreams. Sleep used to be a haven for my head pains, but not anymore, I guess.

Nightmares

When I was a little kid, I’d have nightmares about aliens ripping me from limb to limb, being trapped in a driverless car that’s heading for a cliff or being chased by the Wolfman.

Man, I miss those days (or nights, as the case was).

Now I have blood-chilling nightmares about the years I worked at Kmart. Oh my God, they could make Stephen King look like Mother Goose. The nightmares are always set in December, of course, and there are a million customers and I’m the only employee in the entire store.

On top of that, I now dream that I have a migraine when in this retail hell and cannot get out of the store to go home and take care of the pain.

Man, I’m breaking out into goosebumps even now.

Am I the Only One?

I can’t be the only one who dreams they have migraines or chronic headaches, can I?

No, I’m not. Physical pain of many kinds can be experienced in dreams, whether you wake up still having the pain or not. Many times people dream of getting pain and wake up to discover something is indeed physically wrong with them. For example, one time when I was a pre-teen, I dreamt I got shot in the belly and was dying. When I woke up, I discovered I was having the worst gas attack of my life.

There are many anectodal accounts of people dreaming about having a migraine to discover that either they are experienceing a migraine in the waking world — or that they get an attack that day.

If you dream of having a migraine, perhaps that could be a warning of an immenent attack and that you should take preventative medicine (note the emphasis on perhaps). Migraineurs are often thought to have a lot of nightmares, although the nightmares don;t necessarily have to do with migraines.

There was a small study on nightmares as predicting a migraine attack back in 1996. This was published in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics vol 65, number 4. This only interviews 37 migraineurs, so no earht shattering conclusions could be reached.

Yet another thing to keep track of in your headache journal – do you ususally have nightmares right before a migraine attack? Can’t hurt to keep track of it.

Hope this helps. Sweet dreams.