Sign up for CNN’s Sleep, But Better newsletter series. Our seven-part guide has helpful hints to achieve better sleep.
The nightmares are intense and often horrifying, sometimes lasting well into the day.
“There’s a serial killer after me and the last few years I have the same one,” according to a Canadian patient. “He’s got my legs or something I can still feel something on my legs even when I’m then awake.”
Man in bed in the morning Yuliya Kirayonak/Cavan Images RF/Getty Images
Another English patient described nightmares “where I can’t breathe and where someone is sitting on my chest.” Yet another shared stories of “really nasty” violent visions in their sleep.
“Horrific, like murders, like skin coming off people,” said one Irish patient about his nightmares. “I think it’s like when I’m overwhelmed which could be the lupus being bad … so I think the more stress my body is under then the more vivid and bad the dreaming would be.”
Nightmares and “daymares,” dreamlike hallucinations that appear when awake, may be little-known signs of the onset of lupus and other systemic autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, according to a new study published Monday in the journal eClinicalMedicine.
Such unusual symptoms may also be a signal that an established disease may be about to intensely worsen or “flare” and require medical treatment, said lead study author Melanie Sloan, a researcher in the department of public health and primary care at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
Human karotype, 23 pairs of chromosomes, Bottom right, the pair of sex chromosomes XY or XX determines the sex. (Photo by: BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) BSIP/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
“This is particularly the case in a disease like lupus, which is well known for affecting multiple organs including the brain, but we also found these patterns of symptoms in the other rheumatological diseases, like rheumatoid arthritis, Sjogren’s syndrome, and systemic sclerosis,” Sloan said in an email.
Lupus is a long-term disease in which the body’s immune system goes haywire, attacking healthy tissue and causing inflammation and pain in any part of the body, including blood cells, the brain, heart, joints and muscles, kidneys, liver, and lungs.
“Cognitive problems and many of these other neuropsychiatric symptoms we studied can have a huge influence on people’s lives, ability to work, to socialize, and just to have as much of a normal life as possible,” she said.
“These symptoms are often invisible and (currently) untestable but that shouldn’t make them any less important to be considered for treatment and support.”
Jennifer Mundt, an assistant professor of sleep medicine, psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago who was not involved in the study, said in an email she was pleased the study focused on nightmares.