Does Pregnancy Cause Weird Dreams? Yes, Here Is Why
Why Does Pregnancy Cause Weird Dreams
Weird noises, feeling of falling, maybe a strange and elusive figure that you can’t quite see their face, but have a feeling that it’s your ex, David. You know – the one who dumped you in high school, on prom night and you haven’t thought about him in twenty years.
Yep, welcome to the world of how wondering does pregnancy cause weird dreams or is the lack of sleep from carrying around a bowling ball starting to drive you around the bend?
Even, artist Cardi B, who added to her own family this July — tweeted about having “weird, crazy, spooky dreams,” writing in a second tweet describing that her pregnancy dreams were “too vivid.” And she’s not alone. Studies have found that pregnant women reported more nightmares and more intense dreams than nonpregnant women and that women in the last trimester of their pregnancies described more frequent nightmares during that stage than during the earlier trimesters.
Let Me Sleep
What is the cause of the mystery dreaming phases of pregnancy? It appears to be on a simplistic level, lack of the aforementioned. We go through five stages of sleep cycles, with one we’re all familiar with, rapid eye movement (REM). It takes the majority of our sleeping routine compared to the other stages, with 25% attributed to REM, which is when the majority of dreaming happens according to the National Institutes of Health.
After initially falling asleep, we enter into a REM stage for an hour, and REM will cycle through your sleep cycle throughout the night. As we dream of sweet nothings or a spooky monster under the bed. your brain is actively sorting through recent experiences and emotions, and dreaming is thought to play a role in memory consolidation and processing new information, Dr. Ryan Donald, a physician and assistant professor of sleep medicine at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, told Live Science.
However, waking up during that rapid eye movement phase, and you’ll remember what was happening in the dreams – with pregnant women top of the list for waking up constantly. Leaving the question ‘does pregnancy cause weird dreams’ a mystery no more.
“Rising progesterone levels in the first trimester can trigger insomnia — that’s fairly common,” according to Dr. Julie Levitt, an OB-GYN and clinical instructor at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. That usually abates at 12 to 16 weeks into the pregnancy, but the onset of the third trimester, about 28 weeks and beyond, brings increasing physical discomfort that can disrupt nighttime rest, she explained.
Does pregnancy cause weird dreams for you? let us know in the comments.
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