Why Your Dreams Become Crazy When You Finish Smoking Weed

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Dreams are strange, misunderstood things. This week, Science of Us is exploring the latest inquiry that helps explicate what they are, what they might hateful, and how they bear upon our waking lives.

Information technology is well-known, among those who use a lot of marijuana, that to stop doing so is to invite a sudden torrent of crazy, brilliant dreams. Just Google "weed and dreams" and you'll come across that nigh of the top results are about what happens when you stop smoking pot.

Poking around online, I had little trouble finding people who could provide first-hand accounts. And their stories emphasized that if we knew more nigh exactly what'southward going on with weed and dreams, information technology could potentially help a lot of people looking to scale back on their weed utilize, get better slumber, or both.

Franny, the starting time name of a U.K. resident I met on Twitter and later emailed with, said that she smoked pot heavily from the time she was 26 until her early 30s, at which point she stopped. She said that when she saw a tweet I posted request people about the weed-cessation/crazy-dreams connection, "it definitely gave me a 'lightbulb' moment." "My dreams are exhausting most days," she wrote. "They're so real that I sometimes wake up tired after eight hours sleep. They usually involve 'hero' activities. Saving people from aliens, zombies, etc., but also I can sort of come across myself exterior of them looking at them giving myself a monologue about the dream." Franny said that while she's always had "hero" dreams, she doesn't call up them ever being nearly every bit vivid equally they are now.

I also Twitter-met a 20-year-old guy named John who lives in suburban Georgia and who had a similar story. Near a year after graduating high schoolhouse, he said in a DM chat, he "got to the indicate where I was smoking several times a twenty-four hours every day," which lasted for about half dozen months before he quit — he said the weed made him neurotic, acquired him to stutter, and led to other unpleasant side effects.

Correct after he quit, John said, his dreams got intensely realistic and disturbing. "The 1 I remember is I dreamt my mother killed herself," he said. "And I found her body lying in her cupboard. When I found her I was devastated. It felt so real. I was saying, No no no no, walking upwards to her. Once I got shut I looked down and screamed. The scream woke me upwardly and I was screaming in existent life every bit I woke." Luckily, dreams like this only lasted for nearly a week, and since then, John said, his dreams have been adequately normal.

Finally, Seth Smith, a Navy veteran who was a yr below me in grad school, told a similar story, but in opposite. "I've been a crazy dreamer ever since childhood," he said in an email. "I would sleepwalk often and fifty-fifty make phone calls and full conversations and leave the business firm." Later he underwent the military machine's notoriously intense SERE training. This didn't help with his sleep problems. At 1 indicate, he said, "I fell asleep property the girl I was seeing at the time from behind and dreamt that I was dorsum in the snow and the wood and the mountains of SERE with enemies giving chase. I jumped out of the bed with her still in my arms and awoke to her screams of 'You're sleeping on the couch.'"

Smith had heard that marijuana could assistance, but smoking in the military wasn't an option. After he was honorably discharged, though, "My friends who had been so practiced about non using cannabis around me during my armed services service began to tell me about its wellness benefits and how it wasn't just about getting loftier anymore but about really looking to utilise it as a medicine to treat specific issues." He started smoking, and he said it worked wonders. "I now use cannabis regularly, peculiarly to treat restlessness and disturbed sleep," he said. "I swear by information technology. My dreams are far less of a nuisance than they once were. My sleep seems to exist very regular and sleeping side by side to me is no longer a contact sport."

What can explain these stories? There seems to exist a widespread belief that the connection between marijuana and dreams has to do with REM slumber. In this story line, versions of which have appeared on highly Google-ranked articles addressing the weed/dreams question in Vice, Psychology Today, and LeafScience, smoking pot reduces REM sleep and therefore dreaming, and when y'all quit, there'southward a rebound outcome: more REM sleep, and more than — and more bright — dreams.

This sounds like a tidy, satisfying explanation, merely according to Dr. Timothy Roehrs, a sleep skilful at the Henry Ford Health System, it'southward at the very least a flake premature, in light of the available evidence, and might be entirely wrong. "The literature on whether or non marijuana affects REM sleep is extremely weak and equivocal," he said. "Some studies have shown it suppresses REM sleep, some studies accept shown information technology doesn't."

The same articles exercise tend to bespeak to some studies reporting such a link, only Roehrs said that this research tends to be older — from the 1970s and 1980s — and non particularly well-controlled. Plus, he said, "there are only six studies" on this subject in the literature, total. Overall, Roehrs said he doesn't subscribe to this theory. "If you wait carefully at it, [marijuana] doesn't suppress REM sleep," he said.

Then if the crazy dreams can't exist chalked upwards to unsuppressed REM slumber, what is going on?

Roehrs believes he and a colleague, Leslie Lundahl of Wayne State University Schoolhouse of Medicine, have uncovered a pretty big hint about what'south going on. As role of a larger report that wasn't specifically nearly marijuana and dreams, he and Lundahl brought a bunch of heavy marijuana users into a slumber lab. "In the design of the study that was existence conducted, marijuana was existence smoked in the morning and the afternoon, and on some days it was active marijuana, and on other days it was a placebo, 0.iv percent THC or something," he said. "The active marijuana was iii percentage THC." So the participants alternated, in other words: 1 twenty-four hours smoking real pot provided by the researchers, the next day smoking placebo pot (Roehrs said he wasn't certain whether or not the participants could tell the departure). The researchers recorded the participants' sleep and compared it to the members of an age-matched healthy control group whose members weren't heavy pot smokers, and who didn't smoke during the experiment.

If smoking pot does something to REM sleep, that could show up in an experiment like this in at least 1 of two ways: First, the regular weed should affect REM sleep in a way the placebo weed shouldn't. 2d, the heavy pot smokers should take different REM-sleep patterns than the non-using command group.

On the potent-versus-impotent weed question, "smoking the 3 pct THC marijuana relative to smoking the placebo marijuana had no effect on REM sleep," said Roehrs. And when the researchers compared the ii groups, said Roehrs (that is, the dark when they smoked the barely-weed weed), they found the two groups got the same corporeality of REM sleep.

And then that'south 0 for ii. There's an important but, though: "The sleep of the heavy marijuana users was different than the sleep of the healthy normals on the placebo night" in other ways, said Roehrs. On the placebo nights, members of the marijuana grouping "showed lower amounts of slow-wave sleep, which is that deep, restorative kind of sleep," he explained, as compared to the command group and to their own sleep on nights when they smoked regular pot. "They also showed very poor slumber efficiency, meaning that in the 8 hours that they spent in bed, they slept near 80 pct of the fourth dimension [sleeping]." By way of comparison, Roehrs said that "I have an entry criteria of a sleep efficiency of 85 pct or less" for an insomnia report for which he is currently recruiting volunteers. "Then these people would have qualified for my study," simply from having gone without smoking real marijuana for a day. Toking upwards fixed things, though. "When they got the active marijuana their sleep efficiency was normalized," he said. "So now they were sleeping like a salubrious normal" — that is, similar someone in the control group.

This could explicate a lot of the weird-dreams stuff. As Roehrs pointed out, "when you awaken abruptly from REM sleep," you remember your dreams vividly. When you sleep through your REM cycles, you're less likely to. So if, when you end using marijuana, it makes you more likely to suddenly awaken during REM sleep — even briefly, even if you don't call up doing so — that could leave yous with some very intense dream-memories come morning.

That'south what Roehrs thinks is going on, and he pointed out that this could exist part of a more than full general, well-established withdrawal blueprint that goes on when people cutting out other substances, too. "This is what happens to alcoholics," he said. "When they discontinue alcohol, they have frequent awakenings and disruptions of sleep and they written report vivid dreaming. So this might exist very much a parallel." Roehrs also pointed out that while marijuana didn't seem to reduce the duration of REM sleep, it did seem to reduce the duration of slow-wave slumber, which could exist part of the story here, besides. "Information technology'south a layperson's perception that REM sleep is the deepest slumber," he said. "Just that's actually incorrect: If you actually mensurate arousal threshold, the arousal threshold during REM sleep is less than that of deep slow-wave slumber and more akin to light sleep." Meaning if you're going to awaken suddenly in the nighttime as part of that withdrawal process, it'south pretty probable that awakening will occur during REM sleep, raising the likelihood that you lot'll call up whatever you were dreaming about vividly.

Again: This is every bit-still unpublished research, so a grain of salt or two is appropriate. But Roehrs made strong cases about the inconsistency and poor design of the older studies that comprise the just published evidence for a marijuana-REM sleep link, and that his and Lundahl's work had a more careful methodology behind it: Their report didn't but compare smokers to nonsmokers, which can innovate various confounds, only also, through the apply of the placebo weed, information technology was able to more intricately track the brusk-term sleep furnishings of smoking marijuana on heavy users.

As for my correspondents, the theory seemed to fit John's story amend than Franny'southward (Seth's is a dissimilar instance, since he started smoking specifically to fight intense dreams, and hasn't stopped). Afterwards all, John specifically said that the intense dreams stopped after a week, which could fit with some sort of withdrawal effect. Franny, on the other hand, said that 18 months afterward she quit smoking heavily — she nevertheless tokes up two or three times a calendar month — the intense dreams persist ("they are basically 4K at the moment," she said, meaning ultra-loftier-def). But she was quick to point out she too plays a lot of video games, and thinks they could be a factor, too.

And so it can be difficult to know exactly what's going on with any individual. Peradventure the central point here is less whether Roehrs's theory fits these and other accounts exactly — anecdotes simply take us and so far — and more that in that location'south an urgent, unmet-cheers-to-the-feds need for more enquiry into marijuana and its effects, especially every bit the decriminalization and legalization trains go on thundering onward. After all, Roehr and Lundahl were just able to exercise the written report they did because Lundahl is ane of a pocket-sized handful of researchers licensed by the government to administer marijuana during studies. And when I asked Roehr whether the government's long-standing, heavy-handed restrictions on marijuana research — restrictions which were but upheld by the DEA a couple months ago — have stymied expert'south progress toward better agreement the drug'south furnishings, he said yes, echoing a mutual belief amongst researchers.

Given marijuana's popularity, in 2022 we should know a lot more about what information technology does to sleep, a rather important human action, and to other aspects of the human experience. For at present, Roehr and Lundahl's research does offer upward a theory that feels a bit more compelling and scientific than all that REM talk. But the but fashion to test whether it holds up is to acquit more studies, and researchers have to jump through style too many hoops to do so.

Why Your Dreams Get Crazy When You Terminate Smoking Pot