Sweet Dreams Aren't Made of These

How vitamin D keeps scaring the crap out of me

The other night I had a very upsetting nightmare — one of the ones where you wake up relieved it was all fiction. In the dream, I’d been taken away by some mysterious people. I had no idea what they wanted with me or why I was important enough to kidnap, but I ended up having to text the police to help me, something that doesn’t make sense in real life but apparently does in dreams.

The worst part of the nightmare was that, after I’d been “freed” by the cops, I was still scared long after the terror was over. I remember sitting in a living room of sorts, not fully relaxed because I was worried my captors were going to come for me again. Any branch I heard snap caused a shiver down my spine. Any rustling from wild animals made me almost jump. I was getting some real trauma in this fake dream world.

So, when I woke up, I was so glad to realize it was all made up, sitting up a little bit before being startled by the meow of Juno, who was clearly confused by why I woke up out of nowhere.

How Juno (probably) looked when surprised by my sudden wake-up (minus the cat toy)

This nightmare was a string of a few others I’ve had recently. Another dream had me talking with a man with a bloody finger, yelling at me to watch his dangling appendage because it could fall off at any moment. It appeared it had gotten sliced in a mousetrap guillotine type thing, and it was really gross — I’ll save you the details.

The most recent I remember was more strange than anything. I was watching a weird episode of the Sopranos where Carmela was driving like 2-3 hours away to go see some guy. She hesitated at first — probably because it was such a long drive — but, after thinking it through, decided it was worth going for this man’s gabagool. When she got there, she parked her car by having it go in a garage that lifted it up above all the other cars in a weird parking lift type thing. It was incredibly strange and didn’t make any sense — I’d give the episode a 1/10 with the one being for innovation and weirdness. Good ideas, but bad execution.

Carmela used one of these things (Image: bendpak.com)

These dreams have been confusing the crap out of me. I’ve had night terrors (Something Jenn’s experienced seeing and written about before) but I don’t usually remember them — or any of my dreams, really — so waking up with actual memories of what my brain made up during my sleep was really wigging me out. I remember maybe one or two dreams a month, if that.

So what could have been causing this?
Funnily enough, vitamin D of all things.

I recently discovered after a routine doctor visit that I’m deficient in the aforementioned vitamin. If you’re not familiar with what it’s like to have a deficiency, it can end up making you feel like you never get enough sleep, even if you sleep for 10-12 hours. So the doctor, to bring it back, gives you vitamin D. Duh. But it’s like a crap ton! Like 50,000 IUs (the recommended daily amount is 600 for reference.)

And when you get a crap ton of Vitamin D, some people get a crap ton of weird/scary dreams, and apparently I was one of the lucky few.

After googling this and seeing others having the same experience on Reddit, I was relived to know there wasn’t something wrong with me — other than being deficient in vitamin D, of course. I was even grateful that the dreams weren’t as lucid as others had complained about, being so frequent that they become aware of the fact they were dreaming and sleeping poorly as a result.

I’m still going to have some weird dreams for the next couple weeks until my vitamin D prescription is finished, so we’ll see what other weird dreams I get in the meantime! I have a feeling that once it’s over I won’t be missing them.