If you read my blog, you know that I was put on Oxycontin and Acetaminophen for the first two weeks following the jaw surgery. I think I stopped taking the Oxycontin after the first week was up and just went on the Acetaminophen until the pain started to subside, and I think the primary reason for that was because sleep was getting to be so difficult.
I couldn’t sleep at all when I was on the Oxycontin. Well, no, it’s not that I couldn’t, it was just that every time I did, I had the most profoundly disturbing dreams I’d ever had in my life. They would be so vivid and so realistic that when I finally got up, I wasn’t sure what was real and what wasn’t for several hours. On one occasion, I entered sleep paralysis for the first time in my life, and during the paralysis I kept hearing this robotic voice that told me that I had died and was on the other side. Easily one of the most terrifying experiences ever. Aside from that one hallucination, I had these awful dreams every night and I’d always wake up in a funk that I wouldn’t come out of until some time in the middle of the day. I actually dreamt that a deformed dog-human thing kidnapped the child actor who played the kid in The Sixth Sense and publicly bashed his head against the sidewalk while everyone gathered around and laughed until he was dead. Euagh.
So, being woken up one night by what was probably my death in a dream or some unspeakably horrifying event that I deemed too horrible not to be a dream, I wound up Googling it. I read almost everywhere that opiates and narcotics have this effect on people, and that morphine in particular is notorious for giving its users the optimal weird dreaming experience. So I suppose in that case it’s unavoidable to have bad dreams.
My advice, if you’re looking for help with weird narcotic dreams, is to just assess the amount of pain you’re really in and try to get off the narcotics as soon as you can. Not too soon, of course, because it’ll be even harder to sleep if you’re in immense pain all the time. In the mean time, just try to look at a lot of forums and internet stories of people going through the same thing. I found that it’s oddly comforting to know that you’re not the only one who’s suffering.
I wound up with better dreams as soon as that first week was up. I’m honestly just glad I only had the sleep paralysis thing happen once, because I had to lay there for a little while after that happened to make sure I was even real. I thought I’d make a quick post on this just because I feel like there’s not a lot out there talking about weird dreams on Oxycontin and it should be more talked about.
Best wishes!
Double Jaw Surgery 