What Causes Your Nightmares?

The other day during my diabetes group we started talking about the effects of high blood sugars (BS). You know, the usual stuff, extreme thirst, exhaustion, and so forth. But then someone mentioned that they refused to eat late at night for fear of a middle of the night high BS. I thought that was a little extreme, having high BS during the day were the same as having them at night, right? No, she mentioned that when she has high blood sugars during the night that she has horrible nightmares. I perked up as she said this. Really? Someone else chimed in that the same thing happened to them. I must have had an incredulous look on my face because then they told me next time I have a nightmare to check my BS level.

I paused for a minute and realized it was definitely worth checking out. That night I went to sleep hoping to have a nightmare and see if their theory was really true. But I slept blissfully, without an interruption. A few weeks passed by and then I was woken by a dream so vividly terrifying that I woke up drenched in sweat and needed to calm myself down. Then, that little thought jumped into my head, “check your blood sugars the next time you wake up from a nightmare.” So, I did. I grabbed my checker from the nightstand and sure enough I was at 350mg/dl. I couldn’t believe it, could this be the answer to how to stop the possibility of a horrible nightmare?

Then on an entirely different night I woke up from another terrifying nightmare. I reached over grabbed my checker and my sugars were at the lovely number of 423. I started believing in their theory and decided to look around for some truths. I found a few diabetic bloggers who talked about this same issue, but found that the only thing they could locate on the subject were low BS causing nightmares. So I am wondering now, what is the correlation? I apparently am not the only person with diabetes that this is affecting. Do any of you have nightmares when your numbers are high?