Most people find their dreams to be a blissful escape from the worries of the day, but for epic dreamers, drifting off is the start of another gruelling ordeal. Epic dreaming, otherwise known as hyperonirism, is a little-known condition that causes people to experience incessant hyper-realistic dreams every night.
While the occasional odd dream or nightmare is completely normal, those in the grips of epic dreaming are blighted by a far more insidious problem. Dr Ivana Rosenzweig, head of the Sleep and Brain Plasticity Centre at King's College London, warns that this should not be dismissed as 'just vivid dreams'.
What Makes Epic Dreams Different?
What makes epic dreams unlike other dreaming conditions is that they aren't necessarily scary, disturbing, or even particularly upsetting. Instead, epic dreams wear down dreamers by breaking down the barrier between waking and sleeping. Epic dreamers often report that going to sleep feels like a 'second shift' as they toil through the night in endless mundane scenarios.
'People may wake feeling as though they have already lived through another day,' warns Dr Rosenzweig. Scientists have identified a little-known condition called 'epic dreaming', in which sleepers have such vivid visions that they wake with the sensation of having worked a gruelling 'second shift'.
Is It a Distinct Disorder?
Although epic dreaming is currently recognised as a distinct disorder, sleep scientists and psychologists are starting to make the case that it should be seen as a separate condition. The first reports date back to studies conducted by American researchers in the 1990s and a handful of cases identified in Taiwan during the early 2000s.
Those early researchers identified the condition as the experience of dreaming all night, often with unusually prolonged, realistic, repetitive or even quite mundane content, followed by marked fatigue on waking. Even when dreams are particularly intense or vivid, most people wake up remembering only a few snippets of their visions from the night. Epic dreamers, meanwhile, wake up with the sensation that they were dreaming every single moment of the night.
The Exhaustion Factor
But the most distinctive issue associated with epic dreaming is the feeling of total exhaustion experienced upon waking. While a nightmare might leave you tired by waking you up, epic dreams' content is almost never scary and very rarely wakes the sleeper. However, this is exactly what makes these uniquely forceful experiences so disruptive.
Epic dreaming is the experience of dreaming all night, often with unusually prolonged, realistic, repetitive or even quite mundane content, followed by marked fatigue on waking. Patients frequently report 'too many dreams' or a perception of constant dreaming throughout the night. This is often accompanied by a feeling of tiredness or exhaustion upon awakening, with patients reporting the sensation of having been working through the night.
The dream content is frequently characterised by being mundane, repetitive, and often boring. Dreamers report remembering their dreams with unusual vividness and suffering from 'dream confusion', being unable to distinguish some aspects of waking from sleeping.
'The dream content does not have to be frightening, but the experience can still be exhausting because it feels prolonged, immersive and difficult to disengage from,' says Dr Rosenzweig.
Case Studies: The Footballer and the Parisian Woman
For example, Dr Rosenzweig described one patient with a footballing background who reported feeling totally drained every morning. The patient described dreams in which he was repeatedly back on the pitch, playing in 'midfield in an England-Germany World Cup-like match'. 'The striking feature was not terror, but endlessness,' she explains. 'The match would not reach a normal final whistle; the score became impossibly high, yet he still had to keep running, tracking opponents, passing, and concentrating.' He would wake not frightened in the way we usually associate with nightmares, but depleted, as though sleep had been converted into another demanding shift.
What makes this so strange is that studies have found that epic dreamers don't necessarily appear to be losing any sleep. While some patients also have conditions like insomnia or sleep fragmentation, others show 'quite unremarkable' sleep patterns.
The Science Behind the Dreams
The vivid intensity of these dreams suggests that patients should probably have a disturbance during the 'rapid eye movement' (REM) sleep stage, when most dreams occur. However, a study of four epic dreaming case studies found that the patients all had typical, or even shorter than average, periods of REM sleep.
One clue is the fact that patients sometimes complain that they remember their dreams so vividly that it becomes hard to tell the difference between dream and reality. For instance, a 38-year-old woman from Paris who participated in the study told researchers: 'My dreams leave a strong imprint on me, sometimes lasting for days or even weeks, to the point that I can mistake them for real memories. They allow me to experience things as if they had truly happened, which can be emotionally powerful.'
In another case study, a woman in her 30s spent seven years blighted by such oddly vivid dreams she would often have to read her text messages and emails in the morning to figure out what was real.
Lead author Professor Pierre Geoffroy, a psychologist from Paris Cite University, told the Daily Mail: 'Our observations suggest that hyperonirism disorder is not simply “having more dreams.” The boundary between dreaming and waking memory may become blurred, especially when dreams are repetitive, immersive, or involve highly realistic everyday situations.'
What Causes Epic Dreaming?
Scientists believe that epic dreaming might be caused by a neurological change that means the brain fails to keep dreaming contained, meaning that it starts blurring into real life. 'We believe altered sleep-wake transitions and increased nocturnal mental hyperactivity may contribute to this phenomenon, although the neurobiological mechanisms remain largely unknown,' says Professor Geoffroy.
It can be difficult to untangle the exhaustion caused by hyperonirism from other sleep conditions and mental health problems that often occur simultaneously. However, the strange boundary-blurring effects of these dreams suggest to some researchers that there is something going on that deserves more clinical attention.
Dr Rosenzweig concludes: 'Epic dreaming is not yet as formally established as nightmare disorder, and we should not medicalise occasional vivid dreams, which are common and normal. However, persistent epic dreaming should not be dismissed as 'just vivid dreams' or treated as identical to nightmares. The clinical picture is different.'
