Research Reveals Early Warning Signs of Serious Autoimmune Disease That Show up While Dreaming in Our Sleep

There's a ghost lurking in the bedroom closet or under the bed. For millions of people worldwide, this isn’t just the scene of a horror movie, but a reality of everyday life. “There’s a serial killer after me and the last few years I have had the same one,” said a Canadian person, “He’s got my legs or something I can still feel something on my legs even when I’m then awake.” Another patient from England said, “It’s like feeling disorientated, the nearest thing I can think of is that I feel like I’m Alice in Wonderland.” These nightmares and daymares are symptoms of an autoimmune disorder called “lupus.” A new study, published in the journal EClinicalMedicine, offered these people a lightbulb moment, making them realize that they aren’t alone in their mental plight.

In this study, researchers revealed that nightmares and hallucinations could be early warning signs of a disorder that is about to flare up and require medical attention. According to Mayo Clinic, Lupus is an autoimmune disorder in which the body’s immune system starts attacking itself, triggering inflammation that affects healthy tissues, skin, joints, heart, lungs, kidneys, blood cells, and the brain. Over 5 million people around the world suffer from lupus with 1.5 million in America alone. This includes celebrities like Selena Gomez, Lady Gaga, Seal, Nick Cannon, and Toni Braxton. The disorder usually materializes in the form of sudden episodes called “flares” that strike the patient most often during night-time sleep or sometimes during the day.

“Horrific, like murders, like skin coming off people. I think it’s like when I’m overwhelmed which could be the lupus being bad… so I think the more stress my body is under then the more vivid and bad the dreaming would be,” described an Irish patient who was also one of the participants in the study. Another participant from Scotland described the feeling as “in-between asleep and awake.”

The latest study was conducted by researchers from the University of Cambridge, King’s College London, UC Davis School of Medicine, and other institutions. The researchers surveyed 400 doctors and 676 people living with lupus. Researchers found every three in five lupus patients had increasingly vivid and distressing nightmares just before their hallucinations. These nightmares often involved falling or being attacked, trapped, crushed, or committing murder. “I have lots of violent dreams,” said a patient from England, “I mean I'm not a violent person at all. I don't even kill an insect… I’d be riding a horse, going around cutting people out with my sword, that kind of thing, which is bizarre. And I came to the conclusion that that's probably me fighting my own system.”

“Such unusual symptoms may also be a signal that an established disease may be about to intensely worsen or ‘flare’ and require medical treatment,” lead study author Melanie Sloan, from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, told CNN. Researchers believe that early diagnosis of lupus is important as it prevents doctors and physicians from misinterpreting people’s psychotic episodes, nervous breakdowns, or conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder. In this case, what they need is not a psychological rehab but a lot of anti-inflammatory steroids. “I’ve seen them admitted for an episode of psychosis and the lupus isn’t screened for until someone says 'Oh I wonder if it might be lupus,'” a nurse from Scotland said in a statement.

However, the researchers advised the public to not misinterpret their nightmares as surefire signs of this disease. “It is indeed ‘perfectly normal’ to have occasional nightmares and even daymares, or hallucinations, which ‘are also more common than we think,’” said Sloan. But if the nightmares are “intense and upsetting,” one should seek a doctor’s attention.