DOSE:

30 mg

oral

Pharms - Mirtazapine

(daily)

BODY WEIGHT:

160 lb

A few months before, I was taking Zoloft (SSRI), and it worked but it was keeping me up at night, and while I felt decent mentally, I did not have any energy. The fact that I was taking Xanax along with Zoloft to sleep was not helping. I eventually quit taking the drug, but my depression gradually returned within about two months.

Unable to bear it, I wanted to try another anti-depressant. After some research I chose Remeron. Off topic but in the country I'm currently in (Pakistan), this med is pretty expensive. Anyway, I planned to take 30 mg for a week and then increase to 45 mg a day.

I began at 11:00 PM, by orally taking a 30 mg tab, with very little if any water, and about 30 minutes after dinner. Within 20 minutes, I was feeling exhausted. My little cousin was in my room drawing on herself with my wife's eye-liner and normally I would snatch away the eye-liner and put it out of reach of the child. However, while mentally I wanted to do this, it proved to be extremely taxing on my body. I didn't feel like doing anything other than sitting in bed. Even putting my hands up proved too much work. I recognized this feeling, this is how I feel on a few milligrams of Xanax.

After about 30 minutes, I became very agitated and restless. However, physically I was pretty much disabled. It's as if I was on a large dose of Xanax but only experiencing the physical effects, mentally I wasn't relaxed or tranquil like I normally am on Xanax. Mentally I was irritable and REALLY wanted to sleep. The most annoying thing was that breathing felt voluntary. I would try to relax and go to sleep, but after a few seconds I would notice that I have not taken a breath and would take a few quick deep breaths to compensate. This kept happening for what seemed forever, but I eventually fell asleep.

What a sleep it was! For the first time, I was in a very deep sleep and I did not awake all night. Upon waking up, I was extremely exhausted and just wanted to lay in bed. I was unable to sleep again however. One strange thing that would keep happening everyday on this med is that I would wake up in the morning very abruptly. No noise, nothing happens in the room to disturb my sleep. After waking up, I would never be able to sleep again, for some reason. It's as if the med is programmed to wake me up at a certain time.

I've been on this med for about 4 days, and it has not done too much for my depression. One thing I want to talk about is the effect this has had on my dreams. Zoloft also did the same thing but there was a difference between Remeron and Zoloft in regard to dreams. Zoloft would give me very similar dreams but I would always wake up at night frightened and sweaty. Upon returning to sleep. Sometimes I was unable to tell if I was waking up to reality or to another dream.

The dreams on Zoloft were recursive, for example I would have a dream, and then wake up literally wet with sweat, and then I would realize that I've woken up into another dream, and this would keep happening. I was probably waking up into reality and just falling asleep again shortly after, putting me instantly back into another dream.

Remeron would give me the same dreams but it would be one long dream throughout the night. Sometimes if I wake up and go back to sleep fast enough, the dream continues. With Remeron, I feel like I'm never really awake until an hour or so after I wake up. My eyes are open and I can see/hear but I feel mentally brain dead. As if half my brain is still asleep. With both meds, if I take a nap during the day, I would also have another dream.

Now the dreams I've had on anti-depressants are VERY VERY weird. They aren't nightmares, and they aren't really scary in the sense of death/ghosts/etc. They are very believable and they contain so much detail. Also, they seem to have nothing at all to do with what I've experienced during the day before going to sleep. They seem so random and wacky, but when I wake up in the morning, I usually spend 30 minutes thinking about the dream and trying to replay or continue it in my head.

The dreams are not much different than tripping on a recreational drug. They seem to last long in my head, they are vivid and they make me think after the experience is over. Normally in a dream I wake up and just go about my day. After waking up from one of the dreams I've had on anti-depressants, I would spend hours trying to make sense of what the dream meant.

With Remeron I had the experience with the first dose, and with Zoloft I experienced it a few days after taking the first dose (25 mg) and during withdrawal. After a few weeks on the drugs, the vivid dreams seem to subside or become very weak. I noticed that the dreams sometimes would intersect with other dreams I've had on the meds. Parts of the previous dreams would show up in the new dreams.

I would love to share the dreams but they would make no sense. It's like a DMT trip, the dreams are very hard to describe in words, and I feel like if I do, they would lose too much detail. I can't comprehend how weird the dreams are. For example, I woke up this morning from a dream and I started asking myself questions about the dream, weird questions that only make sense to me, such as:

'How can a whole county. as well as a natural disaster, happen in a building in the middle of Times Square?'

'Instead of trying to save ourselves by building wooden wheels so we can escape from the toxic, why was everyone using the roller-coaster?'

'Why was the roller-coaster covered with sand? was it even a roller-coaster?'

Exp Year: 2006	ExpID: 53235
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jun 11, 2006	Views: 52,749
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Pharms - Mirtazapine (311), Dreams (85) : Retrospective / Summary (11), Alone (16)