Can Essential Oils Cause Nightmares? (Answered!)

So, in a sense, essential oils can cause nightmares in the same way a lot of things can.

It’s all about how we dream and when in our sleep we dream, and how easily we achieve certain dream states.

All of this is highly dependent on many minute factors.

Let’s look further into this.

Do essential oils cause nightmares?

They do not directly cause nightmares, no.

There’s nothing neurologically or biochemically going when you diffuse essential oils that causes your brain to dream or have bad dreams more.

Or, at least, if there is, then no such connection has even been empirically demonstrated. It is unlikely to exist at all.

What does happen, though, is that essential oils can affect how our body sleeps and prepares for sleep.

This is the key thing when it comes to dreaming. Most of our dreaming occurs in the stage of sleep known as REM, or rapid eye movement.

This is the deepest stage of the sleep cycle.

Furthermore, whether or not we ‘dream’ is often more simply a case of whether we remember the dreams.

Whether we remember dreams is largely about how deeply we sleep.

So, these are the basic mechanisms of dreaming.

While, as I said, essential oils do not have any demonstrable role in causing or intensifying dreams, they can certainly affect how well we sleep—which, in turn, affects how we dream.

Why do essential oils cause nightmares?

The simple reason is that they disrupt your sleep, or at the least alter its course from how you would ordinarily sleep.

Certainly, if you are just using essential oils for the first time, then your body is going to be far less used to them.

Essential oils will have different effects on different people, and it may well be that for you, they do not cause nightmares or bad dreams at all.

In any case, what is happening when you diffuse essential oils is that your senses and brain are being stimulated.

When you are overstimulated when trying to sleep, even if you do easily fall asleep, your body and mind are still overall quite active, comparably speaking.

This added activity means that you are going to take longer to fall into a deeper sleep, or that you may never get there at all.

Bad dreams are often, as I said, more the result of higher dream recall than they are of actually intensified dreams.

If you are waking up more often in the night, then you’re going to remember more of your dreams and they will be brought closer to the surface.

If you wish to burn essential oils but are concerned about the dreams, my advice would be to stop burning them a few hours before you actually go to sleep.

This will avoid your brain from becoming overstimulated.

That said, it’s also useful to know if any particular oils are more likely to make you dream.

What essential oils cause vivid dreams?

Again, firstly, it’s important to make clear that not all these effects will be the same for everyone.

That said, there are a few well-known oils that are known to affect dreaming.

Lavender is the best example, long touted for its sleep-inducing properties.

This deepness of sleep can often mean added dreaming, too.

Chamomile essential oil can often have the same effect, just as with chamomile tea.

Sandalwood is another favorite late-night essential oil, leading to deeper sleep.

All of these may have the effect of making your sleep deeper and your dream recall lower—it may have the opposite effect, deeper sleep leading to more vivid dreams.

Why does lavender make you dream?

There are a few theories, though nothing is really concrete.

The best we have suggests that, since lavender, in essential oil form, is accessed through the limbic system—a region of the brain closely connected to memories, emotions—that the impact on your dreams is to be expected.

In any case, smells of any kind do have a really strong effect on our memory, and our best theory about dreaming suggests that dreams are your mind sorting out important from unimportant emotions.

The simple answer, unfortunately, is we don’t know for sure!

Dreaming is a highly complex and still little understood phenomenon.

Even now, our science surrounding it only paints a limited picture of what is going on.

Despite that, we can make some reasonably good guesses about why essential oils might affect our dreaming.

What it comes down to is how well and how deeply we sleep, and this is often highly dependent on the minutiae of our environment.

Don’t necessarily throw out the essential oils if you’ve been having bad or even just weird dreams—there might be something else to address.

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