Detox dreams = scary nightmares?
This year, I made a conscious decision to eat healthier and to detox my body from a lifetime of junk food, fried food, meat, smoking (I’m not a smoker but I second-hand smoke quite a bit), pollution, chemicals and god-knows-what-else.
So far this year I’ve added juicing, various herbal teas and more raw food into my diet, and it’s been going really well. I feel great and healthier than ever.
Then about a week ago, I decided to kick things up a notch by adding a green barley powder into my diet. Green barley is different from barley grains – green barley are the young and green shoots of the plant. It’s one of the most nutrient-rich sources of green food around. Its usage goes back to ancient Egypt and Greece.
The reason why I chose to take green barley powder was to add more chlorophyll to my diet. Chlorophyll is a powerful detoxer and blood cleanser. It cleans out the intestines really well. Chlorophyll also has the ability to bind to heavy metals like mercury and carry it out of the body. It also gives me a clean energy boost.
The only downside to taking the green barley powder? My detox dreams – which I’ve been having almost every night.
Detox dreams are pretty common when you’re detoxing. In theory, as your cells release physical toxins, you’ll also release emotional toxins. Some are tied to the food we eat over the years (and which have become a part of our bodies), some could be tied to painful memories and events. These toxins can show up in the form of intense detox dreams at night.
These inner toxins are actually good for me to release, but boy are my detox dreams scary! For someone who very rarely has nightmares, this is quite a change. My detox dreams are always intense. Some have been violent. One night I dreamt that someone was trying to hunt me down and kill me. Another night, I had a dream about ghosts (think the original Japanese version of The Ring and you’ll have a good idea of the kind of ghost I dreamt about). When I woke up in the middle of it, I couldn’t go back to sleep for several minutes because it was still haunting me.
The good thing about detox dreams is that they’re temporary. I know that eventually my body will get most of the worst stuff out of me and the scary dreams will stop. In the meantime though, I just might invest in a dreamcatcher. 
Have you had any detox dreams? What were they of?
I have been doing a detox also and eating only whole foods. Wow what vivid dreams last night. I felt there was someone with me in the room the whole time and heard screaming a few times.
My wife is also doing a detox the homeopathic doctor told her its ok to do it if shes breastfeeding. She called me this morning also telling me of night mares and feeling like there is some one beside her. She also said the baby woke up crying many times.
She said she was not scared at all. I wish I could have told her the same lol.
I’m glad I found this because I’ve been having nightmares for over a month now and it’s really gotten me down. I was starting to suspect a coffee substitute that I started about a month ago. I really love it, and am drinking way more of it than I ever drank coffee. But the main ingredient is barley. Maybe you are on to something…
Too bad I bought a 2lb bag of the stuff. But I’d really rather not have the nightmares so I’m going to try quitting it for a while. Thanks for this post!
Thanks for sharing
THANK GOD FOR FINDING THIS POST! I’ve never done a cleanse, and in my 29 years on the planet, have ingested many a bad thing, a lot of things that I should have died from (previous party kid). All that being said, in the last year, I’ve changed my diet, I try to stay away from anything not organic and anything that’s gmo. Since discovering a gluten intolerance in the past 4 months, I decided it was about time to ‘clean house,’ and I started a whole body cleans (week 1 – cleans the guts, week 2 – focuses on cleaning the liver). BOY! I have never had such emotional, scary and downright terrifying dreams. They’re so lucid, like I can actually FEEL everything in the dreams. Scary! I was actually considering going off of the cleanse because of the dreams! So thank you very much for posting this… now that I know the dreams are somewhat normal in the process of cleansing, I’m going to stick with it and ride it out. THANK YOU!
You’re welcome and thanks for sharing, Lili. I know exactly what you mean. Detox dreams can be very vivid.
You know, I recently started meditating again and oddly enough, I got “mental detox” nightmares from that too. For some reason, meditation stirs things up in my brain/heart and shakes things loose. The dreams aren’t pretty, but better out than in!
Somebody asked about detox nightmares. Yes yes and yes. I’ve been sober 5 years now but l still remember those. As l am a transgender woman, and also a commercial pilot; l found myself dreaming about airplane crashes that l was on the ground witnessing, bit could do nothing about many times they were happening right over were l was at and l had people l loved that l wanted to protect. I think it comes down to our venerable situation that we are, on when we arr addicted
Hey, thanks for sharing. I would imagine that your detox dreams involve a strong sense of helplessness? It makes me wonder if detox dreams are a way of processing old “stuck” emotions.
I know that in the past, whenever something made me really upset, I had a tendency to fight the feelings mentally while I was actually a mess emotionally. It would have been healthier to just let go, let myself feel all the awful feelings and cry/scream/hit a pillow/etc. If I’d done that more, I think a lot of my stuff would have just passed through harmlessly, instead of lodging itself in my brain/body over time.
It’s like what they say — what you resist, persists.