I had a question about drugs for a short story I'm writing. In my story there's a man who is posing as a psychiatrist and he is going to give his patient two different types of drugs during the story. One drug should cause nightmares and the other should stop dreams all together. Does anybody know of any drugs that do these certain things?
This is a tough question and one that won't yield a very solid answer. The problem is that when a medication affects dreams, it's usually a side-effect, not the main purpose of the drug. And to cause, specifically, nightmares? That's going to rely on the person and what drugs they take. The same drugs can have wildly different side-effects on different people. https://www.peoplespharmacy.com/2011/03/27/many-drugs-cause-bad-dreams/ As for stopping dreams altogether, probably some kind of narcotic, like benzodiazepines, but, again, different strokes for different folks. http://www.aafp.org/afp/2000/0401/p2037.html That link might aid in your research.
The stuff that killed Michael Jackson (name escapes me) clearly stops dreams. I've had it administered several times for day surgery, and it puts you down like a slaughterhouse bolt gun. Not even a wisp of a dream. Like Spencer, I don't know of anything that specifically and consistently causes bad dreams.
Ketamine is an anesthetic notorious for nightmares. Any number of sedative drugs suppress REM sleep. Medications for the Treatment of Sleep Disorders: An Overview
It's really complex and personal about what drugs cause what dreams. There's a reasonable argument to be made that it'll depend on how you dreamed before. There's plenty of drugs who have a side effect of vivid dreams, but you don't really get to choose whether that 's good or bad; just intense. If someone was already pre-disposed towards nightmare then you could maybe make them frequent and more hellish. I agree with @GingerCoffee that Ketamine is notorious for horrible flashbacks and those come through in dreams too; but that's far from your only choice here. Almost every psychedelic drug from LSD to mescaline to mushrooms and salvia can put stuff in your head that will fuck with your dreams. But I think it's better to take a step back and ask what exactly is your conceit. Is this guy a legitimate therapist trying to help people with (or at least do research on) bad dreams? Or is he some mad scientist who isn't bothered about fucking with them? If the former then, well, it's not very likely that he'd start handing out really potent narcotics that definitely do other stuff to you too. No reasonable scientist is going to start casually dosing people with LSD (or Ketamine or, well, anything) because it's really really dangerous. Maybe if you were doing proper research on the drugs effects on dreams then you might do them in a sleep clinic or something; somewhere where you can ensure they don't start, you know, scratching their skin off or something. If the he's a mad scientist that just doesn't care; well, maybe he doesn't mind about his 'patients' hurting themselves but he's presumably interested in their dreams not in them, you know, jumping in front of a train or pulling their own eyes out while tripping balls. This is kind of the problem here; the drugs that are potent enough to effect your dreams to that extent are potent enough to have lots of other effects too. Opiates are famous for giving you really intense dreams and let me tell you, that is 100% true. But if you feed someone 30mg of morphine then they are going to know about it. And yes, being euphoric and zoning out for an evening isn't as bad as hallucinating that the walls are melting but you still shouldn't drive or handle sharp objects. And, notably, while you could give someone nightmares, you could also make them dream about chasing butterflies across Dali-esque landscapes or give them wistful memories of their past loves (for some personal experiences out of my old dream diary) or indeed no dreams at all. Fuck knows. I think that your best bet is just to say that the drugs are some experimental compounds that have the effects you want. It's not like things like night terrors aren't a genuine problem and it's not crazy to suggest that people are trying out different ways to stop bad dreams and their related phenomena. It's not bending reality too far to say that someone has made some pills that do what you want. I have to think that the specific drugs themselves aren't the important part here; what matters is the effects, right? Getting into real drugs is just going to present more questions than answers. Certainly no-one is going to happily take a tab of acid before bed every night, and if they do, well, that's going to be a much bigger problem for them than their bad dreams. So forget about real drugs. Use plot convenience drugs that do what you want them to and nothing else.
