I took some new, fairly untested/uncharted medicine for my liver maybe six months ago. Seriously, the medication had only been in use for weeks, and I was the first person my Dr. had ever heard of going on it. Long story short, it gave me THEE most vivid nightmares. Evil, awful, creepy dreams with ghosts, haunted ships, things coming out from under my bed and smothering me, etc. Not only were they visually horrifying, they were also loud. I would wake up screaming and reaching for the ceiling as I dreamed that I was thrown down a well and when I hit the bottom, it sounded like a mortar shell went off in my room. It honestly felt like my ears were bleeding. It was as if the medicine went into the deepest recesses of my subconscious and found my deepest and darkest fears. I had dreams about my dad that literally had me bawling for hours after waking up. On one occasion, my wife was @ work when I woke up at 2am -- I was too scared to go back to sleep and I had to sit in the family room with all the lights on for the next five hours.
I'm not kidding you, these were so beyond realistic that it was mortifying. I now know what those kids in all of the Nightmare on Elm Street felt like, because I would actually shudder with the thought of going to sleep. The pisser was that I didn't start having them until about a month into the meds, and once we figured out what was going on and stopped taking the medicine, the dreams kept on coming for another few weeks.