Can a medication cause nightmares?

Yes, many meds can. I took Prozac for several weeks but stopped because of nightly serial nightmares.

“nightly serial nightmares.”

Yuck, that would be very unpleasant to expect a nightmare while trying to go to sleep.

It is true that many meds can cause nightmares. Talk to the physician who prescribed the meds to see if there is an alternative if the nightmares are bothering you.

It too me a while to realize that there was a pattern.

I’ve read that Lariam, a preventive drug often administered to short term visitors to places where malaria is endemic, can produce frequent nightmares. I’ve taken the drug, but I’ve never experienced those side effects.

Yes, medications can cause nightmares. If this is a new pattern and you’re on a new medication, it’s entirely possible that the meds are the cause.

I, too, have such dreams on occasion, so I sympathize with you.
They are scary as hell.

Nicotine patches cause nightmares and lucid dreams if left on over night.

As people have said above—Yes.

Did you look up the drug, the actual PDR/insert? It might list it as a side effect. But, even if it doesn’t I think it is definitely possible a drug you are atking is affecting your dream state. Especially if it is a psych drug or pain medication, but not limited to those medications.

Yes, one person I know who is taking medication for depression says she had bad nightmares and her doctor says it is a side effect of the meds.

Yes. Years ago I was taking an over the counter medication for sinuses. It took me a few times to realize that drug was the cause. I never took it again. Good thing, it is now behind the counter as it is a major ingredient in making meth.

Oh yes. Have you ever taken Nyquil?

Yes, a number of medications can cause unusual and/or vivid dreams and nightmares. Some antidepressants, like Prozac, as @gailcalled mentioned, and also nicotine patches, as @Lightlyseared mentioned. I can attest to that one from personal experience. Also, vivid, unusual dreams are a common, though not universal, side-effect of Chantix, a smoking cessation drug.

I had to stop using the nicotine patch because I was having these incredibly odd, complex, weird and extremely vivid dreams every night. I generally have fairly strange, complicated dreams anyway, but when I was using the nicotine patch sleeping was, for me, like spending 8 hours at “Dali World”, as in Salvador Dali. And as fun as that might sound to some people, when the surrealist theme park is located inside your own head it can be a little unnerving. When I woke up in the morning I was mentally exhausted and it took several minutes to get my head back on straight and get readjusted to reality.

That is one of the reasons I have been reluctant to try Chantix to quit smoking. As this guy mentions in his description of dreaming while on Chantix, the dreams I had on the patch seemed so incredibly real. That’s one of the reasons it took time to get my head back on straight when I woke up. It took me a while to realize that I had actually just been dreaming, rather than living the things I had dreamed about.

The only dream that I remember from “the patch dreams,” and it is one of the milder, simpler ones, seemed so real and was so vivid. The dream started with me waking up, getting out bed, walking down the hall to the kitchen so I could make my morning pot of coffee and I went to the back door and drew back the curtains to look out the window. This is exactly what I do first thing every morning. I go to the kitchen look out the window of the back door first, to see what kind of day it is, sunny, cloudy, rainy, whatever. Then I make my coffee. I had no idea I was dreaming and when I looked out the back window I saw that over the course of the night, a number of large tomato vines had grown all over and across my backyard. And the tomatoes were huge; the size of boulders, and they were so incredibly big, and so incredibly red and the grass was so incredibly green and the sky was so incredibly blue! My reaction was a little surprise, to see those big tomatoes all over my yard, and I was slightly perplexed as to how that kind of growth could have happened so quickly. But other than that, it didn’t seem that strange.