How did brain damage and ataxia affect my dreams?
I have always been a dreamer, and there are a few dreams that affected me so deeply that I still can't forget them, no matter how many years pass. While my dreams were much more colourful as a child, as I grew up most of them began to turn paler, greyer, more colourless. A year or two before the poisoning, my dreams faded even further; they gradually became an ordinary extension of daily life and started to be forgotten the moment I woke up. In the hospital, while I was burning with high fevers, I kept seeing the same nightmare over and over, dominated by black, grey and red. That terrifying scene spun constantly inside my head, and sometimes it appeared before me even when I closed my eyes. Then I developed ataxia, my cerebellar atrophy set in, and the way my brain worked changed completely. It was as if my mind had returned to tabula rasa. Everything had gone black. In that period I truly felt what it is we call nothingness: emptiness, silence, a state in which nothing exists.
For about a year to a year and a half, I don't remember dreaming at all. I was sleeping, but I would get up as if I had never slept; during the day I dozed off often. In those short naps, I remember sometimes seeing a few small scenes. Then something slowly began to change. As I recovered a little more physically, as I tried new things and began to use my brain again, my dreams began to come back too. Over time, the beginning of my dreams, their transformation and their growing complexity became an indicator, for me, of what was happening inside my brain and how I was healing. I had dreams that sometimes seemed to be showing me my own development, my own change, my own capacity.
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” — Carl G. Jung
The first period: back to childhood and primary school
When my dreams began to come back after about a year to a year and a half, at first I mostly saw everyday life. Then my dreams started returning again and again to my childhood. I saw myself as a little girl, especially in primary school.
Almost every night I was going back to school. I had actually graduated, but I felt as if I had to graduate once more, as if I had to attend school all over again. I was constantly walking into a lesson, seeing one of my teachers, running into old friends, or trying to get somewhere inside the school building on time.
Sometimes it was raining. Sometimes I was fighting with my friends, sometimes studying, having lovely conversations or playing games. And sometimes I was late, missing the exam, unable to do it or unable to succeed.
Inside these dreams I swung mostly between two emotions: anxiety and joy. On the one hand I was reliving the fun, warm side of childhood; on the other I felt as if I constantly had to get somewhere, finish something or achieve something.
The primary school dreams lasted a very long time. For about a year, almost every day, I found myself back at school. And the most dominant feeling was always the same: I had to go, but I didn't want to go.
In my dreams I kept fighting with this, thinking, “I already graduated, why am I going again?” and looking for excuses not to go. Sometimes I thought about getting a doctor's note, sometimes I tried to escape that obligation somehow.
Then the dreams began to change
I never really liked high school anyway; perhaps that played a part. At the same time, high school coincides with a complete transition period in a person's life: neither entirely childhood nor fully adulthood.
So I suppose it wasn't a period that represented my healing process at the time, or the state of development I was in. This is, of course, my own interpretation.
In time the school dreams began to decrease and gave way to more symbolic, more different dreams.
One of the first of these that truly affected me came in October or November of 2024. I later shared the dream on my Instagram as well.
In my dream I was gathering bouquets of lilac flowers, bringing them together and tying them to my feet. I had made myself boots out of flowers, and I was walking through the fields in those boots. When I woke up, this dream seemed to be telling me something very clearly:
“You will walk. You will do it. You will heal.”
As if my mind had shown me this in its own language.
After that I began having other symbolic dreams like this one, dreams with a powerful meaning for me.
The third period: rehabilitation dreams
In what I could call the third period, my university dreams began to intensify, and sport, movement and rehabilitation entered my dreams too.
By then I had started to see myself repeating the rehabilitation exercises I did during the day, improving them in my dreams, or trying new movements on top of them. I very often performed Frenkel-like exercises in my dreams, especially the ones using crossed arms and legs that require coordination between both sidesIn fact, sometimes I didn't just move in my dream; I would wake up actually moving.
Once I woke up while doing the classic cross movement done face down, lifting the left arm and right leg at the same time and then the right arm and left leg. I was literally swimming in my sleep.
These experiences made me think that the brain continues to process and consolidate what it has learned even during sleep. What I felt was that the brain doesn't merely record a newly learned movement; it merges it with what it already knows and stores it in its own memory in a more comprehensive way.
This is my personal interpretation, but I experienced it quite distinctly in my own healing process.
Moving again in my dreams
I also began to see, in my dreams, the things I miss doing physically so much. I see myself walking for a very long time, running, truly feeling in my body what running feels like. I jump; sometimes I can even hop comfortably on one foot. I see myself walking barefoot over stones in countries I've never known, without any difficulty at all.
And sometimes I see myself speaking very fluently and beautifully.
These dreams leave a very powerful feeling in me. When I wake up I think to myself, “If my brain can construct this so vividly, and if in my dream I can feel as though I am truly doing it, then the representation of these movements and skills must still be with me somewhere.”
That's why these dreams give me hope.
It's as if my brain is showing me a version of myself I can't yet fully reach in real life. And I want to believe that one day these things will appear before me not only in my dreams, but in reality too.
“Dreams are the guiding words of the soul.” — C. G. Jung, The Red Book
The latest period: my dreams reaching the present
The dreams of what I could call the latest period, especially over the past four or five months, have started to become more symbolic, more personal and more inward.
Now in my dreams I see the matters I'm trying to resolve within myself, my personal problems, more spiritual subjects and different questions about my life.
At the same time, my university years and especially my working life after university have begun to appear in my dreams more often. I see myself at those ages, feeling the way I felt back then, going places, making decisions, working or having different experiences.
When I look at this whole process chronologically, I find it very interesting.
My dreams seem to have started at primary school; then high school, university, graduation, working life, and slowly they arrived at today. And now they're dealing (though not entirely) with the personal matters I'm living through right now.
For a while everything seemed to have been reset; then my dreams proceeded as if they were reviewing my entire past from beginning to end. And now I feel as if they're adding new things on top of the things I remember from the past.
In a way my dreams grew up, I grew up along with them, and in the end my age in my dreams caught up with my age today. This is how I experienced it in my own process, and I still find it fascinating.
I don't know whether other people also relive the periods of their lives in this chronological way in their dreams.
Can a person review and learn their own life in this way through dreams?
I don't know how closely this is connected to the brain's healing process, but in my own experience it feels as though there is a link between the two.
By the way, I don't forget to note down and track my dreams. I've collected so many interesting dreams over all this time, like a collection. Sometimes I write in a notebook, sometimes I use Elsewhere Dream Journal (I also like it because you can have your dreams interpreted).
My own interpretation of the cerebellum, memory and dreams
My own interpretation of this whole process is this:
I developed cell loss and atrophy in my cerebellum. When I left the hospital, my mind was truly very empty. My memory wasn't what it used to be either; I had trouble remembering many things.
As time passed, as my brain and cerebellum began to adapt to the existing damage and neuroplasticity kicked in, I noticed that something was changing.
I was remembering more, making better connections between events, and reaching my past more easily. It was as if my memory was becoming accessible again, piece by piece.
That's why I think the cerebellum may play a bigger role in this process than we assume.
Perhaps the change in my dreams was also related to learning, to the reorganisation of memory and to the brain forming new connections.
We know that during sleep the things we learn during the day are consolidated, memories are processed, and many of the brain's regulatory processes continue.
The movements I learned in rehabilitation during the day entering my dreams at night, different periods of my past returning in sequence over time, and finally my dreams reaching my present life…
All of this makes me think that my brain may be reorganising itself not only physically, but also in terms of memory and learning.
The section from here on contains scientific sources for those who are curious.
So What Kind of Relationship Is There Between the Cerebellum, Ataxia, Sleep and Dreams?
After I began living through all of this, I inevitably got stuck on the same question: could the damage in my cerebellum really have something to do with the change in my sleep and my dreams? For many years the cerebellum was a structure associated mainly with balance, coordination and movement. But today we know that this view is quite incomplete. The cerebellum plays a role not only in the coordination of movement, but also in brain networks linked to far broader functions such as attention, working memory, language, visuospatial processing and the regulation of emotion. In a comprehensive expert paper on Cerebellar Cognitive Affective Syndrome (CCAS/Schmahmann syndrome), this shift is expressed with the words “A cerebellar role in cognition and affect has been rigorously established in the past few decades”. In other words, in the last few decades the cerebellum's role in cognition and emotion has been firmly established. Studies on CCAS also show that cerebellar damage may not be limited to ataxia, balance or coordination problems; areas such as executive functions, visuospatial cognition, language and emotional regulation can be affected too.
This is an important point when I think about what I went through. Because what I experienced when I left the hospital wasn't only being unable to walk or losing my balance. Mentally I wasn't my old self either. My memory, the way I made connections, the flow of my thoughts and even the images inside my mind had changed. So as I watched my physical capacity, my memory and my dreams all change over time, I began to wonder whether these were entirely independent processes.
Sleep can change in ataxia too
One of the most surprising things for me was seeing the relationship between the cerebellum and sleep. In the comprehensive review titled The Sleeping Cerebellum, published in 2017, it says “The cerebellum shows sleep stage-dependent activity”; that is, the cerebellum's activity changes according to the sleep stage we are in. The same review also discusses how cerebellar dysfunction may be linked to changes in the sleep-wake cycle and to various sleep disorders. In human studies on cerebellar ataxias, different problems have been reported, such as REM sleep behaviour disorder, restless legs syndrome, periodic limb movements in sleep, excessive daytime sleepiness, insomnia and sleep apnoea. There is an important limitation here: because many hereditary ataxias do not affect only the cerebellum, it isn't always possible to separate out how much of the observed sleep change stems directly from the cerebellum.
An animal study published in 2024 particularly caught my attention on this subject. The researchers examined the sleep of a genetic mouse model in which they produced ataxia by silencing the neurotransmission of Purkinje cells. In the paper's words, “The mutant mice had decreased wakefulness and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, whereas non-REM sleep was increased.” That is, in ataxic mice wakefulness and REM sleep decreased while NREM sleep increased; the latency to REM sleep also lengthened. I should particularly note that this is an animal study and does not directly explain my own situation. Even so, the experimental demonstration that dysfunction in Purkinje cells can alter not only the motor system but also sleep architecture is quite interesting to me.
Because after the period when my ataxia was at its worst, for about a year to a year and a half I remembered almost no dreams. I slept, I woke up, and I felt as if nothing had happened in between. I can't say the reason for this was cerebellar damage; dreaming, and especially remembering a dream, depends on wide brain networks that extend far beyond the cerebellum. The amount of REM sleep and the frequency of dream recall are not the same thing either. But all of this at least shows me that ataxia, cerebellar function and sleep are not entirely independent processes.
By the way, just as I was intending to write this piece, I saw a post on this subject from Dr. Roy Sillitoe of the Cerebellum Science Center: “The cerebellum is always active,” he says. I recommend following his valuable work in the field of the cerebellum and neuroscience.
Could the brain be continuing rehabilitation while we sleep?
For me, the most exciting part of the research is the part about motor learning. Because after a while I had started seeing the movements I did in rehabilitation over and over again in my dreams. I was doing crossed arm-leg movements, repeating coordination exercises, sometimes modifying the movements I'd learned, sometimes adding new movements on top of them. Sometimes I would even wake up actually moving. So this question became increasingly important to me: could the brain really be working again, while asleep, on the movements it learned during the day?
Motor learning doesn't end the moment the exercise stops. For a newly learned movement or skill to become more permanent, a process called memory consolidation is required, and sleep is one of the important parts of this process. In a motor learning study conducted in humans in 2017 using simultaneous EEG and fMRI, the researchers concluded that “Brain regions within the striato-cerebello-cortical network recruited during training … were also activated during sleep”. In other words, some regions belonging to the striatum-cerebellum-cortex network used while people were learning a motor task awake were reactivated during sleep. This activation was particularly linked to short patterns of electrical activity called sleep spindles, which occur in NREM sleep.
This finding is very meaningful to me, because it shows that when the exercise ends, the brain's learning process doesn't end with it. Even when we stop moving and fall asleep, some of the networks we used while learning the movement can come back online. Of course this isn't the same thing as my seeing rehabilitation exercises in my dreams, but knowing that the brain can keep working on motor learning throughout the night lets me look at my own experience from a different angle.
The cerebellum and the motor cortex are in communication at night too
In another study published in 2024, neurons in the motor cortex and the cerebellum were recorded while animals learned a new motor skill and then while they slept. The researchers saw that during sleep spindles, the neural activity associated with the motor task performed while awake could re-emerge in both the motor cortex and the cerebellum. They stated that the findings “support the sleep reactivation hypothesis”, that is, the hypothesis of reactivation during sleep. This suggests that some of the neural patterns involved in motor learning during the day can come back into play during sleep.
This study feels especially striking when I think about my rehabilitation dreams, because in my dreams too the movements I worked on during the day appeared before me again at night. But an important distinction has to be preserved here: a motor network being reactivated during sleep and a person experiencing that movement as a conscious dream are not the same event. Science currently doesn't allow us to link the two directly. Even so, the fact that networks associated with movements learned during the day can keep working at night explains why the process I've lived through is so interesting to me.
Could the cerebellum be running a kind of “simulation” while we sleep?
The review titled Role of Cerebellum in Sleep-Dependent Memory Processes, published in 2023 by Andrew Jackson and Wei Xu, puts forward an even more interesting hypothesis. The researchers suggest that the cerebellum is not merely passively active during sleep; it may continue working on internal models related to learned movements. In the words of the paper, “The cerebellum continues to compute internal models during sleep that train the neocortex.” Roughly speaking, the cerebellum may continue to build or process internal models during sleep, and this process may contribute to neocortical learning.
The word “may” here is important; this is not yet an established mechanism but a hypothesis. But when I think about my own dreams, it feels quite familiar. Because in my dreams I sometimes don't just repeat a movement I learned in rehabilitation; I modify it, develop it, or turn it into another movement I've never done before. I see myself doing things I still can't do in reality: I run, I jump, I can hop on one foot, I walk barefoot over stones with ease in places I've never known, and I genuinely feel inside the dream how all of this feels. We don't have enough evidence to say this is directly related to the “offline simulator” idea Jackson and Xu put forward; but the thought that the brain may continue working on motor models during sleep makes these dreams far more interesting to me.
And what about the dreams themselves?
This is where science and my personal experience part ways a little. There are neuroimaging studies showing that during REM sleep the activity of movement-related structures such as the motor and premotor cortex, the basal ganglia and the cerebellum increases, and it is thought that this activity may be related to first-person movement experiences in dreams. But dreaming doesn't happen only in REM sleep, and there is no evidence that the cerebellum is the main centre that produces dreams. In particular, there is as yet no strong body of literature systematically examining how dream content changes over time after cerebellar damage or ataxia — for example, whether past life periods re-emerge in a particular order.
So I can't present the fact that my dreams started at primary school and moved on to university, my working life and finally my present age as a scientific conclusion, as if to say “my brain rebuilt my memory chronologically”. I can only say that this is how it unfolded in my own experience. Even so, what we know today doesn't leave this experience entirely unconnected: the cerebellum is active during sleep; it is part of networks related not only to motor control but also to cognition and emotion; impairment of Purkinje cell function can alter sleep architecture in experimental ataxia models; some brain networks used during motor learning can be reactivated during sleep; and sleep plays an important role in consolidating new motor skills.
I don't know today which part of what I've lived through is related to these findings. Perhaps my dreams weren't an indicator that directly measured my brain's healing; perhaps their progression from childhood to the present had no special neurological meaning either. But after that period when there were almost no images in my mind and I struggled to reach my past, my brain beginning to produce stories again still means a great deal to me. First my childhood came back, then my school years, university and working life; then I began to move, to run, to walk and to jump. In the end my dreams reached my present life and the matters I'm trying to resolve today. As if my past slowly caught up with my present. My dreams grew up, I grew up along with them, and at some point my dreams also began to feel as though they were healing along with me.
Sources
Argyropoulos, G. P. D., van Dun, K., Adamaszek, M., Leggio, M., Manto, M., Masciullo, M., Molinari, M., Stoodley, C. J., Van Overwalle, F., Ivry, R. B., & Schmahmann, J. D. (2020). The cerebellar cognitive affective/Schmahmann syndrome: A task force paper. The Cerebellum, 19(1), 102–125. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12311-019-01068-8
Canto, C. B., Onuki, Y., Bruinsma, B., van der Werf, Y. D., & De Zeeuw, C. I. (2017). The sleeping cerebellum. Trends in Neurosciences, 40(5), 309–323. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tins.2017.03.001
Fleischer, P., Abbasi, A., & Gulati, T. (2024). Modulation of neural spiking in motor cortex–cerebellar networks during sleep spindles. eNeuro, 11(5), ENEURO.0150-23.2024. https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0150-23.2024
Fogel, S., Albouy, G., King, B. R., Lungu, O., Vien, C., Bore, A., Pinsard, B., Benali, H., Carrier, J., & Doyon, J. (2017). Reactivation or transformation? Motor memory consolidation associated with cerebral activation time-locked to sleep spindles. PLOS ONE, 12(4), e0174755. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0174755
Jackson, A., & Xu, W. (2023). Role of cerebellum in sleep-dependent memory processes. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 17, 1154489. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2023.1154489
Pedroso, J. L., Braga-Neto, P., Felício, A. C., Aquino, C. C. H., Fernandes do Prado, L. B., Fernandes do Prado, G., & Barsottini, O. G. P. (2011). Sleep disorders in cerebellar ataxias. Arquivos de Neuro-Psiquiatria, 69(2A), 253–257. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0004-282X2011000200021
Salazar Leon, L. E., Brown, A. M., Kaku, H., & Sillitoe, R. V. (2024). Purkinje cell dysfunction causes disrupted sleep in ataxic mice. Disease Models & Mechanisms, 17(6), dmm050379. https://doi.org/10.1242/dmm.050379
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