Brown Adipose Tissue, Fever, and Sleep
Animal studies have shown that in the presence of systemic inflammation in the body, brown fat produces an initial hypothermia followed later by a fever. Systemic inflammation can be caused by a known infection or by low-level infection among other things, but also, we need to consider the fact that sleep deprivation (which is often related to the presence of stress or trauma in a person’s life) can cause abnormal body temperature fluctuations. Body temperature is related to sleep patterns and brown adipose tissue plays a role in heat generation in the body. We might not always be able to diagnose whether a given fever is caused by an infection or whether it is caused by stress and resulting poor sleep quality or quantity.
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Every 24 hours, body temperature varies up to 1.2° C. About 5.6 hours after a person falls asleep, body temperature is at its lowest, around 36.1° C. But by mid-afternoon, a person’s body temperature rises to 37.1° C. This normal rising and falling of body temperature impacts the quality of a person’s sleep. Lower body temperatures while sleeping tend to produce more high-quality REM cycles. Higher body temperatures during sleep, in contrast, tend to produce lower-quality REM cycles or the total omission of REM cycles.REM sleep cycles are important in terms of both physical and emotional health. Indeed, REM sleep is the time of the night when our bodies release growth hormone, the substance that helps the body repair itself and adapt to changing environmental conditions. If REM sleep cycles are disrupted, we can become biologically ill. But also, REM sleep cycles themselves can be disrupted by trauma or stress overload. So we might think of REM sleep and brown adipose tissues as an interface between the physical body and our unconscious mind.
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Fever Dreams
During a fever, vivid, intense, and sometimes frightening dreams are common. These are known as “fever dreams”. They tend to occur during periods of elevated body temperature (fever) that disrupts the normal REM sleep cycle. We discuss the idea of psychogenic fevers elsewhere in greater detail, but we should note that psychogenic fevers are related to brown adipose tissue thermogenesis (psychogenic fevers are triggered by brown adipose tissue). A psychogenic fever is a fever that has an emotional (stress-related) origin. Such a fever is ultimately triggered by a major stressful event or by chronic stress and the elevation in body temperature takes shape through a mechanism of action that involves the brown adipose tissue.
So while conventional medicine or psychology might say that a psychogenic fever is caused by brown adipose tissue, it is also true to say that psychogenic fever is caused by stress. What we’re discussing here in greater detail is how stress works through brown adipose tissue to produce a psychogenic fever that, in turn, produces a fever dream.
Fever dreams give us a clue as to what’s happening in regard to the body-mind. Conventional psychology and medicine don’t want for people to experience the body-mind as one, whole thing, but fever dreams are something that helps us see that we are, in fact, deeply connected not just within ourselves to ourselves, but also to the Universe and everyone else in it. I would argue that brown adipose tissue is an important physical structure in the body that plays a role in this deep sense of connection to the Universe and to our Inner Reality as well.
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Fever dreams often feature disturbing content involving spatial distortions, entrapment, and emotional distress. In conventional medicine and psychology, this is nothing of interest, but other systems of medicine and trauma-informed psychology have a different view of fever dreams. In regard to brown adipose tissue, fever dreams give us a glimpse into how and why we might view brown fat as a sort of interfacing tissue between the body and the mind.
In the model of trauma that Lydi and I work with, trauma can be defined in several different ways. Trauma is subjective. In other words, what one person experiences as traumatic may not be experienced as traumatic by another individual. According to one definition, trauma is any experience that feels incomplete.
Another definition of trauma is that it is any situation in which the right hemisphere of the brain (which represents the felt sense of the body) and the left hemisphere of the brain are not able to communicate fluently with each other about a particular event that, as a result, becomes stored in the body as a inner conflict.
Yet another definition of trauma is that trauma is any situation that we can’t tell as a story that has a beginning, a middle, and a meaningful end. For as long as we’re alive, we weave together various storylines as threads that are more or less integrated than other threads into the fabric of our lives. A thread or a storyline that is integrated and thus, not traumatic to us, is knotted or looped into the broader pattern of the fabric that would (in this metaphor) come into focus when we step back to look at our lives at a distance. But most of us in the modern world have many storyline-threads in our lives that are not being woven into the fabric of who we are (our Core).
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Now let’s put these three ideas about trauma together. To be fair, most of our lives happen around situations that feel incomplete particularly in terms of our relationships with others which often involve some level of conflict that is not fully resolved. Nonetheless, situations that feel unresolved and that lack a meaningful end are precisely those situations that have not been knotted or looped into the weave of our fabric. The looping or knotting of a storyline into our fabric is like the right, emotional brain (which represents the body and how the body feels an emotion) telling the left, logical brain its story such that the left brain can hear and retell the story in words. The right brain does not deal with words. It deals with concepts that we experience as emotions in the body. In order for the right brain material to be woven into the fabric of who we are, the left brain must become conscious of right brain material and put it into words.Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep cycles are one of the main ways in which a modern human being is able to integrate right brain emotional material with left brain narrative material to produce a weave that is both highly intricate and patterned when one “zooms in” on the material, but that also has a meaningful and identifiable pattern when one “zooms out”. Many traditional, tribal societies have specific patterns that they weave into fabrics to represent the familial energy. Modern humans often experience themselves not just as separate from any kind of larger woven fabric of family, but also we experience ourselves as disconnected from ourselves internally. REM sleep helps us stay connected within ourselves to a greater or lesser extent which, in turn produces both mental and physical health.
There are different triggers that might cause a psychogenic fever that, in turn, produces a fever dream. An overwhelming traumatic event that’s too difficult for the body to process through the normal REM sleep cycles might lead to the development of a psychogenic fever and subsequent fever dreams that help the body release trauma. Ongoing chronic stress or a life situation that never permits for the expression of emotion might also eventually lead to psychogenic fever or fever dreams that help the right hemisphere of the brain make a connection with the left hemisphere of the brain.
Though a lot of the regular stressors in our daily lives might develop into “trauma” without REM sleep cycles that weave right brain material with left brain material, when our bodies reach critical mass in terms of traumatic material, a fever and subsequent fever dreams might, at some point, become necessary in order to integrate material into the overall weave. Further, certain environmental rhythms might spur the production of psychogenic fever and fever dreams that represent a positive and beneficial integration of traumatic material into an individual’s energy field. For example, solar storms and geomagnetic storms can alter the magnetic field surrounding the earth in a manner that affects humans similarly to what happens during the administration of transcranial magnetic stimulation (a type of trauma-therapy that helps the right brain communicate with the left brain so as to integrate traumatic material that is causing underlying mental or physical illness). Solar and geomagnetic storms are on a reliable 11 year cycle of solar miminums and solar maximums that trigger different health issues that may develop and then later resolve as a result of natural, environmentally triggered trauma-release and right-brain-to-left-brain communication.
Indeed, solar cycles wax and wane on an 11 year cycle. Solar storms sometimes set off geomagnetic storms that may or may not alter the magnetic field around earth. Solar storms ramp up every 11 years and they become stronger and more frequent for a couple of years before waning and becoming less strong and less frequent for a couple of years. Additionally, these 11 year solar storm cycles are a part of a larger solar storm cycle of 500 to 600 years wherein the earth gets hotter and hotter and then, as a result of the loss of glaciers and a lessening of weight on the tectonic plates, volcanos and other types of activity that produce particulate in the earth’s atmosphere begin to occur in order to cool the planet.
As the earth gets hotter and hotter, our bodies also get hotter and hotter. Brown adipose fat can diminish in our bodies as a result of an increase in heat and solar storms which can, in turn, lead to fat soluble vitamin sequestration (something we’ve discussed elsewhere). Fever dreams can develop in response to heat in the environment that heats the body. They can also develop in response to heat in the body caused by fever. A fever dream that develops in response to body heat is the release (full or partial) of trauma and though these dreams often feel very serious and scary, they represent something positive: the return of dissociated energies to the person’s body. In other words, a fever dream is one natural way in which the body integrates traumatic story-threads into the overall weave of a person’s life.
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Feeling Trapped in a Fever Dream
People often describe feeling trapped in fever dreams. This feeling of entrapment is also described as being “in a loop”. Indeed, the looping sensation involved in fever dreams is the right hemisphere of the brain attempting to tell the left hemisphere of the brain (which might be envisaged as a separate part of our individuality) the story of the traumatic event so that the “loop” can be replaced with a natural story-trajectory with a beginning, middle, and an end).
In psychology, the disorder known as multiple personality disorder / dissociative identity disorder / DID is caused by trauma. In DID, a person “dissociates” from a traumatic experience by producing a separate sub-personality that carries the incomplete, unresolved story of the trauma. Typically in response to trauma, the psyche fractures along several fault lines to produce several sub-personalities in response to a traumatic event. One sub-personality might carry the weight of the trauma (the fear or the sadness, for example) while another sub-personality carries the anger about what happened. Yet another sub-personality might develop as a Protector who acts to negotiate or navigate any situation in life that seems related to the initial trauma. This Protector sub-personality is “triggered” by some internal or external cue.
In shamanism, DID sub-personalities are regarded as “soul parts”. Shaman work to do soul retrievals and this type of healer might set out on other planes of reality (using self-induced trance states) to find power animals to protect soul parts when a patient’s energy field becomes delicate or vulnerable. A shaman might look for a soul part that’s trapped in a looping storyline.
In modern medicine, Dr. Naviaux uses suramin, a substance found in pine needle essential oil, to heal autism patients. His work is based on studies into something called Resignation Syndrome. Resignation Syndrome was given a name a disorder that occurred in refugee children in Sweden who would fall into a comatose state after their families were told by the Swedish government that they had to return to a war-torn country where the family would face certain death. Dr. Naviaux observed that children with Resignation Syndrome were in a state of cellular dormancy that he referred to as the Cell Danger Response. In a child with Resignation Syndrome, cells have gone into a comatose state that is holographically similar to the child’s comatose state. Dr. Naviaux was particularly interested in the fact that children with autism have a similar issue with cellular dormancy that can be treated using suramin, in some cases. Children who eventually came out of their comatose state of Resignation Syndrome described the experience as being like someone trapped underwater in a glass cube. One child said that it felt as though if they were to move, the cube would break and they’d die.
So if we go back to the idea of fever dreams and the fact that these dreams tend to involve seemingly infinite loops of traumatic material, we can consider the possibility that fever dreams and even the fever that causes the fever dream might very well be produced by the body in order to release trauma. Thus, a fever dream should be celebrated as a part of the patient’s soul returning to the Core Energy Field. The scary fever dream is not a prophecy of the future, but rather the release of some traumatic material from the past.
Melatonin to Reduce a Fever
Again, let’s remember that poor sleep quality or sleep deprivation can lead to the development of a fever by brown adipose tissue. This relationship between sleep loss and fever is supported to some extent by the idea that melatonin supplements (to produce more restful sleep and enhance sleep quality) can theoretically be used to lower fevers according to scientific studies perhaps by promoting sleep that in turn, makes it unnecessary for brown fat to produce heat.
Melatonin is naturally derived from serotonin, thus serotonin and melatonin are related things. And serotonin, of course, plays an important role in heat production in the body too. Indeed, if a person overdoses on serotonin-enhancing drugs like MAOIs or SSRIs, serotonin syndrome can develop. One of the most dangerous symptoms involved in serotonin syndrome is fever and high body temperature.
So melatonin is not a cure-all for all fevers, but rather, it can be beneficial for reducing fevers certain types of fever that develop in response to sleep deprivation or poor quality sleep. For example, if you travel across time zones and you arrive at a new location with jet lag, you might notice that your body feels cold at first because it is still operating according to the circadian rhythm of your location before your travels. By taking a melatonin supplement at bedtime in the new location, you encourage the body to cool off at night and then warm up during the day.
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Resources:
• Karacan, I. et al. (1968). The Effects of Fever on Sleep and Dream Patterns. Retrieved April 17, 2026 from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033318268718077
• Evans, S. S. et al. (2016). Fever and the thermal regulation of immunity: the immune system feels the heat. Retrieved April 17, 2026 from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4786079/
• Eskilsson, A. et al. (2020). The generation of immune-induced fever and emotional stress-induced hyperthermia in mice does not involve brown adipose tissue thermogenesis. Retrieved January 26, 2026 from https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1096/fj.201902945R
• Nakamura, K. (2015). Neural circuit for psychological stress-induced hyperthermia. Retrieved February 17, 2026 from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23328940.2015.1070944
