Your symptoms may be unrelated - except for the nausea.

It normally takes about six weeks for the plaquenil to begin to work on your body (it has to build up first).

So, if you're taking the plaquenil -especially if you're taking it on an empty stomach- yes it will cause nausea -which if you take it at bedtime can cause wicked dreams because you're nauseas. Make sense?

What's a girl to do? Take it with your last meal - and be sure to eat regularly whether you feel like it or not. It will help to keep your blood sugar level and cut down on the bad dreams AND nausea.

Hope that helps...

Whenever I see anyone post about nausea, I always mention ginger. It's been proven to be very effective at relieving nausea. Most people seem to respond well to candied ginger...I keep a jar of it in the refrigerator, where it seems to keep forever.

Warm ginger tea ain't bad either :)

I had the same tummy problems when I started it. Check with your doctor first, but I had lots of success taking anti-gas medicine with it, and a zantac when I was really nauseated.

As for the dreams? I've always been a vivid dreamer but am even moreso on Plaquenil. Not horrors, but more vivid than before.

I found that taking it in the morning helps. At night I take Pepcid A/C and that helps with the stomach issues.

Oh and one more thing...
Steroids (like prednisone) can cause terrible dreams and interrupt sleep

I found one other person with Sjs that has the bad dreams. I don't take steroids so I can't attribute it to that :/

But I also suffer from anxiety. I'm sure that doesn't help. Thats for all the responses guys :)

When I first took Plaquenil I did not seem to have side-effects, but it did not help me medically either... in fact, I did not notice any improvement to my well-being...
... but I took it all the same because I was told by the rheumatologist that Plaquenil was the best prevention against my SLE/MCTD-flare-ups... and I believed him...
Then, all of a sudden I got very sick and realized I suffered from a flare-up brought up by an allergy and perhaps drug-intolerance to either Plaquenil or my antihypertension medicines - or a food-intolerance...
...after elliminating one food after another without successfullly finding the cause of my sudden obvious allergy-symptoms,
I began to research about the Plaquenil I was taking and found out from a chemist, that the Plaquenil-production had changed recently and,
in an effort to save money, the Plaquenil-producing pharmaceutical company had subsituted the original sugar-coating of Plaquenil with artificial sugar-coating and they also put new artificial colouring in their "new production" of Plaquenil pills and that explained my sudden allergy and onset of an SLE/MCTD-flare-up as a direct result of my allergy and drug-intolerance to these artificial sugar coatings and artificial colourings of Plaquenil...

... Could not take Plaquenil ever since...

It still surprises me how oversensitive my body had become over the years suffering from SLE/MCTD flare-ups, that my whole body would react with illness and flare-ups to such tiny little Plaquenil pills...
Perhaps the oversensitivity of our bodies is also a definite symptom of suffering from SLE/MCTD... over many years... ???