I'm curious to how you got into the using coffee for energy (especially in the early mornings) it seems that this has become the norm in peoples lives: waking up to two or three cups of coffee and then drinking even more at work.
I like coffee enough to have it regularly once a week on Saturday mornings but the rest of my caffeine consumption is sitting down to a cup of tea at around 5 o'clock which seems to make me happy more than energizing me. But the headaches because you did not have your coffee seem rather scary that it had gotten to that point.
I don't remember how I got started in to coffee drinking business to help me wake up. But I have been doing it for far too long. I had to have coffee in the morning for me to begin to do something. 3-4 large cups a day (at least) was normal for me.
I don't think a lot of people realize but caffeine addiction is not very different from other forms of addiction (as to how addictions in generally work, not necessarily how much damage they do to you). So my headaches for not having coffee was symptoms of withdrawal from caffeine. I have learned from others who also tried to quit drinking coffee they had to deal with really bad headaches.
My main reason for trying to quit caffeine (as mentioned before) is anxiety. I think I have recovered 90% from my anxiety just by quitting coffee. I am also taking supplements like st. John's wort, which I believe helped me a lot too, along with heavy exercise.
Oh! And I forgot about the dreams! :)
This might sound as an exaggeration, but I don't think I have dreamed for the last ten years or so. Or at least dreams I can consciously remember. The week after I stopped drinking coffee, every night I have been having the most vivid dreams you could imagine. Its amazing! :)
After dropping out of college, this might be the second best decision I ever made. I am so excited I can't stop writing about it. :)
Interesting, I can understand the relation to anxiety as when I have had more than a couple cups of coffee on a given day I really do start to become shaky and irritable by things that normally wouldn't phase me and have seen similar things in heavy coffee drinkers.
The dreams may actually have appeared because of your sleep habits being fixed as you were waking up with coffee and not naturally waking where your brain actually starts to change from a dream state to a conscious state (which could explain why you now remember them).
You don't have to have a lot of caffeine to get a caffeine withdrawal headache. Variation in caffeine intake is a common cause of people's apparently random headaches.
I forget the name of it but I believe that a few decades back here in Australia there was a brand of over the counter pain killers that had caffeine in them. It perks you up and can reduce the severity of migraines.
You have a headache so you take one but when it wears off you get a caffeine withdrawal headache so you have another one... Repeat until your kidneys fail (or the government finally bans them).
Mixing caffeine with painkillers is pretty common; caffeine improves the effectiveness. I this this is mostly a legal workaround -- codeine would be more effective, but they give you a caffeine + acetaminophen + asprin cocktail that's almost as good because that's legal to sell over the counter. As an occasional headache sufferer, I've found it to be pretty effective. Codeine is better, though.
Pretty sure you're not allowed to put caffeine in painkillers at all in Australia. I've certainly never seen it that I can recall. It sounds like an inherently dangerous idea to combine stimulants and depressants.
Also, you can get codeine over the counter here. You need a prescription for the higher strength stuff but you can get strong enough codeine without one. The pharmacist will ask you a few questions about why you want it but I've never been refused it. Costs 7 or 8 bucks for 20 tablets of the name brand stuff from memory.
I like coffee enough to have it regularly once a week on Saturday mornings but the rest of my caffeine consumption is sitting down to a cup of tea at around 5 o'clock which seems to make me happy more than energizing me. But the headaches because you did not have your coffee seem rather scary that it had gotten to that point.