Horrible Recurring Adult Nightmares

In My Humble Opinion
1

Anyone who’s going to tell me to talk to a physician, I already have. Anyone who’s going to tell me to talk to a psychologist, I already am. Now with that out of the way, I am having my ass kicked by these nightmares. I go to sleep, they wake me up. If I’m alone, I lie there all night trying to calm myself down in various ways, or not trying and simply lying there because I’m tired and I have to get up in X number of hours, and always my whole body stays tense to the point of pain so I get up achy and sleep deprived in the morning. It’s usually worst in my shoulders and upper back, so I get tension headaches frequently too.

If I’m with a lover it’s the same as being alone, as I’m ashamed enough about having nightmares that I take every precaution not to wake her up. If my best friend is here we typically sleep cuddled up to eachother (her mother thinks we’re banging :smack:), so I don’t stay tense long enough to hurt then, but I still can’t get back to sleep worth a damn. I get up exhausted to the point that it screws up my day.

Things I’ve already tried:
-OTC sleep pills. I hate those. They don’t stop the nightmares, just stop them from waking me up, so I wake up in the morning feeling physically and mentally like I’ve just survived a tasteless action movie.

  • Guided imagery, counting backwards, thinking about mundane stuff, going to sleep with headphones in, meditation, breathing exercises, reading before bed etc. Some of these have been great for getting to sleep- but no good for recovering from a nightmare.
    -Getting up and taking a hot bubble bath or shower. The muscle tension is so deep by the time I’m fully conscious that this hardly puts a dent in it.
    -Getting up to make chamomile tea, or drinking hot milk. Helps with the mental stress; doesn’t make a difference in the physical tension.

Normally I like dreams, I get novel ideas from them, I use them to solve problems, I like to hear about other peoples’ dreams, etc. A general source of fun and possibly intellectual stimulation. Though I have had bad nightmares all my life I hadn’t had a reason to hate them so much until now. They’ve always bothered me enough to be a problem, but until very recently I had so many other more pressing problems that even had I not had them, I wouldn’t have had a good night’s sleep, so it hardly mattered. Now, I’m able to get to sleep decently, so the nightmares are the primary roadblock to feeling rested in the morning. So, suddenly, they matter.

What the hell do I do about this?

2

Your real problem is whatever is causing you that level of stress. That’s going to have to come from your doc or psych. Don’t let them fall down on the job. You should NOT be that physically stressed out all the time, and it’s wearing on you mentally. That’s what’s causing the nightmares - your mind is trying to create a reason WHY your body is continually so stressed out and feeling under attack.

Get that dealt with, and the nightmares should lessen.
In the meantime, all I can offer at this point is trying a combination of physical relaxation training and inducing lucid dreaming. It’s gonna be a bitch to start up because you’re already sleep-deprived and on-edge, but it’s worth a start.

First - relaxation training.

Look up Deep breathing Exercises
. You can’t be stressed and relaxed at the same time. It doesn’t work. What most people don’t realize is that you can trick your body into relaxing (at least somewhat) by purely PHYSICAL means. The downside is that you have to really commit to the techniques - a deep breathing exercise may take up to 30 minutes to complete, and it doesn’t really help if you don’t continue until you’re at least somewhat relaxed.

Also check out Progressive Muscle Relaxation where you tense and relax muscles on purpose while consciously keeping your thoughts trained like a laser on JUST THAT ONE MUSCLE that you’re messing with. It’s really hard, but it’s doable, and it works well. The mental challenge of focusing also will help with achieving lucid dreaming states, so that’s a bonus.

Between those two techniques, you should be able to get a handle on your *physical *stress levels at night.
Now, the nightmares and the lucid dreaming to take care of the emotional stress.

First off, are all of your nightmares the same or similar? Usually people get themes - gory shit, suspense/creeper vibes, chase/stalking…

If they are, then one day while awake, you need to write up a scenario that explains to your satisfaction a different angle that the dreams can end on, and keep it by your bed. If not, you’ll need to write one for each main category they fall into and keep them all handy.

For example - if you’re suffering from horrible gory shit - write up a nice short scene, very descriptive. An example would be of someone offscreen yelling CUT and then all of the boring behind-the-scenes action of the actors (the people in your dream) walking calmly away, casually waving to each other, talking quietly and happily in corners, calmly getting sodas, settling into relaxing chairs with boring books, resting in chairs with their eyes shut, getting OUT of costume and makeup and into boring and mundane clothes (be very descriptive of the mundane clothes, not of the gore and makeup), set workers coming in with vacuum cleaners or mops to clean off the stage and recreate the set as something friendly, reassuring, and boring…

You want to make it as simultaneously totally descriptive and emotionally neutral/soothing as possible. You also want it to be fairly short - nothing more than about a page. Make it as comprehensive as possible as to the set-up, so that it can easily apply to any of your gory nightmares.

If you have the suspense nightmares, or the chase ones, come up with defusers for them instead with the same feel to them - descriptively boring and soothing.

Here’s what you do with them. When you wake up - hit a light, and read that sucker over and over and over again. When you feel like you’ve got it burned into your brain, lie back in bed and close your eyes. Are you visualizing what you read, or thinking about the nightmare? If you’re thinking about the nightmare (even a little) sit back up and read that sucker again. This is when you want to throw in the deep breathing exercises and/or progressive muscle relaxation exercises here, to get your body relaxed again also.

Keep that cycle going until you can lie back down and close your eyes without thinking/fearing/worrying about the nightmare. It may take hours. It may take all damn night. That’s ok. If the scene doesn’t work - look closely at it. Is it *really *innocuous and boring? You want essentially elevator music in textual format, lovingly and carefully recorded in nearly agonizingly boring detail, carefully tailored for you specifically and what you find soothing and boring beyond belief.
Keep that up every time you have a nightmare. What you’re aiming for is associating waking up from a nightmare with a relaxing but super-boring interlude where your mind is kept busy, and your body is consciously relaxed back to sleep. Over time, you should eventually get to the point where your body will recognize the nightmare when it’s starting, and you’ll wake up faster, or even right when it’s starting. If that happens, still read the boring scene and relax yourself. You really want this to be a consistent pattern - every nightmare wake-up gets a boring scene recitation and relaxation.

At this point, I’ll warn you to resist adding other rituals along with this. You don’t want to always get a drink. You don’t want to always have the same blanket, or a special pillowcase that you switch to. You don’t want to have to look out the window, or sit in a particular chair (it’s actually best if you don’t ever get OUT of bed at all) or anything like that. The only ritual needs to be the reading of the scene and the relaxing of your body. If you use other rituals, there will come a night when you* can’t *use them, and that is not good. Don’t go there.

So, now you’re waking up just about every night - sometimes you wake up before the nightmare gets really going, sometimes you’re not so lucky and you wake up at the end, and sometimes you wake up even before you have a nightmare, but you feel a little bit unsettled. But now, you read your boring scenes, you do about 30 minutes of deep breathing, work through a nice set of muscle relaxations (remembering to think very precisely about whatever muscle you’re on) and then you go back to sleep more relaxed. This is good.

This is the point where if you’re really stubborn (and maybe a tiny bit lucky) you should get to the point where your mind has a subconscious association between that boring shit you wrote and the nightmares that are showing up. At that point, what should happen is that every once in a while, you’ll notice in the dream that things are heading towards nightmare land, and instead of waking all the way up to read your script and relax your body, you’ll have that process memorized and it will be such a pattern, that you can do it in your sleep - you’re consciously (more or less) guiding your dream back into non-scary territory by not letting yourself get worked up in the first place.

You can help that last step to happen by taking time to either lay in bed before or after you fall asleep and think about what you’re seeing and doing in that misty sortof-thinking-sortof-dreaming hazy liminal state. I find that it’s easier for me when I wake up, my best friend has much better luck when she’s drifting off. You want to try and keep a light touch on your awareness of what you’re doing and dreaming about, and to try and interject when it goes somewhere you don’t want it to.

Again, the real goal is to control your dreams without waking up, but I am in a minority where I think that lots more people can get to the control level where they can at least* monitor and then force themselves awake when dreams go pear-shaped*, and so I think it’s important to practice that skill also.

The last thing I can suggest is to be really paranoid and restrictive of your media intake. Don’t watch the news, or look at any news sites or websites with lots of really emotional or arousing pictures. Try to read good news articles, or boring ones. Do you watch a lot of TV/YouTube/Hulu? Cut out anything bloody, gory, stressful/suspenseful, or morally fraught for you. Even if you think that it’s not bothering you, it’s providing material for your subconscious to torture you with. Do not give it that material.

Good luck!

3

Can you describe the dreams a bit more? By recurrent do you mean nearly identical in nature? Might they be what they call ‘anxiety’ dreams. Or are they PTSD dreams?

4

Prescription sleep aids may be helpful. I’ve never taken one, but I hear Ambien will, for some people, knock them out completely all night.

5

is there something in your lfe , that you keep doing over and over unsucesssfully ??? like quit smoking ? change your eating habits ? learn to pray ?souns like your mind wants to do something but your sub-concious wont let you, therefore you keep having the same dream over and over again ??complete your goals, complete them !!!and hopeffully your regcurrings will go away.good luck.

6

That is going to be a lot more work than if they were just straight up gore/suspense/falling etc. I’ll respond to the rest of your reply in a separate post because this one might grow to some ungodly size.

Nah, by recurrent I just mean I have them Every. Damn. Night.

Right now I am suspected of having PTSD- my doc is bothered by my startle response, for one, but I’m of the opinion that PTSD is the new fad disorder and so am putting on a production of being skeptical lest he judge too soon. So making a (somewhat) educated guess they probably are PTSD nightmares, no garauntee.

The dreams are ridiculously varied. I’m not even sure I could find a pattern at all sometimes, there seem to just be too many types.

Some are just straightforward traumatic memories that I’m not going to recount here, I will say that I had one of the most abusive childhoods in the history of ever.

I should probably mention I used to be mute in all my dreams. I still am in all my nightmares, and most others, but I occasionally talk in non-nightmare dreams. That’s a new development of the past six months or so. It’s assumed by everyone I know and meet in every dream I don’t talk in that 1) I know how to talk 2) I can’t make a sound, no matter how I try, 3) there’s nothing strange about this, it is simply one of my many quirks, 4) I can communicate to some degree by just oozing an idea out of my pores, but so can everyone else, 5) it’s always been this way, and 6) there is no reason (no physical nor emotional trauma, no act of anyone having stolen my words or scared me quiet) for it. And when I manage to speak in a dream, it’s crucial: I’m the only one who knows the building’s on fire, or I’m the only one with the balls to stand up to this dismissive or imcompetent leader, I’m the last person to have seen so-and-so who’s missing alive etc.

I’m not unduly bothered by gore, even in-person in waking life, but I’m bothered by people being in pain, if it’s someone I know or care about. Even if I never witness it. I have a lot of dreams of loved ones being tortured to death, or them having to undergo painful medical procedures, or of myself facing down an impending long and painful demise with no hope of euthanasia- usually when it’s me doomed to suffer it’s because society has just collapsed.

The chase/creeper type is rarer. Usually water-related; I’m alone in the dark at a wave pool and there’s a huge Cthulu-esque critter lurking behind the wave grates, or I’m watching a tidal wave sweep toward me and there’s something giant and malicious causing it that I can’t see yet.

These seem to merge with academic settings semi-regularly, such as dreaming that one of my junior high teachers is making the class stand at attention on the other side of the pool and wait for the monster to come rising out from behind the grates. In the ones with school references there’s almost always the metaphor of “going over the deep end”, either by the creature (if seen) tossing me up over its head, with me avoiding the wave by swimming toward the wall it’ll come from and climbing up over so I’m behind the origin point, or with me somehow withstanding the wave and being left alone on a piece of ground that is now above water level. If I climbed the wall, the source of anxiety after the wave is the immediate threat of the critter, but if I stood in the wave and didn’t flinch then the issue is the sheer desolation I’m left looking at afterward.

Speaking of standing at attention, there are military-themed dreams. I think those are because I consciously realized from a very young age that to survive to adulthood in my household I would have to be or at least seem incredibly tough, and made the logical (for a 7-year-old) step from there.

If I’m present but not as my actual self in a dream, I’m always represented by the same 20-something male. Different facial structure, but whenever I’m seeing his face instead of through his eyes, his expressions are all so similar to mine that it’s hard not to feel like I’m looking at my gender-flipped self in the mirror. He has been 20-something since I was 11, maybe younger, and has the same crew cut whether I have no hair, short hair, blue hair, hair down to my waist etc. And in wars he’s always a conscript, never a volunteer (poor bastard). Apocalyptic battles are common, as are incendiary weapons (there’s that dreaded element of prolonged suffering again) of every kind. WWI-esque shit is common too, particularly jumping over the ledge of trenches to charge. In those, inevitably, he is/I am the only survivor of whatever.

Sometimes I just straight up dream I’m an alcoholic, with no reason in waking life to fear that at all. In those dreams I’m always my real-world female self, but sometimes a few years older. I drink maybe every six weeks or every two months, never alone, never while I write, and never past the point of being able to reliably stand/walk. But in the dream I’m sitting down to a stack of old unlined paper, the kind my dad used to bring home from the paper mill he worked at and have me do math on as a kid before I started school, I’ve got a pen, a bottle, a glass and sometimes something that indicates my thoughts aren’t exactly in a good place, like a knife or a bottle of sedatives. Alone. I drink about a third to a half of the bottle, which is made all the more over-the-top due to my small size, sometimes do something stupid like play Russian roulette or pour the entire contents of the pillbottle into my palm as if to take them. And that’s the whole dream, just a depressed and drunk version of myself real, live, optimistic & sober self.

I swear some of my worst dreams are about the fear of being stressed. Most recent example, there was this small, thin-walled wooden building in the woods. No bigger than an outhouse. It’s completely empty except for a desk, a chair and a phone. I have some kind of sense, as people do in dreams, that my (estranged, but goddamnit I love that man) father said he would be back in fifteen minutes… three hours ago. And with that clairvoyance everyone has in dreams, I’m somehow overhearing police communicate on their radio frequencies and such. One cop reports to another that they’ve found a body beheaded & burnt in the woods, and I immediately see the image of it in front of my eyes. I convince myself it’s him and go through that whole process anxiety sufferers go through IRL of convincing themselves of the worst, in the dream, and after hours of dream chronology he shows back up alive and unharmed, and I shout at him for alarming me.

There are a LOT about apocalypses. Usually ending with the entire planet covered in blue (seems to have some kind of religious significance- my abusive mother was a devout churchgoer) fire, or turned to black glass by nuclear warheads. Before I was old enough to know what a nuclear bomb was, as young as four, I used to dream of huge wildfires, and meteor showers, and I guess they just evolved in scale and grew more realistic as I matured. And even within the realm of nuclear stuff they have progressed- by preteens I was taking shelter in bunkers and surviving, along with few others, while between 12 and 15 (while I tried to get comfortable with the fact that I’m a lesbian, and one who naturally falls into all the butch stereotypes at that) I was taking shelter in a bunker with a gay couple who insisted on doing my nails, hair etc and just generally trying to make a “real” woman out of me while the world ended. After that there came a point where everyone would perish in the blast, and then a point where the death wouldn’t be completely instant, and now I’m at a stage where there rarely is an actual explosion, just the looming threat and nobody doing a damnthing about it. I think the lattermost is a stand-in for global warming.

There are more, but the rest are all much simpler whereas these are weirder and hard to classify.

7

Er, excuse me, your post is a mess, and though I suspect your intentions were benevolent, so are your ideas. Recurring dreams of this nature do not signify some “message” that a person hasn’t gotten yet. That’s the hollywood-psychology version.

I don’t smoke, my eating habits are healthy and as I flip between an agnostic/atheist and a Pagan I have multiple gods who I’m quite good at praying to/questioning the existence of.

8

As mentioned in another thread of mine you posted in, I am leery of meds. However, thank you for the tip- I will consider it.

9

I was prescribed Prazosin for PTSD-related nightmares. Like you, I don’t think I necessarily actually HAVE PTSD, but it might be worth a shot. Prazosin isn’t a sleep aid, it’s just supposed to help with nightmares. It didn’t really work for me because my biggest problem was not being able to fall asleep in the first place, but it did work for my sister.

10

This could be a good idea. Thanks a bunch- I didn’t know there were things other than sleep aids prescribed to help nightmares.

Again- I’m not too keen on the idea of meds. Long story short, many times I was given someone else’s, and not even approved for children, in a golden example of easy-rather-than-effective parenting.

If the doc or the psych says one of the two mentioned here is a good idea, I would have to think about it before taking them up on that. If the doc or psych says some other medication that no one else has had a good experience with is a good idea, I MIGHT think about it. And if the doc or psych says “you must take this” rather than merely saying it’s a good idea, he or she is going to be told to depart my presence and engage in any standard act of autoerotica.

11

Medical hypnosis will do the trick. It has reduced my spider nightmares by 90 percent and my annoying recurring dreams that aren’t nightmares by about half.

12

Yeah, I hate when doctors just tell you what to take instead of discussing it with you.

Prazosin isn’t a very risky medication. I think the main side effect is dizziness, but that doesn’t matter if you’re going to bed anyway. I’ve taken Ambien too, and had okay experiences with it, but it can make you have more vivid dreams, and you can do scary things like sleep driving. I’d probably try the Prazosin first if that’s an option for you.

13

They may, however, be indications of some internal stress. They aren’t normal. They are warning signs; they are symptoms.

To some degree, I think you may be in a vicious circle, where your very anxiety about having the dreams is interfering with your ability to sleep peacefully. This makes sense; if I knew I were going to be awakened in the middle of the night by a horrible dream, it would make it a lot harder to go to sleep in the first place.

So, among your other tasks, you need to break the vicious circle. That’s what meds are good for.

As a long shot, could this have a physical cause? Is it possible you’ve had a mild stroke, or some change in your body chemistry, or perhaps are suffering from some other kind of pain, so that your interrupted sleep is an indication of it?

(I have sleep apnea, which often manifests in the form of scary “drowning” dreams.)

14

This is definitely plausible. I’m told I wake up swearing quite a lot & I don’t remember it, so for all I know that could be cursing at the fact that I had nightmares again.

True. Right now the working theory is that they’re PTSD dreams. If they aren’t, then I presume the doctor will be looking for physical causes from that point on.

I’d say it’s highly, highly unlikely.

15

Good to know! Although, risky or not risky, I should state one more time that I’m very, very wary of medication for anything even remotely psychological.

I’ve heard of people tripping out on Ambien, not sure what’s worse, that or sleep-driving.

16

Look, I hate to be a dick, but you have more problems than the Dope (or any non-professional) can solve for you. If you don’t trust your doctor to prescribe you something to help you, *find a new doctor. *If you can’t ever see yourself trusting any doctor enough to take anti-anxiety medication, then you’re going to suffer far more than is necessary. Are there non-pharmacological solutions to your problems? Certainly, professional therapy will help you change the way you think. But changing the way you think takes time and it takes trust. In a crisis, you have neither. And if you are in a crisis that medication would help to resolve (which, based on your last post, seems to be the case), then you are making yourself unhelpable.

Please consider that there are also mental disorders which literally are just brain chemicals gone awry–they have everything to do with heredity and nothing to do with environment. If you had one of those disorders and refused to take medication (which we don’t know, but I’m speaking hypothetically), how could you ever get better? Schizophrenics cannot wish away their voices. Bipolars cannot wish away their manic phases. What if you have, say, bipolar *and *PTSD from your abusive childhood? Fixing one might be the foot in the door to fix the other. But you’ve closed the door completely to medication. You have to open it to move forward. And, although depression is not in the same category as bipolarity or schizophrenia, there are *very few *cases of depression so bad that they are completely unable to be alleviated by the right combination of meds (in which case, ECT is an option). But you haven’t even started *trying *to medicate, you won’t! So you have no freaking idea how much medication might help you.

Do you feel my frustration, here? You’re asking for help, while shooting yourself in the foot by refusing to accept it. This is self-defeating and, ultimately, counter-productive to you living, which is the bottom-line-most-important-thing. For you, when it comes down to taking medication or getting so depressed you want to kill yourself, you’re choosing the depression. And it’s a horrible and frustrating thing for an outsider to witness.

17

I also have a family member who was prescribed Prazosin for severe PTSD-related nightmares. Ambien didn’t work for him, and he went through a severe crisis period where he became so sleep-deprived due to the constant nightmares that his blood pressure was going out of whack (he does not have hypertension) and his psychiatrist was about ready to hospitalize him. He was put on Seroquel for a few days as a sleep aid to get him through that (wasn’t a viable long-term option because it would knock him totally unconscious for 12-14 hours at a time), then they tried Prazosin plus an anti-depressant. It made a huge difference. I would at least try this if it is suggested to you.

18

Rachelellogram, I am going to try very hard to keep this from needing to be moved to the Pit, so please listen carefully. I do not want this thread derailed by the prescription brigade.

In life, you’re going to meet people you think are factually wrong about things, or are going about something the wrong way. You may be right to think so, you may be wrong, you may be a bit of both. Show some maturity and do what the rest of us do- tell them once or twice and then leave it be. **Please do not make me your pet project. **

In case you missed it, I’m doing well. The nightmares would have been a non-issue a month ago because I had bigger problems. No doctor of any kind has suggested I take meds yet, which should be a telling sign regarding how wise it would be to take them. And did I not say that if an honest-to-goodness expert tells me it’s a good idea, I’ll consider it?

I’m not going to ask to be put on mind-altering drugs when in chronological order a GP, a handful of interns at his practice, a psychologist, an ER nurse, an ER doc, and the entirety of the ER psych ward (two nurses, intern, psychiatrist) have come in contact with me and not told me to take them. Do you go in and ask your doctor to amputate a limb? Do you?

If you think I’m doomed without meds, or that I’m not willing to do what’s required of me, just accept that not everyone agrees and move on to someone else. You don’t even have to open a thread if you see my name under the title.

19

Sounds like Prazosin is the go-to thing for this, when they resort to meds. That’s good to know and it seems to work well for most folks. Glad your family member is doing better.

I’ll try it if it’s suggested. I don’t know whether it will be. Doc & psych are working it out between them before I’ll have to decide on anything. They both know the full and exact truth of the meds issue, and they know that, as reluctant as I am, I’m open to it. If either one thinks the benefits outweigh the downside, I’ll hear about it.

20

The strangest thing about dreams in my opinion is that plotlines which would make for a best seller enjoyed by millions in real life can be completely debilitating and traumatizing in dream life. Your apocalypse dreams are the type of stuff that creates Hollywood millionaires.

I have only had dreams the way you’re describing a handful of times in my life, but I know the feeling. My whole body and soul commits to the reality of the dream, and an honest to goodness fight-or-flight reflex kicks in, occasionally even overpowering sleep paralysis. It’s happened infrequently enough to me that I still view the phenomenon with curiosity when it happens, but I can imagine how terrible it would be to be constantly worn down by it.

Sorry, I don’t have any advice for you. I’m not sure it’s something you can solve, anyway.