Depending upon your definition of “nightmare”, every night that I remember my dreams for about 15 years. Depressing? You betcha.
Almost never normally, but if I wanted to I could actually induce them. How? It’s very interesting, and I can almost get this to work 95% of the time.
I work nights. I’m one of three full-timers here, the other two being ladies who have worked here >15 years each. So they have their system and everyone has their’s. Technically you’re only supposed to have a 30 minute break. Well on the overnight shift it’s sort of “understood” that we kinda cheat, and we take a full hour break in the breakroom, turn off the lights and take a quick nap.
Almost everybody does this, everyone besides me though. I work ten hours straight through, I find it easier that way. And also, whenever I try to sleep at work I always have these crazy ass vivid nightmares. I think it’s related to someone sleeping under the stress of knowing that I should be working. I could descibe some of these dreams for you, but that’s for the “Do you remember your nightmares thread”, not this one.
Every couple of months or so, I’ll have one from which I wake up shit-scared without remembering anything. My partner tells me that when I first took up with him, I would frequently get to thrashing and moaning, and even screaming occasionally-but without waking up, unless he got concerned and shook me awake. I never remembered any of those either. And I apparently haven’t had one in ages.
I had one several weeks back though that I recall all too well…I was in a “quaint” fairy-tale sort of city, at a banquet party of some kind and all was well…but then there was this procession, this line of people walking along, and I was walking with them, head down, kind of shuffling, while that nasty ominous inevitable foreboding feeling you get in bad dreams settled on me and kept getting more intense; I wanted to look up and see where we were going and suddenly this voice rang through my head shouting *“You can’t look up, you don’t have a face!” *
:eek: ! :eek: ! :eek: !!!
And that woke me up literally whimpering, chilled to the bone and afraid to go back to sleep for a couple of hours. Jeesuzz FUCK! I was upset all out of proportion to the actual dream-events. If the ones I don’t remember are anything like that one, I don’t want to know about them.
I’m not aware of having dreamed at all 99.5% of the time, and the 0.5% where I do catch a glimmer just before waking, I forget what the substance was within a few minutes.
What I can say though is that I haven’t had any dreams that scared me since I was just a little kid. I’ve had ones with what would probably be scary imagery to most, but just strikes me as being intriguing since I’m self-aware of being in a dream. And on those cases when I have had disturbing imagery, it’s always been because the sun was shining on me and I was still under the comforter, so I was hot and sweaty. Probably this has happened a handful of times in my life. Five or six times maybe.
A couple times a week, if I take any kind of antihistamine, or melatonin. Otherwise, once or twice a month.
My husband has nightmares whenever he’s stressed. His is always the same one. He once fell through a floor in a burning house. He re-lives that.
Hardly ever. When I have dreams of misfortune, I’m usually just a viewer, not a participant.
95% of the dreams that I remember are nightmares. Fortunately I usually only remember them rarely, maybe once a month. And if I don’t pay attention to them after I wake up, the memory fades rather quickly.
The worst is after getting killed, and knowing I’m dreaming, and getting what’s I’d describe as “static.” Nothing happening, nothing changing, no way to change it, utterly hopeless. It’s not a feeling of being locked in a coffin, just a null signal. But being aware of it.
I usually try to wake up from those.
Twice a week, minimum. That said, I only get a doozy about one every two or three weeks.
“Doozies” include dreams about my daughter dying, being hacked up (the other night I dreamed that a guy was raping me and slicing my leg open, licking the blood)
I was diagnosed with PTSD in 1995 though, so that may have something to do with it…
Cold medicine and various prescription painkillers are like this for me. They make me paranoid and jumpy and keep me awake, mostly, but if I do go to sleep…ugh. I jolt awake, shaking, sweating, and whimpering. Usually, they’re “hopeless fight” type nightmares against horrible things that I can’t quite see.
Used to be nightly, now weekly… sometimes once every two weeks. They aren’t as bad as they used to be. I used to die in my dreams, and I was so certain I was dead that I actually found myself surprised and relieved to wake up and be alive. My most recent one involved a slow and concentrated disemboweling. There is a reason I don’t watch scary movies, and that reason is because my imagination is way too freaking vivid for my own good.
Three or four times a year. But I’m usually aware that I’m dreaming so they aren’t that difficult to take because I know it’s not real. Still, seeing a loved one in pain is never fun real or imagined.
I just recently taught a class in psychology and the book mentioned that the current popular theory* on dreams is that the mind is simply trying to sort out information and file it away - think of an inept office temp who doesn’t know you very well trying to sort out your daily keywords and make some sense of it and tuck it away in files in your brain.
That is why you go from:
Telephone bill, bad traffic on the way home from work, cold fried chicken for dinner to a silly dream about a huge chicken squawking on a cell phone to you as it is driving a Porsche on the freeway next to your car.
Stupid example, but you get what I mean.
Nightmares, however, generally come during periods of stress of some sort and, using the same keywords example, you would have dreamed of a bird suddenly hitting your car window while you were speeding down a road, causing a horrible crash and you dying while frantically trying to call someone.
Same brain filing process, just under different circumstances.
BTW, not all of the keywords are readily understood, but can be associated with others - using the same example, the phone bill could turn into a letter or email, the bad traffic could be a flight or running, the cold fried chicken could turn into ice cream or a pigeon.
- Current popular theory is just that - most likely the next edition of the book will have another popular theory.
DMark, that was actually pretty enlightening and interesting.
as i child i had one reoccuring nightmare (something about a monster chasing me in the basement. probably too much chiller theater on television 
), but i evidently grew out of it, because i no longer remember any dreams at all (assuming we do all dream whether or not we remember it past or present. psychology 101 was a very long time ago).
the only exception to this is when i’ve taken nyquil in the past. :eek:
whatever’s in that stuff sets me on the road to weirdsville. not nightmare-quality, but very hallucinogenic images. while the stuff works very well, i don’t use it any more. not worth the aftereffects.
I’ll be 50 this year. I don’t remember ever having a nightmare. I’ve had weird dreams about stuff that can’t happen. I’ve had a series of recurring dreams over the years that I think would tell me a story if I could have them in sequence. But I’ve never had terrors or woken up abruptly in a cold sweat. Maybe it helps that I’ve never seen a horror movie or read a book in which people are terrorized and murdered. My brain is free of those images.
Last night I had a horrible, horrible nightmare. It was really unpleasant. I dreamt that I quit my job because I hate it (which is true) but then I couldn’t find a replacement job so I ended up working for Old Navy and my parents moved into my apartment to help me make ends meet. I woke up my roommate and made her tell me where I work.
None for the last 3 years or so. Before that I had a string of screaming night terrors every night for about 11 years. Various things, but lots of falling from great heights, losing body parts, teeth falling out, gut shot numerous times and even a few heart attacks while eating out. Also many horrible methods of watching my children die.