How to have better dreams?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve always had fairly vivid dreams, but lately my dreams have been vividly stressful. Almost every night I will have some kind of task to complete in dreamland. When I wake up in the middle of the night, I feel like I have to urgently get back to sleep to keep working on my task. A couple times I have successfully woken myself up more fully and relaxed before going back to sleep, but I have not yet achieved this consistently.

Has anyone else experienced this? Have you found a way to fix it or learned to live with it? I’m not that interested in lucid dreaming, but am thinking of exploring meditating before bed. I recently started to use the Pzizz app, which is usually great for falling asleep, but once I am asleep the stress seems to come back. I wonder about running it all night?

:o (me freaking out while asleep smiley)

2

For years, I’ve been sleeping with tv shows playing all night long. Lately, I’ve switched to listening to meditation audios at night instead. I put them on an endless loop. This definitely helps me get back to sleep when I wake up at night, but has not affected the quality of my dreams. I deal with nightmares and sleep paralysis on a regular basis, myself.

If your recent dream stress is related to an increase in waking stress (which I’m guessing is the case), you really need to deal with the stress. Listen to meditation audios when you start to feel stressed during the day (not while driving) and during breaks at work. Practice abdominal breathing until it becomes your default. Talk to a therapist. Is it possible you might have an anxiety issue? Do you regularly leave things incomplete on an average day, and your brain won’t let you relax without simulating them?

Or, maybe you could try a nicotine patch. I hear most people have very interesting dreams on those.

3

Yes, I do definitely have an anxiety issue - I have panic attacks, mostly in predictable situations like flying, and take Xanax in advance of those situations, as well as once every few weeks at home when I feel like I’m sinking into a worry spiral. (My boyfriend is good at flagging that for me.)

What’s weird is that I thought I’d been doing better with waking stress. Over the past year I’ve been practicing more yoga, with an emphasis on mindfulness and plenty of restorative yoga. I even took a special yoga course about anxiety and have worked what I learned into my regular practice. I’ve been getting more projects done at home and am sticking to some new healthy habits. I have been leaving a lot undone each day at work, though. I thought that I wasn’t thinking it about it after hours, but that’s an interesting relationship to explore. Generally I can write things down and then quit worrying about them, but it’s not my habit to write down work thoughts at home.

I do want to see a therapist, but I am moving soon and would prefer to find someone to start a relationship with once I am settled in my new city. I saw a therapist when I first started having panic attacks and I felt like he really strung out the “getting to know you” process, such that I never actually got any advice from him on dealing with panic/stress/anxiety (besides “your fears are irrational” - no shit!). So I guess based on that I’ve been working on the assumption that it will take me months to build a relationship with someone before he/she can actually help me.

(Oh yeah - and I do see it, “moving soon” = “increase in waking stress.”)

4

Do you take anything to get to sleep? The most common complaint that I have heard about melatonin is bad dreams. Some other sleep meds can effect people in different ways.

5

One way I’ve found to have more, and more vivid, dreams is…sleep too much. Stay in bed Saturday morning. Go for noon. This seems to produce short periods of somewhat restless sleep, with lots of really picturesque dreams.

It seems to help to have a good “daydream” life. Before you actually go to sleep, lie in bed a while and consciously – or half-consciously – tell yourself stories. Get into the habit of being open and accessible to stories coming from your own mind. Make up “Robin Hood” adventures. Visually imagine riding a horse, shooting a bow, swinging from the chandelier, etc. Make your mind into a story-telling machine. It will show up in dreams, too.

Try to learn to trust your unconscious. Don’t be afraid of bad dreams, but try to learn from them. Embrace them as part of yourself. Try to be the master.

And, one tip given me by a friend who is a lucid dreamer: try to “steer with your eyes.” Use your eyes the way you would use a game controller. The eyes are (she told me) the only part of your body you have control of when you’re completely asleep. I don’t know if this is valid or not; it has never worked for me (!) but I thought I should pass it along.

6

Hey, I’m jumping into this thread … I’ve suffered from bouts of clinical depression and PTSD for about 20 years; been through years of virtually useless “therapy” and still have vivid nightmares at times. Antidepressants helped some, but I loathed the side effects & took myself off them (without permission, so to speak) …

I will try some of these suggestions & hope for the best! It would be such a relief to get a good (full) night’s sleep without the bad dreams …

7

As per Trinopus.

Relax and keep your thoughts positive before falling asleep. Don’t go through unpleasant scenarios or think about bad things. Meditate, focus on physically and mentally relaxing, let go of other things. Yeah, it can take some work and some practice to get there. Try to think of your thoughts as little birds. They flit on by, you look at them, then you let them go and they flit away. Don’t hold them, don’t concentrate on them, don’t let them take hold of you. Likewise don’t push them away, don’t try to force silence. Just little birds, coming and going.

A lot of bad dreams are just working through shit that is bothering you, or telling you what it is about in a very very round-about manner. Think about the dream and reduce it to a couple of sentences about what happened. This might clue you in. Also, people in your dreams tend to represent aspects of yourself. My older sister is a control freak, when I see her, I know it is about control. My younger sister has the whole family/kids/money thing going on that I never had, so she kinda represents what I have always wanted in life. They’re not them, they’re my needs, desires and aspects. Vehicles are always about control and direction. Godzilla is destruction. Millions of Godzillas parachuting from the sky is a whole new level of dream terror. :wink:

If you wake up feeling stressed and needing to get back to sleep. Stop. “Change the subject” mentally and think about other things. Even if they are as basic as “gosh it’s nice and warm and cozy here”. Don’t stress about needing to get back to sleep. Just concentrate on being as relaxed as possible and getting rest if not sleep.

And one other thing. I had a friend some time back who said the only reason he smoked pot was because it stopped his nasty vivid dreams. On the other hand, I’ve known people who claimed it gave them nasty vivid dreams. YMMV.

8

It definitely should not take months to build a therapy relationship. Perhaps you could try a female therapist next time? I have had nothing but awful experiences with male doctors for my entire life. In my experience (or maybe just my bad luck), they are much more likely to be paternalistic and they aren’t as capable as females are at grokking “girl problems.” Make sure to look for a CBT therapist, though, not just a talk therapist. CBT will actually give you concrete techniques early on, to stop the negative thought-spiral of anxiety. Talk therapy is starting to be seen as less useful, because it’s focused on passive observations of the past. Cognitive therapy is focused on the present and future, and actually changes the way you think.

Also yes, moving is incredibly stressful. Even for someone who lives rather spartan and continually purges stuff like I do (my last move involved exactly two carloads of stuff, but it was still so stressful). Try to be patient with your brain. Maybe your dreams will settle back down once you’re unpacked. :slight_smile:

Leaving stuff undone at work may be what’s bothering you. I’m not a therapist, of course, so don’t take this as medical advice… but, if there’s a way you can take on a smaller number of tasks at work, and wrap all of them up before clocking out, it might help! There is an increasing body of studies showing that humans are actually rubbish at multi-tasking. If you can reduce task switching and the number of tasks you have in a day, that could also help relieve some anxiety.

9

The thing is, I do this and I’m actually pretty good at letting my thoughts float by. I generally am able to stop myself from rehearsing unpleasant scenarios, and I don’t have trouble actually falling asleep. And, the Pzizz app I mentioned in the OP is basically a meditation tape. So, I’m getting pretty relaxed before bed. But once I go unconscious/lose the ability to control my thoughts, it’s like the stress comes flooding back in.

(Just to clarify, I wouldn’t classify these as nightmares per se. It’s just kind of tiresome to have to get things done during dream time, too!)

So I tried this last night and it worked okay. I use this technique in waking time to combat minor senseless anxieties (e.g. when I go into the subway, instead of thinking “help I’m going into an oppressive underground tunnel,” I think “yay! this friendly train is going to quickly zip me to where I want to go”). I found that I’ll need a more concrete positive thought to replace the “gotta go finish that thing” stress, but it has some potential for sure. Also, I’m not stressed that I’ve woken up and am not getting enough sleep - I usually don’t even wake up fully enough to think that.

This is helpful, thanks. I’ll look for a female CBT therapist, then. :slight_smile: And your advice about reducing task-switching is right on. I’ve experimented with that in the past and had really good results, but I haven’t been making it enough of a priority lately, apparently.

Also, um, I don’t know where I’m moving yet, because I’m also waiting to hear back from grad programs. I feel kind of silly that it didn’t occur to me that this would be possibly associated with stress dreams. But at the same time, waiting for admission decisions is stressful… moving is going to be stressful… my first semester is going to be stressful… and so on. So I obviously need to spend some time on learning to process the stress better because I don’t expect things to stop being in flux anytime soon.

10

From someone who can’t do less at work, or break things into projects that can be finished up all neatly and tidily (it sucks) - here’s a bit of advice.

Take the last 5 or 10 minutes of each work day and get a pad of paper. Write down all of the projects you’re currently working on, and some outline notes of what needs to be done on them.

For example, here’s an edited version of mine from last evening:

Wed AM: Beginning of week stuff - routine. nw (no worries)
Wed AM: Beginning of month stuff - don’t forget new calendar! remember to file apps! nw
Wed ASAP! - Create order for last quarter - problems because it’s late? in trouble? check with supervisor. look into marking timeslots for this on calendar in future - lw (little worried)

It does seem like it matters that I have steps to complete listed instead of just the items themselves. It’s not a To Do List, it’s more of a … these things are coming up, and I don’t have to stress, because I know what I’m going to do about them already.

Basically, what I’m doing is really thinking about what I’ve still got going on, what I need to do to complete it, and confirming that I know my way forward, and that I’m (even though I’m not finished) still in control of the work, and that everything is on track.

I’m using that writing as a time to file work projects away as “continuing processes” rather than “unfinished work” if that makes sense. It helps me finish the workday and leave all that there and not think about it at home, and to not stress about it while sleeping either.

It’s not perfect, especially when it’s been a rough patch at work, school, or home, but it really does help.
On a totally different front, I’ve posted before about lucid dreaming, and it really can help. Lucid dreaming isn’t always the best method for handling stress dreams, because most people (myself included) tend to make the dream simply go away, or morph into something else entirely. If you really want them to go away, you need to actually deal with them, in the dream or in life - but if all you need is a good night’s sleep, and you’re pretty sure you know where the stress is coming from, I figure it’s better than nothing!

11

Lasciel, I tried your task list technique last night and I definitely slept better.* I especially like noting how worried you are about a particular task. That helped me figure out what I should do first this morning!

*I also did some cardio for the first time in months, and got drunk at trivia night. But, hey, winning combination!