I’ve said it before in the SDMB and I am saying it again for the benefit of the people who didn’t get it the first time…
When I wake up from a night mare I wake up feeling more alive than I do at most other times.
First and foremost is the relief of knowing it was just a nightmare.
Also is the quality of the nightmare. knowing what my brain can come up with is quite satisfying.
There is the fact that in my opinion a perfect dream is best, but a nightmare is to nothing as sex is to…welll… no sex.
Normally, I like nightmares, especially the truly surreal ones, but last night I had one in which my husband and I decided we were divorcing, and the whole dream was of us screaming horrible things at each other while I tried to gather up a few of my belongings. It was truly, truly horrible.
I hardly ever remember my dreams, and when I do, they’re just me going through my everyday life, but slightly off. I haven’t had a nightmare in a very long time.
Just what kind of nightmares are these? I rarely remember my dreams, and I never have anything I would call nightmares, just stupid anxiety dreams about screwing up my job and winding up pants-less in public, etc, but my husband has full-blown horror shows about his body decaying, other people rotting or faceless, about torturing children, defending a house full of fallout victims from invaders, etc. He doesn’t enjoy them one iota.
I have what I can only assume are terrible nightmares (which I remember nothing about), from which I wake up by either sitting bolt upright or leaping out of the bed, heart pounding, soaked in sweat, totally panicked and often with a ‘WTF, where am I’ feeling.
It usually takes upwards of 15 minutes to convince myself to relax and get back into bed and go to sleep. I wish I could remember what kind of things provoked this reaction.
I do not like nightmares! If you’d like more, you can have mine.
Not me. I dream like a mother fucker, and remember a lot of them. They’re often pretty mundane, and my nightmares are equally mundane. That is, they’re not about monsters chasing me, they’re very realistic things that could happen and I’m always relieved to wake up and realize they didn’t.
Count me in the “don’t like them” crowd. My nightmares are never objectively scary. My body just decides to be afraid, if that makes sense. There is absolutely no reason to be afraid, but I’m terrified. There’s hardly ever any plot at all, but on rare occasions the terror will coincide with something actually happening in the dream (like drowning, or having to fight for my life).
I’ll usually wake up from a nightmare without even the satisfaction of saying “whew! it was only a dream!” because it WASN’T actually a dream. Just random feelings without context or anything. There’s nothing there to deny the reality of.
Upon proofreading, I realize that I might not be adequately describing what happens to me with nightmares, but after racking my brain trying to come up with a better description, I give up. There’s no good way to describe it, unless someone comes along with a better vocabulary who has experienced the same thing.
I would give everything I own - including my cars and my house and still pay on them - to never have another nightmare. They range from just mundanely bad and stressful divorce / caught masturbating at work and getting fired / in a fight and no power behind my punches to zombie apocalypses, skeletal taxi drivers who lock me in and head for hell, evil wizards dragging me in chains through dark caves, horrible bloody fights with people I really like in real life, being forced to kill my dog, etc. The worst I ever had was an extremely realistic dream that a guy in an ankle-length trenchcoat was standing in my bedroom doorway and began to walk toward me and I couldn’t move or speak or scream. Do you have any idea how stressful that is?
My nightmares are aggravating - not scary. They usually involve people not communicating normally/at all or behaving illogically/idiotically when life and limb are in danger.
Try this: get yourself on some ‘old tyme’ anti-depressants, head into to therapeutic dose and then cut back. Experience some real nightmares then get back to me. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say your experience will be different. The point being; there are nightmares and there are nightmares.
I’ve never had a real nightmare that I can remember - nothing scary or horrible, anyway. My ex does, though - I’ve heard him whimpering in his sleep many times. It upsets him quite a bit.
You know, I can only remember one or two happy dreams I’ve ever had (including the one with a mute stoic yet heroic highway robber Hugh Jackman). The rest have been nightmarish or just weird.
Nightmares for me are like needles–scary, but they’re over pretty quickly and they don’t linger. They’re also pretty bizarre, which is why I don’t put a lot of stock in them.
Eh, I would say some of my nightmares are interesting, so in a way my life is more interesting with them, but waking up after seeing your lovers heart torn out, mashed to a pulp and the same thing happening to you while singing Schubert’s Ave Maria and slowly fading into death is not really fun. Interesting the next morning when there’s sunlight and living people, but not very enjoyable. Watching your father forced into beheading dozens of people in your living room by someone who looks like a blond Sarah Palin is not very enjoyable. Having to wrap those heads in muslin and seeing that it is not blood and stuff in their necks but roots and soil and worms makes it puke-worthy.
However, being set on fire and tossed off the flying sleigh by a drunken Santa Claus after being seduced by his reindeer is fregging hilarious.
I am curious, what happens in your nightmares? I am rather impressed by some dreams people have, and nightmares can be where the mind shows off its flexibility, so I can understand liking them for that reason.
Some of my nightmares are kind of weird, and I wake up feeling bad or strange. But the only really awful thing for me is sleep paralysis. It doesn’t happen often at all, but it’s frightening when it does. Not to the point where I’m afraid to go back in the water so to speak, but it’s one of the worst feelings in the world. If I had sleep paralysis on an ongoing basis, I think I’d be a lot more upset.
I have vivid, colourful, and action-packed dreams. They are even creative, if I do say so myself.
I love them all. Well, nearly all. Even the bad ones.
I’ve tried my hand at lucid dreaming, and I’m not bad at it. But usually, I don’t even have to make that effort. My dreams just get sharper and clearer as I get older, and over the decades, I’ve built up what is almost a parallel universe or holodeck.
Then I hear folks say they never dream or I read stats that dreaming in colour is placing you in the minority… WTF? I escape every night of my life to a free, healthy, natural trip…
I frequently have the kind that your husband does, but for some reason around puberty they stopped scaring me. It feels more like watching a really exciting horror/action movie or being on a thrill ride. It’s the anxiety ones that actually frighten me.
I also find that more and more frequently, I hit the ground when I have a dream about falling. Anyone else have that happening to them?
