Yeah, do they? While I was in college, I had a reoccuring nightmare: I’d be driving along normally, then have a terrible wreck. This happened at least a couple times a month for two or three years. Then one day, I finally figured out what was causing them!
See, my little brother is six years younger, and just about every time I’d come home from school for the weekend, we’d play his video games. Some of them were race car games, which I was terrible at. I never had those dreams immediately after playing the games, but a week or more later, which is why I didn’t connect the dots sooner. That and there were never races in the nightmares, just driving. Once he out-grew those games, I stopped having those nightmares.
Vivid dreams don’t have to mean horrid dreams. Have you told your doctor? That’s the first thing I would do. She or he might adjust your medication.
Another possibility is to write down your dreams to find recurring themes.
While I was once taking medication that caused hallucinations, I “saw” what I thought was a crow on my bed. It terrified me. I told my husband that I knew that it was chemicals, but then begged him not to make me look at it. that was about twenty-five years ago, but I’ve never forgotten the terror of that awful black bird.
Recently I was watching the late 1940’s verion of the film The Secret Garden. In horror I beheld my nightmare again. A raven flew in to the young boy’s room and landed on his bed, shrieking at him. It was the “crow” of my hallucination. I could remember the fear with which I had watched the original movie. I would have been five or six years old. I never missed a Margaret O’Brien movie.
I certainly hope you get relief for your vivid and horrible dreams soon. They disturb on a level that is hard for some to understand. It can be very primitive.