Regular Nightmares

Factual Questions
1

I have nightmares almost every night. I don’t sleep properly when I have them, I shake and toss and turn, and spend the next day tired.
What can I do to stop them? Should I see a psych? Or a gp to get some meds? Could it be diet related? Or is there something I could do before bed to clear my mind?

Thanks, Engine.

2

Is it hot in your room, or do you use too many covers? I’ve found that I have nightmares and sleep poorly when I’m hot. If that’s not it, you might want to consider what’s going on in your waking life.

3

Well it is an Australian summer, but it’s not particularly hot, and it happens all year round.

4

Sleep Apnea is good for suffocation dreams, and feeling tired during the day.

5

Well I do have an allergy to dust mites… but I am apparently not high risk,

since I am female, eighteen, and underweight.

I guess I should also mention that I just assume that I am having nightmares, most of the time I don’t remember them, but the person I am sleeping with gets woken up at about 2am from me shaking and tossing and turning.

6

No chocolate, coffee, or large quantities of food after nine might do the trick. Also, no alcohol. :frowning:

7

You may need to wind up going to a doctor to get this checked out. In the meantime, things that I have seen cause nightmares among friends and family are:

  • troubled life–not in the sense that you are “unstable” or “neurotic” (and I put those in quotation marks specifically to note that they are not a diagnosis), but simply in the sense that pressure at work, tense interpersonal relationships, or worry about a friend or loved one’s well-being can overflow from the waking hours into one’s sleep;
  • medicines–there are a number of meds, and not all psychotropic, that can interfere with one’s sleep, resulting in nightmares. In the States, prescription drugs are accompanied by brochures that list all known side effects. If you are taking medicine (even for a purely physical condition), I’d suggest reading up on the side effects and consulting with your physician;
  • foods–typically the fodder for jokes, (“I really should have skipped that fifth helping of Pad Thai”), they can, indeed, disrupt sleep. On the other hand, you’d have to have a seriously strange diet to disturb your sleep every night. This brings you back to the area of seeking professional help in case your choice of (apparently innocuous) soft drink, strike that, you’re from Oz, beer or snack food has a rarely occurring side effect.

Having typed all that, it occurred to me that there might be actual professional information on the topic. The (U.S.) National Intitutes of Health Medline web site has this to say about nightmares.

8

Check check check and check.

I think I’ll go to the GP and see that they think.

9

There are about a million reasons you could be tossing and turning and/or having nightmares. If it’s really bugging you, you’re tired all the time, it’s proabaly a good idea to work on finding out why, though it could take months to get it figured out.

My experience has been that if I have vivid unpleasant dreams that I remember - which you say you’re not doing - there’s some problem in my waking life that is causing strong feelings; the images in my dreams may or may not match up with the crummy situation in real life, but the feelings do. For instance, if I’m feeling like something in my daily life is out of control and frustrating, I’ll usually have a dream about being back in high school and unable to get my damn locker open. Now that I know this about myself, if I have a dream like that, I know I have to take the time to deal with whatever it is, and that helps the sleeping.

My husband always has nightmares after eating anything with meat or fat in it within a couple of hours of bedtime. He also has really epic nightmares when he’s let his anxiety disorder get out of hand. When he’s taking care of himself, either with anti-anxiety medications or with yoga or whatever, the nightmares taper off.

On the other hand, I also have nasty dreams that sort of “explain” something unpleasant going on at that actual time - for instance, if I’m getting a migraine while I’m still asleep, I start having dreams about being shot in the head, or having my head run over by a bus; if I have to pee, I have dreams about filthy bathrooms with overflowing toilets full or crap that keep me from relieving myself; if my nose is stuffed up and I’ve been breathing through my mouth until my tongue is completely dry, I dream about eating something that turns out to be glass, or sand, or coffee grounds, or whatever. So if I were you I’d investigate to make sure nothing in your bedroom is disturbing your sleep enough to make nightmares but not enough to wake you up.

If you’re not really sure you’re having nightmares but are just a very restless sleeper, I’d make a visit to the GP if you can afford it - there are lots of conditions that are easily treated that might be causing it, like a thyroid imbalance.

If you can summon up the discipline for it, it can be really helpful to try to become a lucid dreamer. I’m no expert in this and you can probably find lots of info about it on the web. the idea is that if you work at it, you can become active in your own dreams - you become able to recognize, while you’re asleep, that you’re having a dream, and become able to change the dream at will. I can do this enough to decide to wake up if I dream of flooding toilets.

You can also keep a diary of exactly what you’re thinking of before you lie down to sleep, which can help more than you might expect - most of us forget the details of what happens and what we’re thinking right in those minutes before falling asleep, and not forgetting can help a lot with crummy sleep.

I hope some of all that is helpful to you!