Since Friday I’ve been having nightmares every night. Not the kind with monsters, but more psychological ones. In the ones I can remember I’m in a hopeless situation and things get increasingly desperate until I wake up. Some situations I remember are being at a festival of some kind and being lost with no one helping me find my way out, being with my family and trying desperately to get someone to listen to me, and one where I was trying to save someone but couldn’t quite get there.
I usually wake up feeling pretty darn bad, and once I woke up crying. None of that jolting-awake stuff from movies though.
I’ve never been one to have nightmares on a regular basis, so I don’t know what’s causing them. I have been more stressed than usual now, though. Stress can cause bad dreams, right?
Anyway, I’m posting this here ‘cause I’d like to hear about others’ nightmares as well. Do you get periods where you have them a lot? Does anything help?
I had nightmares every night for at least five years. Usually they involved some tyupe of peril: I was being chased, or people were trying to kill me, etc. I didn’t worry about having them all the time. After awhile, I came to accept them as part of my sleep routine.
Still, I wondered if there might be something wrong. I spoke to a friend of mine, I psychiatrist, and asked him if I should be concerned, and he said that as long as I wasn’t obsessing about them, I was fine.
And then I was diagnosed with sleep apnea, and fitted for a CPAP machine. I have had nary a nightmare since.
You’ll think I’m kidding, but last night I had a nightmare that I had created a sock puppet on the SDMB, and was frantically trying to locate a connected workstation (apparently at some college campus) from where I could email TubaDiva, apologize, and have her kill it.
I think I’ve been spending too much time on the boards…
I’ve had nightmares and night terrors (those are the ones you wake up, heart racing, bolt upright and screaming, for no particular reason) for…well, for pretty much all of my life. No particular reason for it; no major psychological childhood traumas or whatever. I just live with it. Oh, and I sleep about 3-4 hours a night, typically, after staying up as long as possible reading.
Sleep is not a pleasure for me. I once tried an altered “catnap” sleeping pattern where I’d only sleep about half an hour at a time, but that just made the nightmares more intense. Overuse of alcohol makes it worse, though I sometimes keep a bottle of whisky at the bedside for a quick one to settle me down after a really bad episode. (I’m not an alky…I do this maybe once a month, but it does help.)
I don’t know what to tell you. Stress does make it worse; on the flip side, sex tends to make it less acute, and I sleep a lot better, but that only happens once in a blue moon, so 
Stranger
I’ve been having nightmares for the past 5 days or so, too. Mine are more in line with Uvula Donor’s . I’m being chased, the house is broken into with me there, getting mugged, etc. It’s left me feeling pretty out of it during the day.
I’m trying to get rid of a chronic, low-grade sinus infection, too. I wonder if that’s having the same effect as the sleep apnea?