Last night I had about the worst night of sleep I have had in a long time. I have a very long, sordid history of nightmares, but in recent years it has gotten a lot better. By better, I mean that instead of having nightmares nearly every night, they are now probably only 10-20% of my dreams, although I haven’t kept a dream-log so I don’t know how accurate that number is.
But last night was particularly bad, even compared to my worst nights of sleep. I had two separate dreams where I woke myself up by “screaming” in my dream (really coming out as moans or something I guess). In one dream, I was just screaming as loud as I could, until I woke up. In the next I was saying my sister’s name, and then “No no no no!” over and over until I woke up.
Even after I got back to sleep, I still had more nightmares that kept waking me up (not from screaming though, just natural waking up)!
I know that sometimes nightmares are related to stress, but I’m actually living very stress-free these days. I also haven’t been watching any violent or scary movies, or playing any video games like that either.
Does anyone else here suffer from a high rate of nightmares? Anyone else have the occasional dream where you scream or shout something, in order to wake yourself up?
I have terrible nightmares … mostly from a long-ago marriage that went very bad and a post-divorce traumatic psycho relationship … any kind of stress will trigger them and apparently they are caused by PTSD, for which I was never diagnosed or treated. Only time has lessened them, but my (new) spouse has had to wake me up from my nightmares when I start moaning and whimpering.
“Usually,” I can wake myself up by realizing that they are “only” nightmares …
Just sayin’.
If it’s any comfort, you are not alone. I empathize with you. [There are no “smileys” that indicate sadness, or I would put one here:
Oddly enough I’ve been very insulated from that, being out on a boat and not reading news or even any threads about it. I’ve hardly given it a second thought.
But yeah, nightmares are just a normal part of my life. I had one again last night. I wonder if I should start keeping a sleep log and talk to my doctor about it!
I’ve had them in the past, and like you I used waking myself up as a way to escape them till that ability was somehow taken away from me. The nightmares ended one night inside the dream where I found a cute baby, but when I picked it up I felt it was the source of my nightmares, I told it it must go away, which it changed into a a ugly thing then started to dissolve into light and disappear much like a startrek transporter. That was the end of the nightly torment.