Nightmares

[safetyinnumbers]

I get nightmares a lot. Sometimes they are a version of past experiences. Often it's me as a child in my past life, experiencing bad things but not exact memories. Often they are what I call danger dreams where I'm faced with dangerous situations.
I have always dreamed very vivid dreams since I was very young. I remember having terrifying dreams when I was a young child.
Today, some of these dreams come back over and over, building on the previous one. One nightmare happened like this where over time I was not sure what was real and what was dreams any more. For a while I believed that I had killed someone when I was a child but it was not a memory but a persistent nightmare messing with me.

[Rainagain]

Hi,
I've had these nightmares too.

Some have led me to be convinced of things which weren't true and I only realised my misinformation must have been dream based some weeks or months later.

I've also believed I killed a neighbour as I dreamt he attacked me, when I woke up I was trying to remember where I kept a spade so I could bury him in the garden, took a while to grasp I hadn't killed him.

Worryingly, I wasn't concerned about him being dead at my hands, just the hassle of having to find the spade and do all that digging......

The nightmares were worse when I was in an unsafe situation a while back, now I don't seem to remember nightmares, they are still exhausting but don't 'leak' into my memory of real things like they used to.

Back then I used to dissociate more as well, lost time episodes while awake. I think those two things are connected/related.

Getting to a more physically safe environment has meant these things are now more within what I think is the normal range for people. Things got pretty weird for quite a while but seem less so now.

I don't understand the reason or the mechanism by which dream and reality got blurred like that, but I know what you mean and how confusing it can be.

[CatMama]

Yes, I get vivid nightmares as well. Mostly all of the dreams I can remember are nightmares, ever since I was a child. I frequently wake up crying, a lot of the time they are reoccurring as well. I also yell a lot in my sleep (my BF tells me). Even though the scenarios are not exactly what happened to me, my therapist says that they are flashbacks to a time when I felt unsafe and vulnerable.

Thank you for posting this.

[safetyinnumbers]

Is it possible to suppress the nightmares by self talk before bed eg "I'm tired and I'm going to have sweet dreams." Talking myself into less nightmares over time?
Is it even a good thing to try to suppress the nightmares? Do I need to go through these nightmares to come out the other side? Will suppressing them push the trauma deeper rather than accepting the nightmares as part of recovery? Does that make any sense?

[ah]

Hi Safetyinnumbers,

I don't know what your nightmares are like, I only know my own. For me, nightmares are one of the worst aspects of cptsd. They really are so awful. And there's no way to avoid them.

I've noticed though that when I'm able to do mindfulness meditation before going to sleep, the nightmares tend to be milder. So there may definitely be things that may help somewhat.

Still, I always have them no matter what I do. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but they never go away. Every night is frightening. Sometimes they're every night, sometimes every time I doze off, sometimes they're about long forgotten things (or so I thought). My guess is my nightmares are to a large extent a physiological symptom, it's something that's out of my hands.
What you said makes a lot of sense to me, but I'm not sure I could suppress mine even if I tried. They come and go as they please and I sort of tolerate them.

Stress definitely makes them more frequent for me too.
And I had very vivid nightmares as a child, too. Also as an adult, now that I think of it. Maybe it has something to do with stress hormones. After all, when we're wide awake stress hormones make us more acutely aware of minute details in our surroundings so it may do something similar during sleep, too.

My guess is I was so filled with guilt and confusion when I was small that my mind tried and failed to make sense of what I was going through. It tried to dream scenarios and explanations for inexplicable, unexplainable pain. It tried making sense of things that just didn't make sense, and got stuck. Dreams are really good at siphoning through ordinary waking experiences but I guess they're out of their depth when it comes to trauma.

Maybe.