Published on 12, July, 2020
I suffer from the dual evil of nightmares and insomnia and need help.
For example, today I woke at 4am from a nightmare and I cannot fall asleep (insomnia). I am also afraid to go back to sleep because in the past I have had nightmares following nightmares when I fall asleep after a short break.
With inadequate sleep I get up tired. With nightmarish sleep I get up tired.
I don't have sleeping tablets at home as a precaution. Because in my recent past I've attempted suicide by overdosing with tablets.
So I sit in bed. Either reading , worrying or on the internet.
Any Help or advice is much appreciated!
I Robert
What do you call nightmares? What goes on in your dreams that you don't like?
I suffer from having hyper-real dreams that don't delete themselves when I wake so I'm living 2 or 3 seprerate lives through the night (I'm up a lot too).
I have the tv on very dimly and very quietly with some dull, gentle programmes on to bore me back to sleep.
I learned to embrace the dreams - to explore them and follow them as they pan out. Sometimes they end at a place where I wanted to go further, someimes they end at a point where I'm annoyed at something in the dream.
I can't call any of them 'nightmares', they're just interesting things my brain is creating when it's not doing anything useful.
Are you able to just let your nightmares run to completion?
My nightmares do not run to completion. I wake. Then after falling back to sleep. A new nightmare starts or a different version of the previous one.
Your dreams seem to be based around the feelings of helplessness and frustration - they don't sound like nightmares, more just your brain dealing with everyday stuff.
I have a lot like that but I treat them as sight-seeing expeditions to measure how much detail my brain is prepared to create when I look around the edges and corners.
I have lots of abstract dreams - a recurring one is buying an old house with a barn in rural France (I've never been there) where I have to fully inspect the property, even up a ladder in the roof of the barn inspecting the timbers and assessing how much work to fix it all up. I can smell and taste the dust and the damp. I sometimes get to visit the village and take part in some celebrations (like a village fete).
Sometimes I'm working on an old ship - where I'm down in the rusty bilges working with the other guys as we run the ship.
Sometimes I'm walking around railway lines - maybe 8 parallel tracks, dead straight, dead level for as far as can be seen - I'm doing something 'important' but have to watch out for passing trains.
What would happen in your dreams if you left the chickens alone?