Nightmares & insomnia

The insomnia, I can certainly identify with; it has been with me always since early childhood, just like my Mum before me. No amount of sleep-deprivation guarantees any better a night, and I've yet to find any medication that really helps, or doesn't have side-effects which are as bad as the sleep-deprivation (though I'm considering melatonin at the moment, which is reported to have some success for autistic people.) When the few people who actually believe that I'm functioning on so little sleep ask me how I do it, I don't really get what they mean; I've just always accepted that I have to, and plough my way through it day after day. When people try to empathise ("when the kids were little", "back in my party-animal days"), I tend to switch off; those things are just not the same as being kept awake every single night by your own brain. I lie awake telling my brain; "Will. You. Just. Shut. The. F**k. Up!!!"

I've very rarely remembered my dreams as an adult, aside from when I was taking Mirtazapine, for which vivid dreaming is a known side-effect for some people. I remember that as a child, I often had recurrent dreams, and a repertoire of characters, objects and places that would be shared across dreams. Serial dreams, where one follows on from the next, were also common. What Emma said about lucid dreaming rings true for me too. If I awoke from an uncomfortable dream, I would often fantasize about how I'd prefer the dream to work out, and drift back to sleep with the dream taking on elements of my conscious fantasizing; the point where wakeful fantasy became sleepful dreaming was never distinct, which is probably why I was able to get back to sleep.

The insomnia, I can certainly identify with; it has been with me always since early childhood, just like my Mum before me. No amount of sleep-deprivation guarantees any better a night, and I've yet to find any medication that really helps, or doesn't have side-effects which are as bad as the sleep-deprivation (though I'm considering melatonin at the moment, which is reported to have some success for autistic people.) When the few people who actually believe that I'm functioning on so little sleep ask me how I do it, I don't really get what they mean; I've just always accepted that I have to, and plough my way through it day after day. When people try to empathise ("when the kids were little", "back in my party-animal days"), I tend to switch off; those things are just not the same as being kept awake every single night by your own brain. I lie awake telling my brain; "Will. You. Just. Shut. The. F**k. Up!!!"

I've very rarely remembered my dreams as an adult, aside from when I was taking Mirtazapine, for which vivid dreaming is a known side-effect for some people. I remember that as a child, I often had recurrent dreams, and a repertoire of characters, objects and places that would be shared across dreams. Serial dreams, where one follows on from the next, were also common. What Emma said about lucid dreaming rings true for me too. If I awoke from an uncomfortable dream, I would often fantasize about how I'd prefer the dream to work out, and drift back to sleep with the dream taking on elements of my conscious fantasizing; the point where wakeful fantasy became sleepful dreaming was never distinct, which is probably why I was able to get back to sleep.