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!
(These are my thoughts, not a scientific study)
The brain is full of loads of stuff, and memories are made of various connections in the brain. During sleep, the brain constantly connects and disconnects various neurons which has a similar effect to thoughts and memories. It does this in order to 'clean' itself for rational thinking the next day when there is need again for a clear head.
The brain then tries to make some sort of sense of this, and as such it manifests itself as a dream, a seemingly real experience at the time.
I myself have had dreams that I have been unable to know they are dreams at the time and it has taken months sometimes to realise that what I 'remember' is a dream and not a reality. However, once a real event becomes a memory, it can become subject to some sort of manipulation to fit in with later events. Especially the order in which things have happened. I have watched films or read books and later come back to watch it again (perhaps years later) and somehow the events are in a different order. They are not, of course, but my brain has somehow changed the order for some reason.
I do wonder if some thoughts of those suffering from forms of dementia are also linked to dreaming, even day dreaming. An aunt I had in her nineties who had dementia was always insisting she had been out with her mother (my grandmother) the day before, despite her having died twenty five years previously. To her it was a very real experience and she told of the trip very lucidly. But it obviously didn't happen at the time which she said. Whether it was something she had invented in her mind or remembered from years ago I do not know.
Lack of sleep probably plays havoc with the connections in the brain, and the mind is trying to make sense of things. A long journey I had back late at night once I was so very tired and was sure I was seeing animals at the side of the road which were turned out to be stones and trees - and I was not on any haluncinogenic substances, it was just lack of sleep.