Nightmares & insomnia

Another problem I have that's related to insomnia, is falling asleep during the daytime.

This can happen on buses, trains or most often at home in the early evening.

An incident that's happened several times.  Is that I lie down on the bed around 5pm.  Then when I wake up.  I have no idea where I am or what's happened and I'm in a state of panic.  Last week I woke up around 6:30 ( I could see the time on a large clock).  I was lying on the bed with my daytime clothes on.  It was light and I had no idea if it was morning or evening.  I was certain that I'd slept all night with my clothes on.  It was only after i switched on the TV.  I realised it was still evening and I'd only slept for an hour!!!

Can you trace your vivid dreams to particular items of food and/or drink? Maybe keep a diary of your diet versus dreams?

I admit to being rather jealous of all you persistent dreamers because I very rarely remember any of mine, though I suppose I must still have them. 

There is one odd, recurring nightmare, but it only happens when I have a bad fever (used to get them a lot when I was very small, and the dreams were scary because they didn't make any sense). I can't really explain what they're about because there were no frames of reference. 

The insomnia is a long term problem and always there.

Predicting nightmares is more difficult.  Usually I have none.  Or two or three per night.  So they are connected. If I have one.  Then others follow when I fall back to sleep.

I still don't understand why they repeat.

Another common one that is related to reality is that I'm in college and I have fallen behind too far to catch up.  Or I'm attending lectures after I have already failed.  And it's the following year.  

In reality I've never failed higher education courses.  But I've never done as well as I wanted.

Some nightmares are related to TV I was watching before I went to bed.

I don't know which is worse.  Insomnia and not being able to sleep.   Or sleeping with nightmares????

Hi Robert123, I sympathise with you as I suffer with both nightmares and insomnia too.  This has been a constant problem throughout my life since a child.

Have you noticed if there is any pattern to when you suffer with the nightmares or insomnia?  I will go through 3 phases - first phase is the insomnia where I cannot sleep, I'm too wired to sleep etc.  This will go on for a few week.  The second phase is where the nightmares start and like you if I wake from one, I go back to sleep only to have another.  These can be incredibly frightening for me as well, so I always make sure I have things around me that will bring comfort and reassurance should I wake.  After this, the third stage will consist of broken sleep where I will wake up numerous times throughout the night.

It might be worth keeping a log to see if being more stressed or emotional triggers them or whether you go through cycles like me.  I can normally predict when I am due a nightmare depending on how I am sleeping, so see if you notice any patterns so you can better prepare for them.

It doesn't matter how old you are, nightmares are terrifying end of and even now I sometimes wake up hyperventilating, screaming or crying.

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.

I also have some strange recurring dreams.

Some dreams repeat themselves. Others carry on where they left off, weeks or months ago.

In one, I'm in a city centre on a very busy Saturday evening. It's very traditional maybe 1960s or 70s. Evening papers with latest editions are being sold with the football results..  it's often getting dark with light rain and everyone is very busy. The whole dream is very atmospheric.  I wake up before I get to where I'm going.

In another I'm in a contemporary large city with many shopping centres.  And I'm trying to get to the right one.

Often I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm in a panic and i have no idea where I am.

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?

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.

Last night I slept in three parts.  Each had nightmares.  Each nightmare had some connection with reality.

Nightmare one was about keeping chickens safe in the garden !!! I had dozens in a large garden.  Problem was keeping them safe from predetory cats, foxes and horses.

In reality I currently live in a flat and have no garden. Although several homes in the area do keep chickens and ducks in their gardens. 

Nightmare two was about me and two colleges trying to get back to work/college (this was confused and kept changing). After a half day training course.   We were walking through the snow which was so dry it seemed like dry sand on a beach.  One of my colleagues injured her leg and it was both broken and bleeding.  We were trying to get her medical attention.  But went to wrong rooms then we were told it's by appointment only.  I was saying it's an emergency!!!??

In reality I read on the internet yesterday that it's predicted that this winter will be coldest for decades.

Last winter I slipped twice and fell.  Badly injuring my back.

Nightmare three is too private for a public forum.

As Plastic stated:

Plastic said:

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.

Perhaps consider studying Freud's ~ The Interpretation of Dreams ~ so that you know more what you are dealing with. In terms of dream architectures it really is very good indeed, only the sexual theme bias to the interpretations is wrong. Children form a platonic bond with their parents when all is well, not a sexual one. So if you are interested keep that in mind possibly.

Here is a PDF of the book if you so wish.

The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud (1900)

I have bad nightmares too. Always have; my mum told me that as soon as I could speak coherently I was talking about my nightmares. I've had hypnopompic hallucinations (continuing to see objects from the dream world projected onto real life for a little while after waking) since I was 6. Sleep paralysis since I was 19.

The way I got over the nightmares when I was small was 
A. Learning to recognise when I was dreaming and wake myself; this wasn't too difficult for me as my nightmares were the recurring kind, so I could recognise a theme and ask myself "are you dreaming?" before I got too scared for logical thought. (e.g. I used to dream about giant tsunami, my reaction even now when I see the sea or other large body of water in a dream is "Nope, out!" and waking myself)
B. Visualisation, talking myself through a mundane and calm scenario (e.g. a journey through countryside) in a highly descriptive manner, to help with getting back to sleep after nightmare-induced insomnia.

Nowadays I have added Audiobooks, Youtube videos of rain sounds and Familiar TV to the list of insomnia cures.

When I was older, my dream recognition skills turned into experimenting with lucid dreaming (where you have both awareness and godlike control over the dream world), which was brilliant to fend off nightmares for a while but after learning to go straight from waking into a LD and using it too heavily (at one point I was going to college, coming home, lucid dreaming in the afternoon until dinner, eating, early bedtime and more dreaming) came with side effects for me -basically made the nightmares MUCH worse and introduced the paralysis- so that's a maybe.

I think I just overdid it and a small amount of lucidity would be ok, just don't be an idiot like teenage-me and make it your main hobby! ^^'

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?