Do you have frequent nightmares?

Tazlima

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It's weird, but I still remember the first nightmare I had, when I was maybe four years old.

Throughout my childhood I had recurring nightmares about what I called "white balls." (Feel free to snicker at the name, lol). These were faintly-glowing spheres that bounced around under their own power. In my dreams they were carniverous, and in order to avoid being eaten, you had to climb up high enough to be beyond the reach of their bouncing.

The "white balls" nightmares began when I was pre-verbal and persisted clean into college (over the years their frequency waned and eventually, in my early twenties, they stopped altogether). They mystified my parents, who wracked their brains for what could have triggered such a strange and specific terror, but never came up with a satisfactory answer.

Fast forward 15 years. The topic of nightmares came up in conversation with a British friend of mine. I described the white balls and she said, "Oh, that kind of sounds like this old sci-fi show on the BBC called 'The Prisoner.'" I looked it up, and there it was, a minute or so into the video, my childhood nightmares brought to life, complete with the creepy noise they made when they bounced. The dates lined up too...the show was aired in the US around the right time period. I was like "Holy crap! The mystery has finally been solved!"

I forwarded the clip to my mother. Her response? "That looks like the kind of thing your father* would have watched when I wasn't home..."

*He passed away a few years before this discovery, so I couldn't rib him about it.
 
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Orianna2000

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Taz, I remember seeing clips of that show. It would be terrifying to a young child! I remember my grandfather watching a scary movie when I was a kid. It had these giant carnivorous plants that villagers would sacrifice young women to. When I started elementary school, they had these enormous plants out front that had spiky leaves on them. I used to play that they were carnivorous and that me and my friends were being thrown into them. Loads of fun, unless you got too close to the spiky leaves!

My first nightmare was about these weird symbols that showed up on the ground. They were round, made of concentric lines, only some of the lines were dashed or dotted, instead of solid. The thing was, if one appeared in your house, you had to be careful not to touch it, or else it'd infect you. Then you'd be "put away" for the safety of others. (In the dream you just disappeared, so I don't know if they were hospitalized, institutionalized, or thrown into a mass grave. Who knows?) When one of the symbols appeared in my room, I accidentally got infected, so my parents put me in a closet and slipped bowls of applesauce under the door, so I wouldn't starve. I don't know if they were hiding me, so I wouldn't be sent away, or if sticking people in a closet was basically what they did with infected people. Either way, it was scary as all get-out to my four-year-old self.
 

darrtwish

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I used to have recurring nightmares all the time, most likely because of my PTSD & anxiety. I still have nightmares and night terrors (where you can't remember what you were afraid of, but you wake up shaking, covered in sweat, exhausted and faintly nauseous) pretty regularly. It's always worse when I'm stressed / overwhelmed; those nightmares are related to close friends not wanting to talk to me anymore or loved ones dying. Night terrors are the worst though, because you have no idea what was so scary, you just wake up screaming. It usually takes me an hour or two to calm down enough to stop shaking, and I usually have to leave my bedroom. More often than not I fall back asleep on the couch, because I can't bring myself to go back to my bedroom
 

blacbird

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I dream vividly, every night. I can't really call most of them "nightmares", because they aren't truly frightening, but they are often disturbing, centering around frustrations and uncertainty. There are some common themes: Having to deal with deep snow and ice and flooding waters, inability to find where I parked my car, inability to locate a room in a building, often one I am supposed to stay in (very Kafka, that one), discovery that I never really got out of the Army, and need to go back and get uniforms and stuff, or (similarly) that I still have one class to finish to get my final college degree and haven't attended it ever and don't know where it is held. These are hugely vivid, and I remember intensely small details in them.

caw
 

Fictionalizer

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I've had nightmares since I was three years old due to witnessing two murders and having Complex PTSD, and they are usually about what happened. I actually figured out a code for my nightmares: Which ones were memories and which ones were nonspecific and related to more of the same stuff coming down the pipeline or something else. Then I have what I call my precursor nightmares which tell me I'm going to have more memories about what happened. For those I usually dream about gigantic spiders looming near my bed. I'm talking SOUS's: Spiders of Unusual Sizes. The latest nightmare contained a spider about four feet across. I dreamed that it was above my side of the bed and my husband made the bed without getting rid of it. He bought me an A-SALT Rifle for the big spiders we get around here. You load it with salt and fire it them.

My nightmares are vivd and disturbing and contain the trigger from present day which brings on a memory from the past.

I've had a couple of sleep walking nightmares in the past. Now those are bizarre and contain elements of the present juxtaposed over something from the past.
 

suziquaif

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I think I can echo a lot of what has already been said, especially that the mind is an amazing muscle. Dying, flying, being pursued, witnessing carnage, sleep paralysis are all part of the mix

I've had recurring nightmares for most of my life and some one offs that I will never forget and have no wish to repeat. After all these years I have come to terms with what goes off in my head when I sleep. My mind is full of stuff that comes from me. my insecurities, my fears, my traumas, my memories (even if these are blocked memories I'm not aware of) Once I convinced myself that was a truth I stopped worrying and tried to refer it to a self help manual instead. It doesn't always scan but it helps. My mind doesn't make a decision to scare the bejesus out of me for the fun of it.

Perhaps the most interesting ones are dredged up from blocked memories. They are upsetting, unsettling and disturbingly graphic. Its basis must be in PTSD so I try not to dwell, but bookmark as an interesting fact and file. Forgetting them is another issue.

Most disturbing - Finding my young sons dismebodied remains in a drawer.

Most difficult to emerge from - A dream within a dream, when the 'within' was a nightmare. Urging yourself to wake up from the nightmare to find yourself still dreaming.

Most complex - Watching myself going insane and being the one experiencing the downward spiral. So I was me watching me and experiencing both me's. The cause was depression and I worked hard immediately after to recover. It was a my life, my choice moment and a very long time ago.

Most persistent - Walking through the front door of a constantly changing building with hidden corridors between the inner and outer walls. I was always afraid of the something I couldn't see and generally ended up in the large, dark vaulted cellar I was too afraid to enter. After I don't know how many years I walked out the back door and never went back. It was childhood dream and ended in my teens. I hardly have to say I was not a happy child and embarked on a one girl rebellion in my teens which was a very very long time ago.

Most scary - Turning on a demon and finding you were possibly a tad premature in the notion you were ready to deal with it.

Not all dreams are nightmares. If anyone can explain why I dreamt a whole musical comedy complete with original scores and woke up laughing I would love to hear from them.

Hope this helps
 

Cobalt Jade

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Having to deal with deep snow and ice and flooding waters, inability to find where I parked my car, inability to locate a room in a building, often one I am supposed to stay in (very Kafka, that one), discovery that I never really got out of the Army, and need to go back and get uniforms and stuff, or (similarly) that I still have one class to finish to get my final college degree and haven't attended it ever and don't know where it is held.

These are all mine, except for the flood and army one.
 

Myrealana

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When I was about 12 years old, my dad was watching a TV special on lucid dreaming and I sat down to watch with him. I thought "I could do that." So I did.

I just decided I could control what happened in my dreams and then did it. I've been doing it ever since. Usually, when a dream gets too scary, I can back off a bit and change the situation. I once dreamed my husband and son fell into a pit of lava. I screamed and lunged for them, honestly feeling like the two most important people in my world had just plunged to their death. So, I decided it wasn't lava. It was a steam tunnel with red lights in it. They fell, and we still had to figure a way out, but they weren't dead. I do this kind of thing all the time, so frequently that only the really special ones stand out. I can decide to fly, or teleport, or change history. It's generally a lot of fun.

The problem is, sometimes, I become lucid and can't change the situation. I'm aware that I'm dreaming and I try desperately to escape, but something is holding me back. When that happens, I'll wake up and not be able to tell the difference between reality and the dream for a while. It's not like a normal nightmare where you startle awake, or maybe scream a bit and go back to sleep. It's a full-on panic attack where I'm fully awake, but certain the nightmare is still happening.

Those are not pleasant nights for anyone.
 

underpope

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I do have nightmares, though not all that frequent. Usually the most terrifying ones I have involve ghosts. In one for example, a ghost was floating through the hallways of the building where I work, possessing people and making them smarter (don't know why this part was so scary). Then it came floating at me at top speed, and I woke up screaming, waking up my wife and annoying the cat.

Once I dreamed that a ghost with a face made of mirrors was climbing into bed with me. Again, I screamed, and again I woke up my wife and annoyed the cat.

Finally, I'm convinced that I've had at least one instance of sleep paralysis, when I woke up around 2 a.m. unable to move or breathe, and certain that there was someone else in the room. I was finally able to scream, and that woke me up completely.

Not sure if that answers your question. I just like talking about my dreams.
 

Mary Mitchell

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Funniest one (if you can call a nightmare funny) involved a monkey that was growing into an ape outside my front door. I could see it through the window that comprised the top half of the door, and when it got to full size I knew it would break in through the window and attack me. I must have been in the process of waking up because, in the dream, I was aware that I was dreaming and I began banging my dream head against the dream headboard of my bed to wake myself up before the ape got fully grown and broke into the house.

BTW, if you fall asleep on your back you will be more inclined to nightmares. More specifically, if the back of your head is flat against the pillow or bed. I can fall asleep on my back so long as my head is tilted to the side and I won't get nightmares, but if all of me including my head is flat on my back I will get them. Looked it up and apparently it's statistically a factor.
 

David Barbur

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Ayup. Thanks to some time in the military, followed by a brief career in law enforcement, I get to ride the nightmare train periodically. Because I've spent quit a bit of effort "working on my s&*t," it's not as frequent as it used to be. Mostly it's a sign that I'm tired, stressed out or that there's a major disaster happening in the US and I've been watching too much news coverage.

It's informed my writing, but the trick there of course is to make sure it adds seasoning to something another person would want to read, as opposed to being some kind of cathartic exercise in self therapy.

By the way, I clicked on your webpage via the link in your footer, and now my Amazon Wish List has Monday's Lie onboard. That's a good blurb you have on your sight.
 
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Famoustapu

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well, sometimes it is based on what your thoughts or what you did before sleeping XD
 

KTC

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I'm reading up on a little research into nightmares (doing my Googling and reading diligence) but I was curious about our AWers' experience of nightmares --- and more importantly, what you make of them.

Do you think it reflects anything about your personal routines (like staying up too late or medication you have to take) or your physiology, or your psychology? Do you wonder about why this is something you have to deal with or do you just roll with it?


Of course, most people have the occasional unpleasant dream, but I only know two people who have mentioned their frequent, terrible nightmares to me and although they don't know each other, there are some interesting similarities in their personalities that make me wonder about people plagued with chronic nightmares.

In advance, thanks for anything you're willing to say. I so much appreciate it.

I have suffered with them my entire life. They do tend to come during my own personal 'down' times. Routine-wise, when I'm feeling emotionally fatigued the nightmares are stronger. I just put it up there with PTSD stuff, though. Pretty typical for me.