Do you have frequent nightmares?

Never had recurring nightmares but for the last 3 of 4 nights I've had mini-nightmares. Very odd.

The first I thought I lost my wallet. Searched and searched until I woke up and reminded myself I could relax, I hadn't really lost it.
Second dream, my car was stolen. Same thing, searched and searched until I woke up.
Last night I dreamed malware infected my computer, that one which tells you to click on the site which will fix it for you for a price and you can't get any other page to open. It was real enough I was hoping my computer was OK this morning even though I knew it had been a dream.

Has to be related to stress or something.

Sat Nam! (literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

I am not prone to frequent nightmares, but a know a few people who are. Invariably they are people who have experienced traumatic events: armed robbery in two cases, the aftermath of the great tsunami of 2004 in one case.

Many years ago, back in the 1970s, I used to have frequent "calculus nightmares." This was after I'd finished school. I'd dream that I had final exams for calculus and usually one or two other classes and hadn't done the homework or cracked the books. These nightmares disappeared once I began to teach Kundalini Yoga. (Then I would dream that I was the assistant to the calculus teacher.) I've discovered that lots of people this sort of anxiety dream after finishing school. It's kind of like the force that propels us forward when we stop a car suddenly. The mind is used to having to deal with schoolwork; when that stops, it keeps going, but with anxiety that we're not doing what it was trained to think it was supposed to do.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal

I’m not plagued so much with the frequency (often-ness) of what I consider to be a nightmare, but it’s definitely a reliable theme when I do have one: There will be a great big spider, or many normal-size spiders. (I don’t like spiders.) Either way, when the nightmare becomes too intense I’ll wake up. I’ve always found this strange because if my own mind selected and played the spider-movie, then why did it get so freaked out about it and wake me up? Is there some sort of ‘duality’ going on in the sleeping mind? Like there is in the conscious mind?

Another recurring theme, that I consider to be more stressful than nightmarish, is I’ve forgotten to feed/take care of some being—usually a baby/small child, or an animal. Alternatively, I’ve forgotten to do some random important task and when I do remember it’s so close to the deadline that it may be impossible to complete… and then it becomes so stressful trying to complete it that I’ll wake up.

Lastly, back to nightmares, there is one other I’ll have on the rare occasion: driving off the side of a bridge, but I always wake up before impact. Though it's stressful in the dream, the odd thing is that I don't have a problem driving over a bridge in reality—no matter how loftily perched it is. (However, I don't like bridges where the lanes are too 'squeezed' together. I prefer 'elbow room'!)

Good luck with your research.

Do some research into the neuroscience of sleep. The brain is literally bathed in a different set of chemicals / hormones than while awake, so if a person has certain hormone imbalances or other chemical issues in their biology, it can most definitely impact how they sleep and how they dream. That's why a lot of sleep meds come with the added warning of "vivid dreams." Maxing out on over the counter melatonin can, too.

When I was a teenager, I would have 1 throw-me-out-of-sleep-screaming, can't-talk nightmare a year. It was basically the culmination of every horror movie I'd watched throughout the year come back to haunt me, and often starring people I knew in place of the ones from the movies.

After that, if I had bad dreams, they usually happened if I fell asleep during the day and came from sounds / smells / etc. filtering in from the real world and getting mangled by my sleeping brain.

I have nightmares when really big stressers are doing their stressing thing in my life. As a child I had several recurring nightmares. I've turned or plan to turn all of them into stories. Of course they represented whatever was going on in my life (lack of control, fear of certain things/people, feeling lost, etc.) but those are the ones that make the best stories. I have them less often as an adult, but still whenever I have a day that is particularly stressful and I'm feeling fearful about the outcome of those stressers.

For years I had recurring nightmares about not being safe. I even had a dream stalker--fictional, but the same guy was out to get me in these nightmares. Usually, he'd be outside the house, and I'd go frantically through every room, latching windows and locking doors and knowing that if I made a mistake he'd get in and kill me. Sometimes he'd get in--once he was standing in my bedroom door with an ax--but then I'd wake myself up because I was not going to actually let myself be killed.

I've had exactly one panic attack in my life, and it felt exactly like the nightmare. I was awake, but I started doing the dream routine of checking all the windows and doors, sure that someone was about to break in. It was unbearable. I called my sister, and talking to her calmed me down.

Used that in my third book, actually.

And yes, there were shitty childhood reasons for dreaming about being unsafe. The dream went away when I got older and felt more in control of my life.

Apart from that, typical anxiety dreams: not being prepared (the play's tonight and I don't know my lines/test is today and I forgot I took this class) or able to cope (waiting tables and can't even get drinks out), or out of control (car won't respond, etc.). Those are usually easy to trace to the source.

One physiological trigger: I tend to have more vivid and wild dreams, sometimes including nightmares, when I take melatonin to help me get to sleep.

I have nightmares about fears--being trapped in something or somewhere without a way home.

I took prescription ibuprofen for a week once and had violent I'm-gonna-kill-ya-sucker nightmares every single night. Never take that again.

I'm constantly dreaming. Sometimes when I wake up, I can't shake them off. I remember dreams from years ago. I had a reoccurring dream when I was little that I was stuck in a sewer and when I looked up at the grates, I saw people walking passed. I would scream, but no one ever heard me. Things would drop down, like coins and keys too.

Most of my current dreams are of me losing my family. Either losing my husband or kids. Or my cat. But every time I wake up, man o man, am I glad! But still though, some are so violent, it's hard to believe. I'm bipolar too so I know that has everything to do with it.

I have occasional nightmares. As an adult, they're most often about falling. For instance, in the dream, I'll be driving on a bridge or along a cliff, and somehow lose control of the car and it will plunge over the cliff (and I'll experience a very real sensation of falling and associated terror before I wake up). Or I'll be in an elevator that will not stop at my desired floor, and when I press the button, it will plummet. Occasionally flying dreams turn into falling dreams, though that happened more when I was younger. Now when I dream of flying, I tend to only push off and float a few feet above the floor. Symbolic?

My most frequent "bad dreams," though, are more emotional or frustrating. I'll be trying to find something or complete a task before I can go do something I badly want to do in my dream, but I'll keep getting sidetracked or forgetting what I need to do. Somehow, in my subconscious, I must know I'm dreaming and have to get to the good part before I wake up. I always wake up just as I'm finishing the chore or finding what I need to find.

This is pretty clearly related to the way my life feels sometimes.

Another kind of bad dream involves a fight or falling out with a loved one. In those dreams, someone is either very angry at me for reasons I can't fathom, and they're yelling at me or treating me very badly/unfairly, or else I lose my temper and say unforgivable things to someone I care for.

And, ugh, then there are those dreams about having an incurable disease, or about my husband dying. And ick, those ones where my teeth fall out for no reason.

I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for as this only happened once, but I used to be very prone to having strange and vivid dreams when I used sleeping medications. I never had a problem with it, as I don't typically have any dreams under normal circumstances anyway. But there was one experience I had with sleeping medications that put me off them for good. I had taken some allergy medication late in the afternoon, and before bed I took my sleeping meds. I know you're not supposed to mix meds, but the allergy stuff was over-the-counter, so I didn't think anything of it. When I fell asleep that night I experienced something I can only describe as a looping nightmare. I woke up in the middle of the night to get a drink, and as I was heading back to bed I got a really bad feeling that something was really wrong. I kept hearing breathing noises, and I couldn't sleep with that around, so I searched the house until eventually I realized that whatever was in the house was right behind me, but no matter what I tried, it was always behind me and I couldn't get a look at it. Spooks ultimately ensued and I woke up back in my bedroom, and I could still hear the breathing. This process repeated itself over and over, resetting each time something 'woke' me up. (The Groundhog Day of nightmares) Each repeat generally followed the same theme as before (something following me, not being able to see it, etc.) ,but it varied a little each time. After a few repeats I caught on to what was happening, and the house began to devolve with each repeat until it simply didn't have a form anymore. It shifted and warped like clay or putty, constantly changing shape and size. Obviously I had realized what was going on, and I started to panic. I tried to find an exit, but whenever I got close to a door or a window it would either shift away, or twist and warp until it physically wouldn't open. Eventually I was chased by some kind of creature until the house warped in a way that allowed me to be caught. Whenever I was caught, I'd wake up in my bedroom and I'd try to leave again, with roughly the same result. After the third repeat of this, I gave up trying and accepted my fate. After that I woke up for real. I don't know how many cycles I went through in total but it was at least a dozen. Needless to say, I never took either medication again. It took me a month to bring up the nerve to sleep in my own bed. I haven't had any dreams like that since, so I can safely assume I had a reaction to the medications.

I almost always dream, so I do take the time to think about what they might mean. I'm fascinated by them. But since I dream a lot, some of them are just total boring junk. As in so mundane that I'll wake up and have to ask people if I was remembering real life events or if it was a dream. I can't tell you the number of times I've had to ask my boyfriend, "Did we have a conversation about the coffee pot or was it a dream?"

I have cried, laughed, spoken, and ticked like a clock in my sleep - from childhood to now (late 20s).

I have had recurring themes in nightmares at different times in my life that I would absolutely connect with psychological things (i.e., feeling out of control in my life = dreams where I'm not in control).

It was actually always a great tool for me in school to warn me during summer break when I needed to get started on my summer reading projects because, without fail, I would dream of showing up to class unprepared.

FWIW, I suffered from insomnia when I was younger and just last year was diagnosed with narcolepsy. I did take sleeping meds for a while but now I take "stay awake" meds and it doesn't seem to have affected my dreams but I don't mix with anything else.

I've read that frequent nightmares can be a sign of depression or pent-up anger or frustration. Fear and anxiety can create them too. If you have very powerful negative emotions that are left unresolved they can leak into your dreams.

One re-occuring theme I used to have was dreams where I'm witnessing terrible events. Maybe someone getting killed or some 9-11 scale event (even before 9-11). I was never participating, just a spectator. But I'd be left with the same troubled feeling I'd have if I had seen such stuff in real life. I guess it had something to do with whatever was going on at the time, because those eventually faded.

I don't have nightmares much anymore, but I used to have them all the time. Typically, they were about things like being trapped in a car going over a cliff, or all my teeth falling out.

I also used to have nightmares of being chased by demons or aliens, but the last time I actually had one of those, rather than being scared, it just pissed me off, and instead of running from the monster, I stood up and fought back. It wasn't like a lucid dream or anything where I knew I was dreaming and took control, just being chased in that dream made me angry more than scared at that time. I remember the monster grabbing me by the throat and picking me up off the ground. I just spit in its face and said "I'm stronger than you." Then I woke up, and I haven't had that kind of nightmare since, been over a year now.

I remember as a kid when my friends would describe their dreams to me, wondering why they seemed so boring... my dreamscape was entirely surrealist. Nothing was as it is in this world. Everything had a slight edge of terror to it. Landscapes and people melted together, faces shifted and strained, something was almost always chasing me, or I was chasing it, things that communicated with me weren't human, they weren't animorphic, they just were... things in my dreams. I tried a few times telling people about the neat and strange dreams I had (some felt particularly thrilling and I woke up startled, or shaking, or sweating) and they would look at me aghast and wonder how I went to bed the next night. When I was around 12 or 13 I discovered that I apparently only had nightmares and everyone else's boring dreams were normal dreams. I also only had lucid dreams though. I've always had lucid dreams, and it's really not scary when even though the world is stretching around you and landscapes are falling away under your feet, you know that eventually you'll wake up. I liked my nightmares. They were interesting, almost fun, like my own personal horror movie in my bed every night.

The last time I remember dreaming was shortly before I went on anti-depressants. I've been off them for years, and I can't recall a recent dream I had. I miss them.

ShaunHorton said:

I don't have nightmares much anymore, but I used to have them ... all my teeth falling out.

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One of the nightmares I had as a kid that really impacted me and I still remember, I had these awful black things that grew all over my face. I think I was about 10.

I love dream typology. I'd break my 'bad' dreams down into several distinct types (I have 'good' dreams and the occasional mindblowingly awesome cinematic dream as well, but most of my dreams are just 'boring'.) Of the bad, the most frequent are the anxiety dreams, and we've all had those: oops, you forgot to attend statistics class all semester and the exam's tomorrow! (You will have this dream forever.) Uhoh, you've gotta leave the house to attend Important Social Event, but you can't find your wallet or pants! (There's a lucid dreaming version of this one where I'm desperately trying to do something really fun and exciting that can only be done in a dream, because I know I'll wake up any minute.)

There are the dreams of emotional distress: where I'm insanely angry at someone I love, or someone has just died, or the like. Interestingly, I only ever wake up with a vague unease after these ones, no matter how intense the emotions were a second ago. Neurochemistry is weird.

There are the otherwise mundane dreams that suddenly hit you woth jarringly disturbing imagery: body horror, people being killed. These I usually wake up from pretty quickly. Thanks, brain. WTF?? These ones are unpredictable, and don't happen often.

I've only occasionally had falling dreams. Usually these are like the above: just plodding along when suddenly you fall off a cliff.

I had more pursuit dreams when I was younger: I remember being chased by the T-1000, by the T. rex from Jurassic Park, by sentient fireballs. In retrospect these dreams were almost fun. These ones I believe are your body test-firing your fight-or-flight systems while you sleep.

Most inexplicable, and the most terrifying, are the sleep paralysis episodes. They deserve a whole thread of their own.

Oh yeah, and the dysmorphic dreams. I think everyone gets those: your teeth are crumbling! Your hair is falling out!

I've heard it said that dreams about your teeth failing/breaking/falling out have to do with powerlessness. It makes sense. When we prowled the plains of Africa, we were just one more animal on the food chain. Losing your teeth could mean losing your life.

I've also heard that you dream either what you want, or what you fear. Now, I won't get into politics here, but since November my infrequent nightmares have reverted to those I had as a child in the fifties: global thermonuclear war. When I have this type of dream, it's in technicolor, full surround-sound. The ground shakes. I can feel my physical reaction, and I wake up gasping and tachycardic. No fun.

Ditto on the sleep aids leading to nightmares, usually of my kids getting attacked. I sometimes can't decide which is worse, the nightmares or the insomnia

I always dream, even if it's just a short nap.

Nightmares tend to run along the same tracks:

1. I am in a life threatening situation. Often the car is speeding down the road, heading for disaster, and I can't get my foot on the brake because I am all but paralyzed. The cost of mustering the necessary effort is barely worth the price of saving myself. In fact I talk myself into it. The dream doesn't seem to have a conclusion. I keep trying and fighting my wish to just give up.

2. Someone or something is trying to kill me. While I am fighting them/it off, I scream for help, but all that comes out are tiny whispers. Eventually, I try starting softly and working up to a bellow. That usually works, but no help ever comes, except in the form of my husband waking me up.

3. Snakes. Sometimes snakes slither across the room I am in, or I just see one somewhere one wouldn't expect to encounter them. A dream I remember well was of a huge dark snake that leapt about on my bed.

4. The creepies. Something awful is near. I look for it, but don't find it, and I probably don't want to. I'm hoping I'm wrong, but I know I am not.

Nightmares are always dark. It's always night, and the colors tend to be blacks, browns, and dirty oranges.

Some dreams, are sorrowful rather than scary. I still consider them nightmares. My heart is broken, and I cry and cry and cry some more.

Nightmares I used to have, but have no longer:
Tidal wave is coming. I am at the beach trying to get everybody I care about out of there. The wave arrives, it crests, it breaks . . .
Losing teeth.
Falling through space.
Being close to a person I know and love when suddenly their mask dissolves and a monster face is revealed.

Otherwise, I love my dream life. It is very active, brilliant with color, full of people and pets, that have gone away, and people I know only in my dreams —
more vivid than in real life — assuming this is the real life, but I could have it backwards.

The causes, I think, are a little of everything. Physiology, psychology, events current and past. Childhood trauma(s). New traumas. Being human. Pretty fascinating stuff isn't it? Being human, I mean.

I take no drugs, prescription or otherwise, unless you are one of those nitpicky persons who count caffeine. I don't drink coffee after 6:00 p.m., and I don't drink alcohol ever.

I think I have nightmares more often than not, to the point where I've sort of just accepted them as what I dream. I have some of the ones listed above (teeth falling out happens but is rare, "late for school dreams" all the damn time even though I've not been in any school for 8 years, and I used to get tidal wave dreams drowning me all the time but those seem to have petered out). I don't have the falling ones, though I often wake up feeling as if I've fallen a great distance. My most common nightmare has to be with being chased, and if I'm caught I'll die or be seriously hurt or robbed or the world will be destroyed--my sleeping brain is very dramatic. I've been killed twice in my dreams, though the second one was the far more distinct "death dream" and left me horribly unsettled for about a week. Long story short (time travel and world peril and the like), I was shot and rather than wake up, I felt myself bleed out and choke on blood and then it was just darkness for what felt like a minute or two until I woke up super shaken.

As far as medicines, I only take some vitamins, either ibuprofen or meloxicam (a prescription NSAID), and caffeine in the form of tea before 6pm. I try not to take antihistamines before bed unless absolutely necessary (like for the cluster headaches I mentioned in the other thread) because they make my nightmares so much worse. I also have mild-to-moderate-but-not-worse GAD, which might have something to do with it.

I also have a mild version of REM disorder. My body doesn't lock up when I dream, so I try to do in real life what my dream self is doing. Unlike the bad cases, I don't get out of bed or fully articulate. I know it makes a dream feedback loop. I've woken up before because I couldn't run and whatever is chasing me finally caught up to me, but my legs are hobbled or it feels like I'm moving through molasses, and then I wake up with the sheets in a knot around my ankles. I've learned to tuck in my sheets in different ways to help stop this and I never wear pants or long nightgowns to bed anymore and it's seriously cut down on that happening in my dreams. Benefit to this, I've never experienced that creepy sleep paralysis.

Once I dreamt I was a tiger being hunted by a poacher. I got tangled in my sheets which translated to being caught in a trap in the dream, and I woke up right before he shot me.

I forgot to mention, during the infancy of both my daughters, I had horrible nightmares. Sleep deprivation, probably, but it got so bad I was almost afraid to sleep, yet I knew I had to get what shut-eye I could before she went off again. And my kids were both scrawny little peanuts when tiny, so they woke to be fed often. Some nights it felt like every fifteen minutes, though of course it wasn't. I used to dream about losing her or hurting her. I suppose these are typical. Nobody ever warned me about post-partum dreaming.

I used to have wake-up-screaming nightmares several times a week. My husband got quite annoyed, because I was constantly waking him up with my screaming. Most of the time, my vocal cords were paralyzed from sleep, so I would make this screaming sound in my throat, which almost sounded more like a moan, except I'd make the sound as loud as possible, over and over, until I woke up. Sometimes the noise would wake me, but if it didn't, my hubby would wake me. On rare occasions, my vocal cords would not be paralyzed, so I'd scream full-force, which scared the crap out of my poor husband.

I used to have sleep paralysis, where I would wake up, but my brain would still be in sleep/REM mode, so I couldn't move. My eyes were open, but I was completely paralyzed. And because my brain thought I was still dreaming, I would hallucinate. Usually, I'd see a dark, shadowy figure standing in the doorway of my bedroom, which terrified me! Or I'd hear footsteps approaching, but couldn't see anyone. I would try to scream, but couldn't make more than a few whimpering sounds. Eventually, my brain would figure out that I was awake and the spell would break.

I used to have a lot of teeth-falling-out nightmares, too. (Probably because I'm terrified of the dentist and put off going for several years. Not the best decision I ever made. . . .) So, one time, in real life, I had a filling fall out and the tooth was too weak without the filling, so a good portion of the tooth broke off. It was my worst nightmare come to life, which meant I could no longer tell dream from reality while dreaming. Then, one day I realized that, in my dreams, when a tooth falls out, there's always a new tooth growing in underneath it. Just like when you lose a tooth as a kid. So I told myself, if a tooth falls out and there's a new tooth underneath, it means it's only a dream. This worked one time. I realized it was just a dream and all my anxiety disappeared. After that, it was like my subconscious figured out I wasn't scared of these dreams anymore, so it circumvented the only way I knew how to tell it was a dream, altering the dreams' parameters. Now, when my teeth fall out in a dream, there's no new tooth growing underneath it, so I can't tell if it's real or a dream. Which is horribly creepy, because it means my subconscious actually knows how to manipulate my dreams--and it's doing it to terrify me.

I suspect a good portion of my nightmares were caused by unresolved childhood trauma, because they mostly disappeared once I started coming to terms with things. It's also possible my bipolar medication is helping reduce the nightmares, too. These days, I only have a wake-up-screaming nightmare once every month or two, and I haven't had a sleep paralysis incident in several years. I do still have the teeth-falling-out nightmares occasionally, and I have another recurring nightmare where I'm chewing a huge wad of gum and I'll spit it out, but no matter how much gum I pull from my mouth, there's always more. It makes me gag just thinking about it.

It's weird, but I still remember the first nightmare I had, when I was maybe four years old. It was like a scary sci-fi story, with a plot and everything. Someday, I might turn it into a story. Even today, I have very vivid, detailed dreams with plots and sub-plots, characters, etc. In fact, most of the novels I've written were inspired by vivid dreams.

I've had some pretty intense nightmares over the years, ones where my husband gets shot in the head, for example, but the worst I ever had was a few months ago. In the dream, I somehow forgot about my cat. He was locked in a room without food or water for months, because I forgot about him. When I finally remembered, I hurried into the room to feed him. He came out to greet me, and he was literally a skeleton with skin. No fur, no muscle, no fat. Just skin and bones. It was absolutely horrifying! I knew that even if I fed him, there was no way he could survive. And it was made a thousand times worse by the fact that it was MY FAULT. I woke up crying, and even though it happened months ago, this dream still haunts me.