Daily nightmares for 2 years now

[dr150]

Take meditation classes and meditate for an hour before sleeping. This will get your brain on an even keel.

Also get a sleeping mouth guard from your dentist so you don't wreck your teeth while you have your condition.

 

[disappoint]

I've had dreams where I'm actually aware that I'm dreaming, and can somewhat control stuff, but it's not really something I can just make happen on the spot. Usually if I realize I'm dreaming, I have to try to not blink in the dream, if I blink, I wake up.

I sometimes get dreams inside of dreams too. These typically happen in the morning after I've hit snooze. Can have hours or even days worth of dreaming in that 10 minute of real time.

Yeah the times I lucid dreamed it was because something didn't make sense and I realized it was a dream. One time I woke up, another time I decided to stay asleep because I figured I needed the rest.

You say it's not something you can make happen. That's where the post hypnotic suggestion comes in. Maybe google how to lucid dream if you want to. The subconscious mind is a lot more controllable than most people realize. Like anything else that is possible, to do it they just have to find out how.

 

[Humpy]

My problem is the nightly daydreams.

 

[disappoint]

Maybe start learning a little bit about it from this article in Scientific American:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-control-dreams/

No one should have to suffer from nightmares. Especially not for 2 years! That sounds like pure torture to me.

Some dreams feel so revelatory—if only returning to sleep would take us back there. It turns out, however, that our ability to shape our dreams is better than mere chance. In the blockbuster movie Inception, Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his compatriots use drugs and psychological profiles to trigger specific dreams in people. Although the heavy sedation and level of detail incited are far-fetched, dream control isn't entirely a Hollywood fantasy.

Techniques to control, or at least influence, our dreams have been shown to work in sleep experiments. We can strategize to dream about a particular subject, solve a problem or end a recurring nightmare. With practice we can also increase our chances of having a lucid dream, the sort of "dream within a dream" that Inception's characters regularly slip into.

 

[disappoint]

Even if you learn how to do it, it's still uncommon to happen for most people.

Like any skill, the more you practice the right method the better you get at it.

 

[Paratus]

Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun-god robes on a pyramid with a thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you?

 

[Kaido]

Share. What kind of night terrors?

Nothing too crazy, it was more of a during-sleep adrenaline release. So whatever random dream was going on would hit a point of sheer terror once the epinephrine hit the bloodstream. Would wake up sweating, heart racing, the works. Sometimes it wasn't even a horror dream, it would just be an amplified negative emotion. But sometimes it would be a horrible situation rather than a crazy dream, like completely realistic ones where you were driving down the road in your dream & a kid ran across the street chasing a ball & you braked but couldn't stop in time & that horrible feeling of dread from not being able to stop just washed over you & as soon as your car hit him BAM you woke up drenched in sweat with your heart pounding so hard it hurt with all of that fear-driven adrenaline coursing through your body, while the dream slowly faded but you were just stuck there feeling terrible for awhile after you woke up. Crap like that. It stunk.

I wouldn't always remember it either. I had a roommate in college who told me I was grinding my teeth so loud he could hear it across the room. Wasn't until I got married that I even realized I slept-walked a bit, or would sit up in bed & talk & then go back to sleep. It got to the point where we put a whiteboard next to our bed & my wife would write down all of the funny junk I said or did. One time I was turning on & off the floor lamp for like five minutes straight...my wife asked me what I was doing & I said I was trying to adjust the speaker volume on the TV, duh

Sometimes I'd get physical too...one time I woke up & was yanking on my wife's hair...in my dream, a bad guy had tied strong helium balloons to her hair & she was going to float away into the atmosphere & die because she couldn't breath up there so I had to save her by getting the balloons out of her hair ASAP. From my perspective, I went to sleep, slept like a baby, and then was rudely awakened by her yelling at me. Wasn't my fault

I had night terrors since I was a kid & acid reflux starting in my 20's. For starters, I found that if I was going to eat at night, it was better to have something with protein in it because sugar would spike me & then drop my blood sugar levels super low while I was sleeping, inducing the crazy dreams. Then I got acid reflux & found that if I just quit eating 2-3 hours before bed I was fine, so I can have dessert before bed now because the sugar wears off before I fall asleep. I also broke my meals up into six smaller meals to keep my blood sugar level during the day, although it's not really an issue at all when I'm awake, other than I get pretty sleepy if I eat too big of a meal. Getting in shape & exercising on a regular basis also helps to regular your sugar levels. It wasn't ever something that came up during a doctor's visit because my blood sugar was usually fine during the day.

I think I figured it out from some news segment on TV where the dude went berserko at night due to unknown dropped blood sugar levels. Mine was never quite that bad, but they said even a little bit of low blood sugar can cause some really crazy effects. The night terrors thing was always interesting. I had a lot of dreams where I was getting chased by giant spiders, which is weird because I'm not afraid of spiders at all & always had a lot of pets growing up. Just one of those things where a random weird dream would pair up with a physically-induced trauma feeling that made no sense...I'd wake up with that ridiculous fight-or-flight feeling pumping in my chest, go what the crap! lol. And then go back to sleep. Sometimes they were funny though. One time, completely asleep in the middle of the night, I taught my wife how to build speakers from scratch. I didn't believe her when she told me that after I woke up, but she showed me the crossover design she had drawn out on our whiteboard & I about died

Never have any issues now, unless I make stupid eating decisions & skip out on exercise for awhile, or goof up my sleeping schedule. It's not overly hard to keep in check, provided you are able to self-regulate your blood sugar levels through your habits, you just gotta find what works for you. Writing it out kind of makes it sound more serious than it was, although I guess it was more of an issue than I realized at the time. At any rate, if you have to deal with crap like that, go get a sleep study done. I never did because I eventually figured out the root cause, but if you don't know, it's quicker just to have a professional diagnose you because then you can find out if it's sleep apnea or low blood sugar or whatever it may be.

 

[Kaido]

Like any skill, the more you practice the right method the better you get at it.

Are you personally able to consistently control your dreams? I've heard a lot of people talk about it, but I've actually never met anybody who said they could do it whenever they wanted.

Guess it doesn't really matter now that I have a VR headset because that's just about as good...I can drive race cars or kill evil robots or be an astronaut anytime I want :awe:

 

[Kaido]

I have these too, and to me that's the most interesting part - it's not that I haven't been doing my homework, or that I got a C on the midterm - no, it's that I straight forgot the class existed and didn't show up for two months. And then, somehow, I think I might still have a chance at it.

Hah, I've had a few like that where time passes oddly. Had a couple about stuff like math class, where I walked in on the day of the final that determined if you passed the class or got held back, and hadn't written down the date in my notes & hadn't shown up to class in weeks or month and was completely flabbergasted at my cluelessness, and then the horror of what I'd done & what my consequences would be set in :biggrin:

 

[Kaido]

I had a dream about lifting a sea turtle out of the sand. As I pulled him up, the sand consumed me until I was gone. Like the mirror scene in the first matrix.

It was the only night terror I've had, made me wake up screaming.

Hah that would be terrible! I used to get crap like that all the time. Wasn't always for crazy situations but the feeling was always the same due to the chemical reaction that happened inside your body.

You know, it would be fun to make a virtual reality game about people's nightmares so that you could experience crazy stuff like that where you would normally never ever be in that position (that sounds a lot creepier written out than it did in my head, rofl). I'm playing a VR game right now called "Raw Data" that has a really great scene where you're inside this building hacking the company, the alarm gets tripped, and the bodyguard robots start attack you. You're surrounded by safety glass, but the very first one to attack just starts banging his freaking head against the glass to break it like that scene from The Happening with the old lady in the house at the end. Watching a 2D version on Youtube is one thing, but seeing it in high-res VR is freaaaaaakay! (feels so much more real & the graphics don't look very cartoony at all when you're actually wearing the headset). Skip ahead to 1:55 in this video, the evil robot starts breaking in at around 2:05:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIx3xzd-xUg

With the immersion from the super-accurate motion tracking & location surround-sound effect, it's like being inside of a nightmare. As soon as you see him cracking the glass you're like HOLY CRAP NO NO NO NOPE NO lol.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Another fun thing is sleep paralysis. I get that every now and then. I don't really get the terror ones, I get ones that are kinda scary, but they're not scary at the time, it's like my mind is not really in a state where scary things should be scary. Most notable one was I was laying in my bed (IRL) and someone came in my room (that part being imagined, but is in a real life setting) and came near me, the way I was placed I could only see their feet. Person patted me, like a loved one would and said something to the effect "I'm going to miss you. You're going to die tomorrow". I was too tired to react or show that I was awake, and more thinking like "oh ok. Now go away and let me sleep". After that I snapped out of the sleep paralysis mode, placed the same way and was like "woah, that was actually kind of creepy".

Usually though when I get sleep paralysis I'm just in an odd state where I can't move and have a feeling something bad is going to happen, like I'm going to fall into a nightmare, so I try to shake out of it. It's one of those things that does not really happen all that often.

I remember watching a show on night terrors, that is freaking horrible stuff right there. People get that every night. I can't imagine how exhausting that would get, you pretty much dread going to bed at that point and probably always super tired due to bad sleep.

 

[Kushina]

I've had dreams where I'm actually aware that I'm dreaming, and can somewhat control stuff, but it's not really something I can just make happen on the spot. Usually if I realize I'm dreaming, I have to try to not blink in the dream, if I blink, I wake up.

I sometimes get dreams inside of dreams too. These typically happen in the morning after I've hit snooze. Can have hours or even days worth of dreaming in that 10 minute of real time.

Considering the amount of bad dreams I have, it's at the point where in every dream I'm like yeah thats bullshit this must be a dream but then two seconds later I seem to forget that and still end up scared.

 

[who?]

I had the math final without a clue one. I've also had dreams where I got fired for being late, immediately woke up and actually had just enough time to get dressed and go to work.

 

[Kaido]

Another fun thing is sleep paralysis. I get that every now and then. I don't really get the terror ones, I get ones that are kinda scary, but they're not scary at the time, it's like my mind is not really in a state where scary things should be scary. Most notable one was I was laying in my bed (IRL) and someone came in my room (that part being imagined, but is in a real life setting) and came near me, the way I was placed I could only see their feet. Person patted me, like a loved one would and said something to the effect "I'm going to miss you. You're going to die tomorrow". I was too tired to react or show that I was awake, and more thinking like "oh ok. Now go away and let me sleep". After that I snapped out of the sleep paralysis mode, placed the same way and was like "woah, that was actually kind of creepy".

Usually though when I get sleep paralysis I'm just in an odd state where I can't move and have a feeling something bad is going to happen, like I'm going to fall into a nightmare, so I try to shake out of it. It's one of those things that does not really happen all that often.

I remember watching a show on night terrors, that is freaking horrible stuff right there. People get that every night. I can't imagine how exhausting that would get, you pretty much dread going to bed at that point and probably always super tired due to bad sleep.

That's actually super common with sleep paralysis: can't move, just want to sleep, and then get a creepy visit from somebody. Some people feel pressed into their bed or suffocated too. A lot of people see aliens or little gremlins or demons or someone who says something scary. They're called Shadow People:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_person

Also Witch Hag/Night Hag/Old Hag syndrome:

http://thoughtcatalog.com/christine...ir-experience-with-the-sleep-paralysis-demon/

http://theshadowlands.net/ghost/sleep.htm

Or a demon sitting on your chest:

http://www.thejesusalien.com/sleep-paralysis-demon-sitting-on-chest/

I've only had it a couple times & I think I only had a dream once, where someone was standing in the doorway staring at me. Nothing inherently creepy about it, but because of the adrenaline-fear reaction, it felt horrific. It was weird because I'm a pretty logical thinker & I knew to separate what I was seeing from what I was feeling, but it's like going on a crazy carnival ride...you know it's just a ride, but your stomach can sometimes tell you otherwise & generates an emotional response from a physical input that is outside of your control.

I can't seem to find it know, but I read a research paper or something a couple years ago where I think they figured out what was going on. It wasn't always low-blood sugar related, it was more due to stress & stuff iirc because sometimes people would only have it once or twice & never have it happen again, whereas other people would get it constantly or at least on a regular basis. It's kind of weird how specific it is, that there's always a "malevolent presence" feeling combined with not being able to move. It's documented back to hundreds or thousands of years ago of people experiencing stuff like this. Creepy :biggrin: