Yeah, I know they're crappy lyrics, but that's exactly what I feel like.
Today was the 3rd day back at work after an amazing holiday in the sun, and reality is definitely setting in.
The whole time I was away, I slept pretty well, and came home feeling very rested.
For years now, I've had a recurring nightmare. The whole time I was away, I didn't have the nightmare once, and last night I had it again.
When it first started happening, it would fuck me up for a couple of days. When it started getting more and more regular, I started sleeping less because I was scared to sleep. That's how my insomnia developed. The problem with the nightmare is that sometimes I can't snap myself out of it and I get trapped within the nightmare. It's really annoying to me, because it's something I can't control. I like to be able to control everything in my life, and I can't do that when I'm sleeping.
Any tips on getting rid of nightmares? This has got to stop. Maybe that should be my new year's resolution.
Nightmares suck. I have far more experience with them than I would like to, and there doesn't seem to be any sort of easy fix.
ReplyDeleteA couple of things that I've found that can help: firstly, lucid dreaming. This is the art of becoming aware in a dream of the fact that you are dreaming, and hence being able to control the dream. For me, this is very hit-and-miss, and sometimes it can make nightmares worse - being aware that I'm in a nightmare, but still being unable to do anything is worse than not knowing it's a nightmare. Still, when it works, being able to pull out a gun and shoot the monsters or something similar is really helpful. A similar trick that I learned as a kid was to come up with some sort of signal that means "okay, dream, want to get out now" - for me this was closing my eyes and rolling them back into my head, since the feeling was usually enough to wake me up. Again, not always successful.
Another thing that sort-of-helped was taking antihistamines as a sedative (as prescribed by my doctor for insomnia). Again, hit-and-miss - sometimes it would be great, I'd fall asleep and either not dream or not remember my dreams, and wake up feeling refreshed. After using them for a couple of days in a row, though, they stopped being quite so awesome, and they just left me sleepy most of the day. And again, sometimes I would be falling asleep and knowing I was about to have a nightmare and unable to stop it; or I'd wake up from a nightmare scared out of my mind and all I could do was fall asleep again, because of the sedating thing.
The only thing that I've really found that's actually had any success rate at all is sticking to my own sleep schedule. This means staying up till 3am or later, until I was so tired I actually could not stay awake any longer, and then sleeping as long as I needed to, usually 7-8 hours, and then waking up naturally, without an alarm or anything. Obviously this is nearly impossible to fit in with work/school/etc, but it's also the only thing I've found that's stopped me having nightmares.
And hey. If there's one recurring nightmare, maybe it's something that you're not letting yourself consciously process, and so your subconscious does its best the only way it seems to know how - by giving you nightmares. Could possibly be worth talking to someone about it?
...yeah, way too much experience with nightmares.
:( Same nightmare again last night. Every time I woke up (about every 1/2 hour) I tried to fully snap myself out of it by physically getting out of bed and doing something to wake myself up, but it didn't work.
ReplyDeleteI don't know what to do.
What helps for me in-the-moment is getting up and going on the internet. I guess you could achieve the same with something else - a book that you can pick up and read, or a specific pendant or whatever; the point being, something that you can only get to in reality, that you can't get in a dream (like, you can never read books in dreams because that part of your brain is asleep or something). So, I get up and go on the internet, and talk to whoever's online, since timezones and stuff means there's usually someone around, and just talk to them about whatever until I'm un-scared enough to go back to sleep.
ReplyDelete