Dissociation after nightmare

[sonicwhite]

Okay do any of you dream of a place you grew up in not necessarily your trauma but a place where fighting happened. What I mean is I'm going to move to TN and I often have dreams of the rocky relationship between me and my stepmom. So I know when I go there I will be dissociated by things I see in my dreams. Like this funky feeling.


I've always gotten before but it just now interrupts life. So does anyone have a dream of a place and then you go there and become dissociated?

 

[recoveringfromptsd]

I can relate to that, as I get waking dreams (dreams that continue after I wake) that are violent in nature, and at least once I went into a disassociated state. To help withs I have in my bedroom a nightlight that projects a planet scene on the ceiling, so I have something to visually ground to. I got it at foodline I believe.

 

[screen-name]

Talk to your T. I was dissacociation and having trouble determining what I dreamed and what I'd really done. This sounds similar to me. Like your brain is storing dream memories as real ones or vice versa.

 

[cptsdsurvivor]

i have very similar things regularly and have had them for years although the specific nature of them has changed a lot. But the basics are invariable like bread and cheese - I have a nightmare which triggers my flashback emotional state (it represents this state, so your fight that you nightmared about may do the same for you) and then I wake completely dissociated, although terrified too. This is a typical response in a flashback of a very heavy kind as it protects the psyche from the overwhelming emotions - terror, annihilation - of the flashback.

Often I wake and I can't even tell the time or make out simple shapes in the dark such is the degree of dissociation.

you are not alone. it is horrible.

I really recommend Pete Walkers's Cptsd: from surviving to thriving it really explains all these things very well and also how to manage them

 

[tontoe]

Thank you everyone.

Lots of recognition for me here...

does anyone have a dream of a place and then you go there and become dissociated?

I often dream of being back in a place I lived over 20 years ago, and also of my childhood home - both without any specific nasty memories but often with a feeling of things being somehow not at all right. But I nearly always wake up in dissociation.

I get waking dreams (dreams that continue after I wake)

Yes - me too sometimes; for me, it's usually the feeling or "taste" of the dream that persists, not the content.

Like your brain is storing dream memories as real ones or vice versa.

when i'm very dissociated, it's sometimes really difficult to separate real memories from the states/feelings associated with dream memories. These states/feelings can pervade/pollute everything - even good memories.

I have a nightmare which triggers my flashback emotional state (it represents this state, so your fight that you nightmared about may do the same for you) and then I wake completely dissociated, although terrified too.

Yes - oftentimes the dream doesn't seem like a nightmare until I wake, and then there are a few seconds of feeling okay until the altered state of dissociation kicks in.

As a CPTSD survivor, I find this time of year particularly difficult. I'm going to go back to the Pete Walker book, I think...