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Childhood Childhood anxiety, auditory hallucinations, and recurring nightmares

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ImSad

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Since starting therapy about 6 months ago I’ve been remembering a lot of strange symptoms I had during childhood. I’m not really sure what to make of any of it. I’m wondering if any of these things could possible point toward some repressed trauma. As i’m Setting out to type this i’m realizing that almost all of these problems occurred during night/sleep time.

I was an extremely anxious child. I remember constantly being afraid that someone was going to kidnap or murder me and would often spend time awake at night worrying that someone would break in my window and hurt me.

While laying awake with these fears, I remember on so many occasions I would hear either someone calling my name, or I would hear breathing. I always tried to convince myself that the breathing was just coming from my parents room, but it always sounded to me as if it was coming from under my bed. I would lay there paralyzed in fear, eyes shut, body frozen, just praying that I would fall asleep so I didn’t have to hear those things anymore and so that I would be asleep and not scared if something bad were to happen to me.

Then there are the nightmares. There’s one specifically that I had all throughout my childhood that filled me with the deepest sense of fear I’d ever felt. The content of the dream wasn’t even all that scary. It always started out that I was in a room filled with stuffed animals with my cousin, then the sense of fear would come out of nowhere, things would go dark, and it was as if I was floating through space. All sorts of things would be floating by me, but it always ended with a knife and then a male relative’s face, then everything would go black at once and I’d wake up terrified.

I still have a lot of the same anxiety problems, but haven’t had many auditory hallucinations since childhood and haven’t had the dream since childhood (I think, possibly in my early teen years?).

Anyway...I’m not really sure where I am going with this. Are these just normal childhood anxieties, or could they point to something more serious?
 
Hey @ImSad! I feel like I just said I relate on a post but wow I have experienced those same things. I don’t know if they’re things people have without trauma or not, I just know I’ve had traumatic experiences since I was at least 5 years old. For me the fear someone was going to murder me started when I was 5, or at least that’s the earliest I could remember if. I remember having a panic attack at 5 where I thought we were going to be bombed. What I would do when I was young enough would be to picture a superhero or, weird enough, sonic the hedgehog saving me so I would calm down.

I would hear a woman’s voice calling my name at night all the time and be terrified. Same with the breathing. I also had the same nightmare over and over: my dad driving us all off of an unfinished bridge that we all tried to tell him was unfinished but he didn’t listen bc he had to be right. Waking up panicked and terrified. My dad is a narcissist, so that part makes sense, but other things don’t. I feel like there’s something there that I’m unable to process right now.

Therapy will help a bunch with this! I wish you luck.
 
I had these types of dreams as a small child too. Mine always involved E.T. eating me and I would wake up terrified. I got in trouble alot for singing myself to sleep. I guess I was loud because I was anxious. I used to have hallucinations of my closet door opening at night too and shadow figures walking out if it. Now I think it was just a manifestation of the constant abnormal stress I was experiencing.
If I'm extremely agitated now I wake up in the middle of the night to check my locks and check my closets for whatever reason. Sometimes, I wake up weeping. I still have torture/mutilation dreams. Therapy has really helped with the dreams though. I'm going to try to see how a healthy diet, a little exercise, and reading before a scheduled bedtime helps.
Also, it's completely normal to have auditory hallucinations when you're falling asleep. I have them all the time. It just sounds like a bunch of people's garbled conversations like if I was in a resturaunt and not really paying attention to the people chatting around me. It used to freak me out but now I don't pay much attention to it.
 
Hey @ImSad! I feel like I just said I relate on a post but wow I have experi...
Hello @Strangelongtrip! I'm sorry you had to experience that stuff as a child as I know how scary it always seemed at the time, but it is somewhat of a relief knowing others can relate.
But yeah, I'm not really sure what to make of that recurring dream or any of the other things I described. I'm not sure exactly how young I was when it all started happening, but I know it was younger than 6/7. Now that I'm thinking about it, another weird anxiety thing I remember from as young as age 4 is being afraid that I somehow wasn't real... I remember questioning frequently if I was real or if I just existed inside the dream of someone else. The thing is, I don't remember anything particularly traumatic from that young of an age. I did grow up with a narcissistic father, but I'm not sure the effects of that would have caused all of these things I am talking about (also, the relative I saw in the dream wasn't my father). I guess I am just wondering if there's the possibility of something else being there that I can't quite remember.

Probably a good thing to explore in therapy, if only I didn't feel so strange bringing up all of these weird childhood things! But I am sure I will get there in time.
 
I had these types of dreams as a small child too. Mine always involved E.T. eating me and I would wa...
Hi @frogthroat! I'm sorry you experienced those things as a child. Now that you are mentioning it, I do remember some visual hallucinations at nighttime similar to what you describe here. I don't have as many sleep problems now, aside from having a regularly hard time falling asleep/staying asleep. But I have also been using marijuana for a while now to help with my sleep, so I haven't remembered my dreams in quite some time, although I will frequently wake up feeling as if I just had a nightmare, but very rarely am I able to remember them (which I am thankful for, as they are usually pretty awful when I do remember).
The thing is though, whenever I got these auditory hallucinations, it was never when I was actually falling asleep. It would be night time and I would be in bed, yes, but when I heard voices and breathing it was always when I was wide awake and hypervigilant. I would lie there with my eyes closed and be completely still hoping that I could fall asleep so I could stop hearing these things, but I was always very much awake and alert when experiencing them.
It all just makes me wonder if there is more trauma there than I am aware of, if something happened to me young enough that I wouldn't remember... but there's always the possibility that I'm just looking too much into all of this! Aghh.
Sorry of this got a little ramble-y, and thank you for your response. :)
 
will frequently wake up feeling as if I just had a nightmare
Weed will do this to you for sure maybe not for everyone but I know it at least did it to me and I smoked regularly for about 4 years. It actually felt like it made my anxiety worse after so long and definitely messed up my sleep. I frequently woke up out of a dead sleep in a panic for no reason. I never felt fully awake being high nearly all the time either so I know that messed with my sleep and also my moods.
My T says that my brother and I were both being sexually abused before we could verbalize and so I guess that affects how your neurotransmitters form pathways in your brain. Luckily, you can re-route your Neuro pathways but it's tons of work.
Try not to worry so much about why your nightmares right now. Believe me when a memory wants to come out it will.
 
Weed will do this to you for sure maybe not for everyone but I know it at least did it to me and I s...
Oh yeah, I know that it can definitely make me feel even more anxious and paranoid at times. Luckily I now live in a state where it's legal so it's been easier to find strains that are specifically for sleeping related issues and that are less likely to cause anxiety/paranoia. I try to keep my consumption to only before bed time, because when I use more often than that I experience some of those same things, like never feeling fully awake, or having it really numb down a lot of my feelings, which I am trying to get away from so that I can actually feel and heal things.
Ah, yes. My T was just explaining to me a few sessions ago that I likely underwent some trauma as a baby/toddler before I was verbal and so those neural pathways that were formed then are likely a cause of some of my undesirable behaviors/symptoms now. I guess I really should just trust this whole therapy process and try not to do too much digging into all of this before my system feels fully ready. Thank you for your insights!
 
I’m wondering if any of these things could possible point toward some repressed trauma. As i’m Setting out to type this i’m realizing that almost all of these problems occurred during night/sleep time.

I was an extremely anxious child. I remember constantly being afraid that someone was going to kidnap or murder me and would often spend time awake at night worrying that someone would break in my window and hurt me.
Most likely repressed tramua. I have a similar distress or phobia towards dogs. I'm not sure what caused it, but its definately trauma.

I have a similar story about being an anxious kid. Its a sequence of events, but I'll make this breif. So at age 3, my younger brother was just born. Back then, my father worked during the day and would come home during the evening. And my mother would have certain hours so she could take care of me and my brother. And one day, I was minding my own buisnuess until I asked my mom for some milk. I didn't hear a response. So I'm looking all over the house to find my mother. I didn't find her and after I had checked every room (garage, bathroom, attic, etc) I have a meltdown of fear.

When you are 3, time feels longer than how it actually is. I felt like I was in the house for about a day, when the reality was my mom was only gone for an hour. She was taking my brother out for a walk. I recently had a discussion with my mom about this incident, since I am (the course ends tommorow, I'm so sad) in a child development course. And apparently, my mother didn't know you can't leave your three year old in the house by herself for more than a minute. (I was her first kid) Thats how I knew she was gone for an hour.

I don't remember what happened when my mom returned. I want to say I was ambivantly attached (meaning even if caregiver returns, the child is still distressed) I remember then making a rule in the house saying she had to notify me whenever she left the room. I was that anxious about being left alone.

Two years later, I was watching Home Alone with my dad on the couch. He was the type of person who would turn the TV on and fall asleep twenty minutes later. And I don't know what prompted him to show his 5 year old, a movie I like to call "Saw Junior." But this movie really freaked me out. Like I was afraid people would break in to our house and kidnap me.

I hated being alone after these two events. But they only kept piling on as they only got worse and worse. My parents are also the kind of people who don't understnad what makes people uncomfortable. They will laugh at someone if they said "I don't like x." They are still like this.

I remember it wasn't until age 13 or 14, when the phobia of being alone just stopped. What cuased me to get over this phobia is beyond me, but I'm glad I'm over it.
 
Thank you for your reply, @LadyLucifer!

I am thinking all of these things point to some type of repressed trauma, I just have absolutely no idea what it could be. I am trying to not spend too much time thinking of it because I know that if anything is really there, it will come when it’s ready. But it’s frustrating to know something *could* be there and not know what!

I am sorry you had these experiences when you were little. Things that seem little to adults can have such serious impacts on our little selves. That is also something for me to keep in mind I suppose. I feel like when I look back at these strange feelings/behaviors in my childhood I am always looking for some big traumatic event that I must be forgetting, not considering that it could have been something “simpler” that the adults in my life weren’t aware was traumatic for a young child. Looking back, I think my fear of someone breaking into my room and murdering me came from watching a story on the news when I was probably 6 or 7 about a girl my age being murdered in her home. That doesn’t explain the recurring nightmare or the hallucinations, but it could definitely explain that one large fear!

I am sorry you had to deal with parents who don’t take these things seriously. Mine were the same way, quick to turn it into a joke and laugh. That can be so hard on children growing up, especially when they are experiencing serious fear and anxiety.

I am glad to hear that phobia is no longer with you.
 
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