Other Do i have generalized anxiety or ptsd?

[Hashi]

if you have a dream and wake up right after, ur supposed to write it down right away, correct?

I get where you're coming from, about the possibility of waking up too much. It really does help to write them down straightaway, though. A few thoughts:

I bought a geeky/nerdy pen that has a little light on it. I keep this hooked into a notebook next to my pillow. When I wake up in the night from a dream, I click the pen light on and note down the dream. It's enough light to see to write, but not so much that I feel shocked completely awake.

It still wakes you up a bit, to write down the dream. Two things that help me a lot after this are

I have a relaxation/sleep audio that I often listen to when going to sleep, and I play this afterwards (through earphones, if there's company)

I have a sort of visualisation that I do, although it's very light on the visualisation part. I think of sleep as going down steps into sleep, so after making a note of my dream I think "I need to go back down the steps into sleep now" and I imagine myself walking down the first step to sleep, then the second... it usually doesn't take me very many, and if it does I go to the audio.

Also I find that writing up the dream soon after I wake up means that I don't need to really write very much about it during the night. Just something like "office.... carol singers... giraffes... card game" can be enough to jog my memory. I don't know about other people, but as long as my memory gets jogged within about 12 hours of waking up the dream comes back to me. I write my dream diary loads during lunch breaks at work, and although ideally I would write it the moment I get up, that sometimes happens and it very often doesn't. A lunchtime catch up is fine, even an after-work catch up is good. If it gets to a next day catch up... things start getting lost.

But even a fragment of a dream can help.

I really love how my dreams help me, and I hope yours will help you too. :)

 

[Smile]

Hashi,

Thank you! The details you go into r so helpful :)

 

[Don'tgetit]

Smile,

Your story sounds almost exactly like mine - down to the details of not going to school with constant stomachaches , bulimia, no memories, but weird dreams, the whole thing.

I am just starting out looking into my "stuff", whatever it is, and am curiouswhat's happened for you since your last post above?

 

[shimmerz]

I am hoping that my experience may help ease your mind @Smile. I had no knowledge of what had happened to me before the age of two when I was adopted. I experienced nightmares after a kindling (re-traumatizing) event that brought back all of my symptoms full bore. T-doc and I decided not to go to Children's Aid and I was diagnosed with Complex PTSD chronic from childhood trauma without knowledge of what had happened as I was showing heavy signs of dissociation and my body was displaying trauma signs of preverbal trauma. That is how he judged the age at which the original trauma happened.

I went through about 4 years of not knowing my past but had flashbacks and nightmares that told me the story as I learned how to interpret them. It was eerily dead on the picture I had put together when I finally went to Children's Aid and had a history of what had happened. I had been lied to all along by my adoptive parents - to save me from the horror of knowing I suppose. They died 30 years ago so the secret was in the grave and there was nobody to confirm my flashbacks etc until this meeting with Children's Aid.

As far as being a monster goes. I have to say, I am a good person with a kind heart. I haven't felt like a monster EVER in my life. The first thing that the Children's Aid worker told me was that I was described as a 'monster' child. I almost fainted in my chair as she started to describe my behaviour at the time. Of course nobody knew why I was behaving like that. To make a long story short, I had had to fight for my life and I was acting out. In order to protect yourself from monsters we must (in order to survive) protect ourselves in a way that monsters understand. We act that way because if we don't defend ourselves we feel we will die (or worse).

So perhaps what you are feeling is how it felt to defend yourself during that time. It does not define you, but was a piece of you (and would bring out in anyone) given your situation. Because you are now vocalizing your body is shaking and shivering to discharge that energy from that time (Peter Levine). It starts with the visualizations of the dreams and then perhaps you can hear things in your dreams or words start to trigger responses. But as the process continues, and you let the feelings go without fearing them - let your body shake and tremble, try to breathe through it and accept without calling yourself names it will release.

I learned through my 4 year tenure while I was waiting to be ready for the Children's Aid report, that everything that came to me was in fact a feeling I had a right to feel. My history proved it. I now accept my body's way of telling me something is wrong without question. That has made this journey much easier than it was when I was fighting it.

Love and Light,
Shimmerz