Does Anyone Have Nightmares That Are Not About Trauma?

[Justmehere]

The beginning of April is historically the worst time of yet for me.

This year, my daytime anxiety is high but manageable. At night... yikes! It's one nightmare after another. Some are not about any trauma I have been through, but simply strange and graphic.

This is really new and different for me. I usually have nightmares about the trauma or just no nightmares at all. Now it's multiple nightmares about weird random things every night.

Does this happen to anyone else? Is this my anxiety simply leaking into my dreams?

 

[desiderata310]

Yup! Me! Right here.
It must be a moon phase or something but my non-trauma nightmares have been especially disturbing and scary

 

[Marie76]

The beginning of April is historically the worst time of yet for me.

This year, my daytime anxiety...

All the time, quite often I had nightmares, only dreams I could remember. Typically I will wake my husband up screaming, and he will shake me awake. I have asked him to do this because I've never been able to stop these nightmares on my own.

I would dream vividly about always being chased in various scenarios with the intent of being killed, sometimes natural disaster scenarios like huge tornadoes, world war and destruction. Much like @desiderata310 stated my nightmares also led on part to my diagnosis. I've had nightmares most of my life and never would have put the pieces together. I can say since I've stopped having sex with my husband, most of my nightmares have stopped. I was raped when I was 14, yet not in a million years would have made this correlation on my own since my nightmares selling have nothing to do rape. I'm guessing once you remove/decrease exposure to the stressor, maybe yours will decrease?

 

[Deleted member 41588]

I came on this section because I woke up crying (balling) from a dream cause it made me realize how lonely I actually am in this world. It wasn't really a nightmare but it was pretty intense. I have allot more mental health problems than trauma so I think everything probably caused this dream with such strong feels. You can tell it really effected me cause I hadn't cried in months even though I wanted to cause I was so numb. It felt good to finally cry but I hope these dreams don't become a regular thing. I already have plenty on symptoms on my list.

 

[Friday]

For sure.

Some are a blend of total fiction & reality (too much nightmare fuel), others are pure fiction. LOL Autocorrect win "f*cktion".

 

[Suzetig]

Yep, me. My stress really leaks into my dreams. A family member is very ill at the moment and my dreams have been utterly mental - not related to my trauma but very disturbing all the sane.

I think our minds process while we're sleeping and part of that means odd dreams - I've always had crazy, scary, disturbing dreams.

 

[Klo]

About half of my nightmares are blatantly connected to trauma.

And about half of my nightmares are general anxiety manifest in the most bizarre ways.

I mean really, some of my nightmares are so incredibly absurd that when I wake from them, half of me is in an extremely distressed state and half of me is about ready to burst into wtf laughter.

I had a nightmare the other night that I was at my grandparents' house during Summer. They live on a small inland lake that is nowhere near the ocean or anything. In the nightmare, there were cartoonish blue sharks that lived in the lake, and suddenly they came up onto the land and were flopping in the grass. I was so horrified that I started physically freezing and struggled to move through the house, trying to get everyone to safety. We wound up in the garage with the lights off, but I used my x-ray vision (I guess?) to see through the garage walls and saw the sharks flopping around on the lawn. Then we all spontaneously died.

This is probably half the reason I gave up on doing a nightmare journal back in the day. Half of the nightmares were too hard to write down. Half of the nightmare entries amounted to cartoon sharks flopped on the lawn in such a way that we all died of heart attacks.

 

[jaccat]

Yep. Really strange, vivid ones, usually full of metaphors pointing to whatever's going on in my head at the time. I rarely get direct trauma related nightmares.

 

[Lady Moonlight]

I do have nightmares too. Pretty often. When my anxiety level is really high, they become really frequent. But they are not about anything traumatic. I wonder if it's because I spend so much time feeling fear and anxiety during the day that it creeps into the nighttime to try to deal with it. And it seems sometimes that will then cause hypervigilance and insomnia instead.

 

[WolfKing]

I get both.

I find that what lends me to feeling stressed helps dictate what sort of nightmares I'm going to have.

If there's violence or violent tension around me, nightmares tend to be directly related to or involve traumas.

If I'm worked up because of general worry, career stuff, anything existential, then I either have nightmares that spinoff fantastically from traumas or that are just bizarre, trippy, and horrible.

Think the latter are the worst. Fabricator in my head is even crueler than memory. And remembering stuff, I get to see my friends sometimes, which can be nice.

 

[WolfKing]

I do have nightmares too. Pretty often. When my anxiety level is really high, they become really...

I hear you on the hypervigilance. Have you found anything that helps?

 

[Lady Moonlight]

I hear you on the hypervigilance. Have you found anything that helps?

No, I really haven't. Not with that. I've tried OTC sleep aids, taking hot showers, putting on music, etc. etc. I haven't found anything that makes it easier. When it comes, it comes. When it goes, it goes.