I need help - More & more nightmares, but nothing is triggering them, I thought I was getting better.

[Ekko]

I have been having more and more nightmares about my trauma but I'm not doing anything or have anything triggering it, I just want to sleep peacefully but I'm scared to sleep, I thought it was getting better for me.

 

[arfie]

hello ekko. welcome to the forum. sorry for what brings you here, but glad you are here.

getting better does not equal cured. the cycles go on. in my own recovery, the getting better part is in learning how to manage those cycles. building on the techniques which led to the more peaceful period leads to longer peaceful stretches and shorter, less dramatic psychotic stretches.

posts such as this one help considerable. they help me stabilize and sort the yaddahs of the blahs. hope it helps you, too. welcome aboard.

 

[Muttly]

One of the things that can help for me in a bad nightmare cycle is when I wake up, I work at changing the narrative of the dreams.

So, for example, I just had a nightmare about drowning. For this dream, I can kind of make it like a movie. I create a montage of me learning to swim and all the things I have done since I learned to swim. I even added Rocky music to it. And I ended with remembering that the reason I had the nightmare is because I spent the day at the pool yesterday. I was with good friends and my husband and I am a capable adult who has wonderful, safe people in my life.

 

[Friday]

Scared to sleep is a rough place to be in, because it doesn’t matter how AMAZING your sleep or dreams could have been, you don’t get them. One bad nightmare creating how many days/weeks of fear & avoiding sleep??? Then adding sleep dep + fear together? Pretty much guarantees what sleep you DO get is going to be riddled nightmares. And so the cycle continues. Bad sleep. No sleep. Bad sleep. No sleep. Fear. Fear. Fear. Fear. Fear. It all spirals.

One of the best tricks I ever learned was to nix the fear.

It doesn’t get rid of the nightmares, but the nightmares stop f*cking up my sleep & my life.