Trauma subtly showing up in dreams.

[Bigglesworth]

Does this happen to anyone else? It had stopped for awhile, but with my late fiance's birthday and the anniversary of his death coming up I've noticed my sleeping has become rather disordered again, but lately my dreams have just been plain weird, with bits and pieces of trauma stitched in, sometimes it's barley noticeable and I just have this general sense of unease when I get up.

 

[Friday]

I have 3 classes of nightmares...

Total fiction
Too much nightmare fuel. (Blend of fiction & reality)
Total reality

That blend of fiction & reality can be incrediably hard to shake.

 

[Kubash16]

All.the.time. And it’s miserable.

 

[Missycat]

@Bigglesworth , i know exactly how you feel. I will go a while now without nightmares but then i will have odd dreams - not a nightmare but weird and some little parts of the trauma. Often i cant immediately remember what i dreamt about but just felt uneasy and then it comes back to me later in the day. I wonder whether its the subconscious slipping in?

 

[Bigglesworth]

I'm often semi lucid in my dreams so I'm noticing things as they happen and then just wake up feeling really off.
I haven't felt all that "normal" for a couple weeks now. :/

 

[Ronin]

For sure.

It's where it's dead on accurate, although symbolic, where it's pissing me off & scary.

 

[Pietro]

I was considering starting a thread about this topic to corroborate whether others were doing a lot of processing via dreams, and then I saw this thread. :)

When I first started trauma therapy, I was having the micro-flashbacks typical of CPTSD during the day. Gradually, though, after 2-3 years, most of the processing is done while I sleep, via my dreams. They often recur, sometimes after weeks or months, sometimes more frequently. Certain themes seem to be ever-present -- my childhood home, for example. (Which is always damned creepy.) And there is often a sequence of nights were a similar theme or topic is addressed, usually in different ways.

The dreams often involve real people from my life and real places. If you believe the idea that each person or object in the dream is some representation of yourself, my son, in a younger form, and dogs often represent my inner child.

Recently, my dreams seem to have become a little more explicit about what my past abuse might have been. The processing is infinitesimally slow, but I do recognize points where things take a bit of a "leap".

Most importantly, I still get micro-flashbacks during the day -- but, now, they are to the dreams from the night before. Sometimes I get them earlier, sometimes right before bed the next night (state-dependent memory?). Also, I often have an "emotional hangover" from the dream for a while after waking in the morning.

And like others have said, my dreams often awaken me in the middle of the night. Sometimes I'll find that my heart is racing. They cause a lot of sleep issues.

Interested in whether anyone else has experiences like these while sleeping.

 

[Fadeaway]

If trauma is going to insert itself into a normal d4eam, I swea4it it is always at the end. It's like my mind is saying, plot twist! Gottcha?

 

[HealingInProcess]

I think dreams are often an indicator for me of the beginning of the processing of trauma.

 

[Nessa7]

The majority of my nightmares are somewhat fictional. I occasionally have very short dreams that are just reliving something that happened, but they're very rare. They don't have much of an impact into the day. They feel like watching a movie rather than something that I'm emotionally engaged with.

The ones that bother me the most in the day are the ones that try to mimic the feeling of a panic attack. They include things that seem obviously connected to trauma but not directly. Instead of being just scary, they go for that feeling that the world is ending. These usually start up when I'm going through a rough patch or under a lot of stress.

The most frequent ones seem like the kind of dreams that most people would have about being a kid or in high school again. I have ones that seem completely normal in subject matter but were directed by Dario Argento. Lots of them deal with the theme of something secret and bad being hidden just out of sight, so things will seem calm but with little hints of trauma.

 

[Pietro]

@Nessa7 All of my dreams are fictional, in general, but use elements of my history, such as places I lived. Often, the elements of my history are cloaked in ways that obfuscate what they actually are. I had a dream, last night, that involved a house... after thinking through it, I realized that the house was nearly the same model as my childhood home, but decorated differently. My therapist told me that this is a protection mechanism -- your mind reveals things very slowly and carefully, in order to prevent being overwhelmed by whatever horrible stuff lurks beneath.

I don't feel a lot of outright fear in my dreams, but there is often a lot of anxiety, which carries through into the day. Also, the mood of the dreams is often dark and dire -- you mentioned a feeling that the "world is ending", something like that. And, occasionally, my dreams do cause fear. I know I wake up a lot in the middle of the night, even if not fully. Sleep is a big problem for me.

When the dreams first started, I didn't have much emotion from them other than that dark feeling. Gradually, however, they've become more vivid and more realistic. And, lately, they've started focusing on more concrete topics instead of symbols. I of two minds about this -- yes, I want to learn more about my past, but I'm also scared as hell as what I'm likely to find.

 

[HealingInProcess]

@Nessa7 All of my dreams are fictional, in general, but use elements of my history, such as places I lived. Often, the elements of my history are cloaked in ways that obfuscate what they actually are. I had a dream, last night, that involved a house... after thinking through it, I realized that the house was nearly the same model as my childhood home, but decorated differently. My therapist told me that this is a protection mechanism -- your mind reveals things very slowly and carefully, in order to prevent being overwhelmed by whatever horrible stuff lurks beneath.

I don't feel a lot of outright fear in my dreams, but there is often a lot of anxiety, which carries through into the day. Also, the mood of the dreams is often dark and dire -- you mentioned a feeling that the "world is ending", something like that. And, occasionally, my dreams do cause fear. I know I wake up a lot in the middle of the night, even if not fully. Sleep is a big problem for me.

When the dreams first started, I didn't have much emotion from them other than that dark feeling. Gradually, however, they've become more vivid and more realistic. And, lately, they've started focusing on more concrete topics instead of symbols. I of two minds about this -- yes, I want to learn more about my past, but I'm also scared as hell as what I'm likely to find.

Me too. But I feel at least for me my mind is revealing things to the extent I can take them. Do you have something nurturing around when things get scary? A lot of people have stuffed animala. I have a crucifix next to my bed.