Anxiety Support Group

Okay, so I took a nap this afternoon, and had more bad dreams. What the heck is going on? I'm afraid to go to sleep tonight. I feel so silly, like a little kid, but really the dreams were so bad, I'm afraid of going through it again :(

i get nightmares i put it down to the medication i'm on.

I get horrific nightmares and have done for months now, It seems to me the more I control the anxiety when I am awake the more my nightmares get a hold, maybe its all the junk from the anxiety getting filtered out while were asleep as it has to come out some where as i can't retain it or my anxiety may come to the surface again.Hopefully in time my body will find another release. I hope this helps Hun, just try to shrug the nightmares off as what they are and try not to give them another thought when your awake cause the one thing I have noticed is the more you think off them the more you seem to have. take care Hun.xxx

Sometimes bad dreams stem from the meds we take, are you on anything new?, or it could be down to stressors, anxiety and deppression, it happens to me usually for a few nights in row then they go.
Is anything in particular bothering yo?.
How is your litle niece doing?.
Take care!

I'm not sure if substances were a factor in your nightmares or not however...

I am a true believer that nightmares are all about emotion rather than any particular dream symbology, so to me it doesn't matter if its a shark or a toothbrush chasing you, its how you feel about the situation. Also that I nor anyone else can tell you how you feel (although perhaps guessing or empathizing may help there)... but I don't think I can fix dream issues for other people personally, all I can do is arm them with some truths that may help them help themselves...

I used to be plagued by nightmares when I was a kid, the way I got over them was partly growth, partly the fact that I realized that a dream doesn't affect or hurt my waking life in any form other than my behaviour as a result of experiencing the dream...

The thing with nightmares is, ironically if you could simply ignore them they wouldn't be a problem, but because thats not possible the dream situation brings you into a state of awareness/alertness, due to that you take in more detail/notice/sensory data about the situation itself, which makes you even more scared because you are being faced with a situation that you have now seen/noticed theres even more to be scared of... and you'll be in a position to more readily notice something like this again...

The dream can often perpetuates itself that way... hopefully during the experience a truth that eases the situation arises, something to help you remember that all your doing is dreaming... (nightmares at least are by definition lucid dreams)...

With any luck, like me you may come out of this with the gift of lucid dreams of your own choosing, rather than being stuck in the horror of one you appear to have no control over...

Note: there is another less desirable possibility that I don't really suggest for people who are fragile (mentally) or may be at risk of psychosis ... that is desensitization, forcing yourself to further experience the dream, learn everything you can about it, bathe yourself in the experience which is often the last thing someone having nightmares wishes to do!

I'm sure most people who experience them for reasons I explained earlier either know much already, or think they know all there is to know about their nightmare... but eventually, especially if you amp up the experience by facing it, sooner or later what scares you about them will no longer hold the power to do so, like children playing violent video games, they eventually become desensitized to them, or you'll simply realize the stark truth of it being nothing more than a dream... however this is unlikely to occur on the first "replay" around after learning of this, and secondly, the whole goal is to not be frightened anymore, why try to re-experience that?...

Hope this helps and I wish you all good luck and many future Sweet Dreams!

what meds are you on, i think stress can also give us nightmares the same as it can give us genereal sleep problems. vonny xx

Now that your afraid of it happening again your going to sleep with it on your mind and your now expecting it to happen unbeknown to you . Just disregard wat happened as a bad experience and before you go to sleep think of something really nice. That was then , this is now . That happened to me last week and i was on the verge of panicking and i was very tearful but reminded myself it was just a dream so wat i done is i let myself wake up for about ten mins before drifting off again an you'll find you won t go back into the nightmare. Sweet dreams :) for tonight x

Ive had that happen to me before..I went a whole summer having really bad dreams...I ended up having really bad insomnia the whole time because I was avoiding sleep..I would cry myself to sleep and once I closed my eyes the visions of HORRIBLE things would just pop into my head....I think the nightmares were because of my racing thoughts due to my anxiety finding a way to show itself when I wasn't awake....I dont know...I dont have the horrid dreams as often anymore.

I wish you the best!

i have some nightmares. not bad dreams but nightmares. sometimes when i wake up im so scared to go back to sleep again.