I cant sleep either but from back pain not night terrors. I have been there though many many times and sending hugs and support your way and i hope you get some sleep! I cant sleep even with my sleeping med either and its after 3 am.

Mine replay in my sleep and then I scream awake and that's it for me for the night. (BTW, I can wake the neighbors with the scream. Yeah. That's fun to explain in the morning...)

So I know how it is to just have Bad Reruns in your head.... Peaceful rest to you soon!

I hear you. I wrote on another thread here that I got zero sleep this past weekend between Friday overnight into Saturday morning. Insomnia's my biggest PTSD symptom still after all these years. I have an appointment with my psychiatrist this afternoon to renew my Prazosin prescription, that should help.

As a person who at one point a few years ago operated on too little sleep and too much caffeine, I'm sending out thoughts of support and prayers for your peace and rest.

Huge hug for everyone that's suffering from this... I've only had night terrors as a drug side effect and they're bloody awful

However all I had to do was to stop the drug..... I am so sorry that you're going through this..... xo

I have the same problem, Thor. My Tdoc tells me to keep writing out the dreams and eventually they will stop haunting me, but they still come, night after night. I’ve gotten a lot of sleep lately because I am so drugged up between psych meds, nerve pain meds and surgery meds, But my norm is 4 hours a night. 6 hours on those few nights I don’t have nightmares. I can’t take prozasin or seroquel because my blood pressure is too low, so I just have to suffer through them along with the flashbacks. Hang in there Thor!

Secouya- thanks. Never thought about writing out the nightmares. Will be a harrowing experience

This could be a TW for some. While I tried not to go into great detail those affected by auto accidents or child deaths could be triggered.

There are several reasons for writing out nightmares. One is to compare the nightmare to the actual events, normally their are some differences.. The difference may be so small but can tell ourselves we are dreaming. A example is in one of my major car accidents which seems so real, in the dream I feel the impact, the launching of the trucks back end, the fear of flipping ...what I don’t see is that the seatbelt broke or the transport between the accident site to the garage where the vehicle was towed. There is a time lapse and subtle differences between the dream and reality, so I can train my mind that it’s not real and I am safe, if that makes sense

The other reason is that all dreams per my Tdoc are related to some life experience and possibly fear that was felt at the time of the event. I have this one dream that is so disturbing, yet it makes no sense. I have had it since childhood, but yet in the dream, I am seeing through the eyes of an adult women, but I can’t see her face. Because the dream brings so much fear I wanted to try to figure it out. At first I thought it might be related to my sister who fell two stories at the age of 4 and almost died, but then I realized some things weren’t adding up. In analyzing each aspect of the dream with my Tdoc, when I was about 4 years old, there was a tragic event where a very close cousin died at the age of 8. He apparently spent a lot of time with me. As a child I had a lot of his books and toys and still have this silver llama he gave me, but I don’t remember him other than seeing pictures of him. My Tdoc thinks it could be related based on the details of the dream and objects and locations.I was so young, but my TDoc says that impressions can be left at early ages. By writing out the dream I can analyze each little detail that I see in the dream and try to piece together what it means. I still don’t understand the fear caused by the dream as it relates to my experience, I am still trying to figure that part out. I may never know or other details could surface.

One night a week or so ago Mom woke me up screaming and said we had to leave the house because of fire. I finally got her settled down because there was no fire. I wish I had known about this support group before. She says she sleeps very little at night but I know she has these horrible dreams. They keep me awake too.

I'm the type for whom Dr. Viktor Frankl's "logotherapy" works. He's the psychiatrist who got sent to a concentration camp by Hitler and watched the Nazis kill his family.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl


I survived the fall of a democracy abroad where I lived in the 1970s in which a dictatorship took over and set up concentration camps, too. Fortunately, I didn't get sent to one because every single time of the 3 times the dictatorship arrested me it was proof of my US citizenship that got me released. But the last time I didn't get released before I'd already been tortured and I'd been through 2 execution attempts I miraculously survived.

That's why Dr. Frankl's book means so much to me and it's why I wrote and published my own. That helped me so much that I kept going with the writing as "logotherapy" forever, which is why I'm here at DS PTSD. My logotherapy begins offline every morning in my own offline journal, though, where I try to write down my night's dream or nightmare right away as soon as I wake up. I find it helps me to process complicated emotions if I type them through my fingers. Don't ask me how it works, for me it just does.

I can't live comfortably with anybody else, though, because of my nightmares at night and my PTSD startle response during the day time. It's not just hard on me, it scares partners or roommates who try to be around me. It's just easier for me not to have to explain why I wake up 3 times every night or why I jump out of my skin if somebody walks up behind me in the house during the day.