They're Back :(

But I hope that they're not back to stay.  What am I talking about, you ask?  My nightmares.  I have talked about them before, a few times.  Well, the nightmares had pretty much gone away after meeting G. I'm not being mushy or anything; it's just a fact.  I have always been able to remember my dreams extremely vividly, which sucks because it means that my brain remembers how it thinks it would feel to die in numerous ways, being decapitated, burned to death, drowned, shot and raped.  None of these things are ones that I would like to remember, yet I do.  Anyway, as of a week or two ago, I stopped being able to remember my dreams at all.  Which was really weird for me, but I took it as a good sign.  When my nightmares were at there worst, meaning up to 8 dreams of seeing everyone I love be murdered in different ways on a nightly basis, and having it either be my fault or just not able to stop it from happening, and either knowing I'm next and waking up before I get killed or knowing I'm next and then getting killed, occasionally wandering around in my dream for a while before realizing I'm dead, waking up screaming and/or crying and not getting enough sleep at all because I'm not going to let myself sleep until I pass out from exhaustion, that is when I sought help from a therapist.  They did nothing for me, but they did tell me that it isn't normal to be able to remember your dreams as vividly as I always have, and that it means I never reach the deepest level of sleep.  So anyway, when I stopped being able to remember my dreams, I just figured that it was because I was finally reaching the deepest level of sleep.  Or the other possibility is that my nightmares had returned and my brain was trying to repress the horror, which it never did before despite the fragile mental state the nightmares put me in.  The latter option seemed unlikely, so I decided that it was the former.  I'm still not sure which it was but I guess that it doesn't really matter.  Anyway, when G woke me up this morning to say goodbye before leaving to the airport for Washington D.C.  (He's going for five days for a conference for his work as a therapist with the Center for Human Services.), I was extremely grateful to be awakened, because I was having a nightmare.

I guess that I should explain to you the way that I dream, since there are many different ways.  I usually dream in the first-person, meaning that it's just like real-life where I am experiencing the things going on directly and that I am making my own decisions. Sometimes it is more like I am being filmed but still feeling what "I", or my body, is experiencing and still making my own decisions, but not often.  I always dream in realistic color, meaning nothing is super vivid or dully colored and it is not in black and white either.  I can hear people's voices, and their voices are realistic.  I can speak (except for sometimes if I try to scream but I can't) and my voice is also realistic.  Sometimes there is music, but it is not like background music with no obvious source.  It is from someone singing or me listening to music or rarely a television being on.  I almost always have a cell phone, but can never dial 911.

DON'T READ THE NEXT PART IF YOU DON'T HAVE A STRONG STOMACH.  I'M SERIOUS. I'M ACTUALLY FIGHTING BACK NAUSEA JUST RECALLING IT.  IF YOU HAVE A QUEASY STOMACH, JUST SKIP AHEAD TO THE NEXT PART IN ALL CAPS.

So now that you have that bit of background, here is my nightmare from last night.  Usually my nightmares involve a logical fear for my life.  But this one was just creepy and scary.  Nobody tried to murder me but I was tortured.  My dreams do not have narration, which might be helpful sometimes for my awake self to understand what happened, but the me in the dream usually feels like the situation is normal and understands what is going on, even if I don't understand everything after waking up.  In this dream, I was in some sort of an orphanage.  I was the age that I am now, 20, and the other kids there ranged in age from about 14 to 20.  I'm not sure if it was an orphanage, but no parents were in the dream, and I am not sure if the dream me's parents had died or if "I" had just never had parents.  But as it was, we were all in this large, old, dirty building, and that was normal for us.  The only "adult", not age-wise since most of us were over 18 but more like the person who was in charge, who we saw was this woman who was probably in her 40's.  We all feared her, because she could do things.  Like controlling people's minds and making them do what she wanted them to, where they knew what they were doing and even if they didn't want to do it, they had no ability not to do it.  There was one boy who was probably around my age and he was the only person I actually knew there.  We were friends, but neither one of us had a name.  Anyway, the lead-up to this part was fuzzy, but the lady mind-controlled this boy.  Somehow I could read his thoughts too, which was weird.  She made him cut off my fingers and my toes one by one.  It was excruciatingly painful, especially since it was less of cutting them off and more like breaking them off, with large pliers.  And in the boy's thoughts, he was crying while he didn't it, but he had to do it because of her power.  And then she made me eat them (by mind controlling me), which was the most horrible thing ever.  Shortly after that happened, we all escaped while she was asleep, which I have no idea why we didn't do that earlier.  There were probably about a hundred of us.  And none of us had shoes or coats.  We all had ragged tee shirts and pants, not even socks.  And it was cold and it was rainy but we had to escape and for some reason we hadn't been able to until that night.  I'm not sure how we escaped either, because the dream did that thing where it just skips a part and all of a sudden, you're somewhere else, but you aren't wondering how you got there because somehow in your dream you think it makes sense (Does that happen to other people or just me?).  Anyway, we were all running away and it was cold and wet and hard not to slip and fall (especially for me since I no longer had toes)  And we were running for what must have been hours.  And then all of a sudden we just realized that it was useless.  She would send her army and they would find us, because they would smell us.  Somehow the dream me knew that she had an army of scary men with an incredibly heightened sense of smell, even though I hadn't seen them in the actual dream.  And so we just stopped.  And we gave up.  And we waited for them to find us and bring us back and torture us.  And that is when G woke me up.

THIS IS WHERE IT'S SAFE TO READ AGAIN, FOR YOU QUEASY STOMACHED PEOPLE.

And after I woke up, I couldn't help but be mad at my dream self and at all of the other dream people for just giving up like that.  Really? You worked so hard to get away from that horrible place, run miles in the rain and the cold WITH NO TOES.  You are sure to get sick, probably pneumonia, and probably also terribly infected feet and hands, you go through all of that and then just throw it all away?!  What is wrong with you people?!  And then I realized that I wasn't going to accomplish anything by getting mad at my dream self, so I told G goodbye and haven't gone back to bed since.  It was really early in the morning and I'll take a nap later, but I had to get the dream out of my head first.  Then I'll watch something pleasant and funny, and then when I do take a nap later, hopefully the bad dream will be nothing more than a bad memory and a nauseating blog post.

And, because any picture I could put on here would either be deeply disturbing or completely unrelated, here is a song instead.  It's sort of relevant, even though I don't have night terrors.  And it should give you a tiny idea of the kind of music I like, although I also enjoy some folk music, most classic rock, some hip hop, and even the occasional pop song.

Crazy Dreams

I finished writing my paper. I feel pretty good about it, even though I am not good at academic writing, but my TA who will be grading it is super awesome. I even managed to include something about how you can't drink a gallon of milk in an hour without throwing up.  My three day weekend starts tomorrow. I'm looking forward to it as always, even though I have my doctor appointment tomorrow.

And now I will discuss the strangeness of my dreams.  The first dream I can remember having was when I was five. I remember it because it was a recurring nightmare about a giant bowl of red Jello trying to eat me. I have nothing against Jello. I'm not afraid of it or anything. The red flavor is not my favorite but I don't feel like it's going to attack me for feeling that way. I almost always remember my dreams extremely vividly.  I dream in color, there is not music very often and if there is, it's not like background music or anything, it's from someone actually playing an instrument.  I usually dream like I am experiencing the things that are happening, although every once in a while, it is like I am watching myself do things from above. 

I have a lot of nightmares.  The first time I started having nightmares every single night was when I was 11 or 12. I was in the 6th grade, and I would sleepwalk.  I would have entire conversations with my mom while asleep, but with my eyes open.  She would always ask me if I was awake and I would reply that I was, but then if she said something about it in the morning, I would have no idea what she was talking about.  These nightmares always consisted of someone chasing me and trying to kill me in some way. It was never the same person or anyone I knew just someone trying to kill me.  Back then, I always woke up before I died. 

After a while of those dreams, I learned how to lucid dream.  It wasn't on purpose or anything.  I just started to be able to figure out when I was dreaming and then I could control it however I wanted.  When this first started, I would just go around telling everyone in my dream that they weren't real because I was dreaming. Then they would get mad at me and would turn them into dancing rabbits or something.  I began to progress to being able to do anything I wanted in my dreams. There was a lot of flying and eating ice cream, along with being really awesome at stuff like skateboarding, playing guitar, and walking on my hands.  It was great while it lasted.  My ability to lucid dream began to diminish and the nightmares came back.  The only thing that I could still do if I realized that I was dreaming was to try my hardest to open my eyes in the dream and then I would open my eyes in real life and wake up.  This ability started to become more difficult to use when I would open my eyes in the dream, think I was awake and lying in bed when whoever the murderer happened to be would appear in my room.  Then I would realize that I was still dreaming and try again and again until I was actually awake.  This was exhausting and I never got up in the morning fully rested. 

For a while, my mom thought that I had narcolepsy because I would be sitting there talking and fall asleep mid-sentence or be listening to metal one minute and be asleep the next.  This lasted for about a year.  I never told her what was actually happening because I didn't want to admit to anyone that it was sometimes hard for me to distinguish between dreams and reality.  I would definitely sound crazy.  For whatever reason, those dreams ceased as well and I started to have really bizarre dreams that were incredibly complex and made no sense whatsoever.  I was fine with those, but then my nightmares came back, and they were worse.  Before I always woke up before I died in my dreams, but now I didn't.  You may have heard that if you die in a dream, you die in real life.  Well, luckily that hasn't happened to me. I have died in my dreams more times than I can count but never died in real life.  The first time I died, I was decapitated at the edge of a cliff by a man with a battle axe.  I woke up immediately and I had to feel my neck and head to make sure that they were actually still connected, because it felt so real. 

That began the cycle of being murdered in my sleep every single night.  If my dreams are at all realistic, I know how it feels to die a lot of different ways.  I have been shot multiple times, burned alive, drowned, ripped in half.  One dream was particularly horrible because I was being attacked by the usual murderous stranger and he ended up shooting me once.  Then cops arrived and I was relieved, but then they raped me and then shot me until I was dead. 

I had some counseling to try to stop my nightmares, because it may seem impossible but they started getting even worse.  The counselor told me that when things happen in dreams, your body reacts just as it would if it happened in real life.  All the adrenaline was not healthy for me.  Unfortunately she couldn't find any correlation between my dreams and something that could be causing them in real life.  I found out about this dream replacement technique that worked for me for a while.  You start with something that happens in your nightmare and then rewrite it as a good dream.  You imagine it in your head for ten minutes a day as vividly as possible and then when you go to sleep, your nightmare should be replaced by the good dream you wrote.  I never actually had the dream that I wrote, but I did start having good dreams, dreams of flying and absolute freedom. 

But like I said, it only worked for me for a while.  The nightmares have come back now.  The severity of the nightmares has increased once again as well.  I had gotten used to being murdered every night, but now I have to watch as my family and friends get brutally murdered every night while knowing that there is nothing I can do to stop it.  After they get murdered, I get murdered.  I used to have up to eight of these dreams a night and would often wake up screaming and crying, and was physically ill a few times.  They have decreased now and I haven't screamed in my sleep for a while now, but I still do have nightmares.  The only thing that sometimes helps is watching scary movies.  I know that that seems completely counter-intuitive but I never watched scary movies before. One night, I was visiting my brother and we watched a scary movie.  I don't remember which one, but that night was the first night in a long time that I didn't have a nightmare.  So I watch scary movies pretty often now.  They don't always prevent my nightmares, but they do help sometimes.

Now I have to go to class. Bye.