In my continuing effort to turn this blog into the most depressing place I can make it, today I’d like to talk about nightmares. Specifically the fact that I have them constantly. In fact, it is very rare that I go for more than a few days without waking up from a terrifying nightmare. It really gets old, and it makes me not want to go to sleep.
Most of my nightmares involve death of some sort. Some of the more vivid dreams I’ve had involve large scale death. One time I was in the military and was about to be sent off to a battle where I was assured by my leaders that I would die. Other times there has been some force, natural or supernatural, that was going to destroy the world.
Other times my nightmares are a little more mundane. I’ve had a fair amount of them where I get put in prison. I can’t really remember the details for why I get put in prison, but there definitely have been instances of that. And there have been other cases where something happens that ruins my life.
Needless to say, I’m always very glad to wake up in the morning. But it still shakes you up quite a bit to wake up knowing that your life is ruined or that you are dead. It takes a few seconds to realize that everything is okay. And I hate those few seconds.
Now, despite this, sometimes I do have good dreams. Like last night. I had a dream that was all about eating cake. I was just sitting around in a cake store, eating cake. That is a good dream.
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Like you, I have always been afraid of these nightmares, until the day that a neurologist told me that nightmares are nature’s trick to keep those parts of your brain exercised that you really need in stressful emergency situations (like real disasters).
Two nights ago I killed half the block with a machinegun in my dream. Afterwards that gets even funny (but the waking up isn’t).
So I’m wondering, how bad were the nightmares after greasy chinese food, heat, and watching men prance around in tights? I have really bad nightmares too. I used to have really bad ones as a kid, like I could *feel* them. Then when mom died they went away. Then when “Pepa” died, they came back (he was chasing me around my aunt J’s front yard with a butcher knife? Creepy.). I’ve had the classic dreams of my teeth crumbling and wake up spitting them out. I have tornado dreams which sometimes turn into air attack dreams where I am in my parent’s house, in the basement, hiding under the workbench (which we had to do for real everytime there was a bad thunderstorm). In the past year I have had a lot of nightmares about my mom. I wake Hubby up with weird “screams” as I wake myself up. Not sure what I’m trying to deal with, but I don’t like it. I had to stop watching psychological thrillers and blood and gore movies. I can’t watch them anymore now that I have kids.
I saw this on another blog and thought of you. ;P http://www.despair.com
I have bizarre dreams, sometimes frightening, sometimes just weird, and on a rare occasion, instructional. They say if you realize you are dreaming that you can control the outcome of the dream. However, I have never been able to achieve this, because the moment I become aware that it is a dream, then I wake up.