Flashback or Nightmare???

****TRIGGER WARNING****

I have nightmares all the time. I have had them my entire life.

Lately, I have been having nightmares that feel different. Its like lucid dreams because I know I'm dreaming but I cannot get out. I can't wake up. I feel trapped in the dream. I have them at night and during the day.

Sometimes they are like trauma I went through and I know which Little is having the nightmare. Other times I'm not sure who may be dreaming or "showing me something".

These nightmares feel very different than my usual nightmares because I feel myself get "little" and I cannot get out of it. Its terrifying.

Does anyone else experience this?

Are these nightmares or flashbacks or a mixture of both???

I´ve had re-experiences in nightmares. It was terrifying, but believe it was just my psyche dealing with the delayed shock of trauma... or something like that.

I have a lot of lucid dreams, night and day also. They often happen when I'm dozing and sometimes I get the feeling of being a spectator in my own dream. Screaming or yelling out in the dream will often bring me out of it. You could give that a try.

I view some nightmares as being flashbacks to an actual trauma that then distorts the truth according to what is going on in the psych at the time. The memory will then hold several different versions of the trauma and when finally, amnesiac barriers become dissolved and it becomes time to properly process the trauma, fragments from both the actual trauma and nightmares may become merged to give an inaccurate picture.

When I experienced memory flooding last year, for some incidents, there were related memories of waking up and thanking god that it was "only a dream". Yet, there was also evidence that they did really occur.

OhNoNotAgain wrote:
I have a lot of lucid dreams, night and day also. They often happen when I'm dozing and sometimes I get the feeling of being a spectator in my own dream. Screaming or yelling out in the dream will often bring me out of it. You could give that a try.

I do hear myself calling out, crying or whimpering sometimes and it wakes me up, but I cannot seem to do it on purpose.

OhNoNotAgain wrote:I view some nightmares as being flashbacks to an actual trauma that then distorts the truth according to what is going on in the psych at the time. The memory will then hold several different versions of the trauma and when finally, amnesiac barriers become dissolved and it becomes time to properly process the trauma, fragments from both the actual trauma and nightmares may become merged to give an inaccurate picture

This makes much sense.