Bad dreams

Hopefully this question doesn't bother anyone, but is anyone here willing to share what kind of dreams you have that are unsettling and recurrent? Im not trying to get really deep into it. But its been almost 10 years since I graduated high school, and it seems like every year I keep having an increasing amount of dreams about still being in high school and its awful because it's like I'm trapped in the worst part of my life every night like I'm going to hell and I wake up all confused about what I'm supposed to get out of it. It has turned into every single night like torture. Am I the only one with this kind of problem?

yes. i have recurring dreams that i'm in school and have to take a final exam in a class i never even knew i'd been registered for. i think it has to do with a fear of failing, or a sense that i'm failing terribly just in general.

i don't know if yours are anything like that, but they're obviously troubling. i hope they stop for you soon: high school is bad enough the first time around. it's not fair to have to go through it all again

I have bad dreams every night. Never good ones for as long as I can remember. Mine aren't about school. I'm usually being stalked, kidnapped, losing my teeth, driving into water, family dying...those who have and those who have not passed, the end of the world, falling, really effed up graveyards...can't even describe graveyards, people in coffins, people coming out of coffins to get me, and not being able to run from a dire situation. They get so bad Ive been able to realize I'm in the dream and tell myself to open my eyes and I wake up. Not sure how I mastered that but I did. It wasn't easy but it can be done. I wish I could give you tip on how to do it. For me the first time I recognized I was dreaming, I was dreaming about Armageddon. Something just clicked and I remember something in my head saying " Open your eyes". Been able to do it ever since. Doesn't stop me from having them but at least I can get out of them quick now.

I've always been a big horror fan, especially zombie films - so those type of dreams are scary but thrilling for me. The "bad" dreams for me are more like when I dream that I've worked out some of my job/housing type issues - where I'm dreaming of a pretty good situation, then I wake up and realize it wasn't real. Now that's a bad dream.

I have bad dreams almost every night. Mostly it's this guy (I can never see his face but it feels as if we are really close) and me, being in like mortal danger, we are trying to run away, the bad guy gets me, he can't do anything, and I get injured badly (maybe killed but I wake up before that). Sometimes I can feel the pain, which is creepy.

I have nightmares a lot, too. They used to be so bad and frequent that I would not sleep until exhaustion forced me to, and I had periods where I would refuse to sleep at night time because it intensified the nightmares (I felt very vulnerable and paranoid at night).

I have nightmares about a variety of things, some of them really, really weird. I've had ones where I'm kidnapped by people and violently tortured - a distinct one I remember is one where my kidnappers hold me in front of a mirror and with a scalpel begin to cut and then peel off my skin from my body, and force me to stare into the mirror.

I have a lot of them where it's dark and I'm out in the streets, and I have to run and run to get away from some people that I know are trying to catch me and kill me. I run through the streets and see horrible things happening everywhere I look; I see girls being raped, tortured, killed.

I have some where it's like I'm watching myself, as if through a movie. One I remember was watching my then-boyfriend bury my own dead and disfigured body.

Like you, I've also had dreams where I re-experience times of my life. It's as though things take off from a certain point, and nothing that had happened had ever actually happened. For me, this is where I dream that my mother still lives with my dad, sister, and I, and that my parents never actually divorced. My mother is an unstable and violent/abusive person, and my parents' divorce was the best thing to have happened for me, so these dreams are rather horrible.

I also have ones that scare me in a different way - ones where I'm carrying out horrible violent acts against the people I love, my pets, and random strangers...

Then there's the plain old abandonment phobia ones - where my fears of abandonment come true in my dreams, my friends tell me they hate me and then cut me out.

A lot of the time when horrible things happen or are happening in my dreams, I become incapable of moving, or if I can move it's so slow and sluggish, like I'm moving my legs through air that's a million times denser than real air. It creates a horrible feeling of powerlessness.


Sooo, yep, I get bad dreams too! Oddly, Valium helped me a lot (I was either dreamless, or I could never remember them when I woke). I can't have Valium anymore though, unfortunately.

Something that might be of particular interest to you guys is the concept of lucid dreaming, or at the very least dream awareness like Beautiful Disaster mentions. I used to be able to do it when I was a kid, but I guess I've kind of lost the knack. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream

For me, it`s World War 3. I`m in Portsmouth, UK and this would have been one of the first targets to be wiped out in the event of an all-out nuclear conflict between NATO / Warsaw Pact. Thank God the balloon did not go up, but the apocalypse is never far from me.

For the last three nights I have had dreams where I am physically attacked, but I kill all of my assailants (varies from using a saw to have superhero powers of omnipotence and laying waste to whole cities just by the power of though); over the aforementioned three nights I have also woken up with cries of, `You fu**ing c*** (etc)). This is of course, quite troubling for me. As if dealing with my BPD wasn`t enough, I now have to wonder what the joys of sleep will bring me. I think it was `Nightmare on Elm Street` where falling asleep could have fatal consequences (not that bad for me, but still... )

BPD sucks big time.