Am I Alone in my Torment?

Where do I begin. I’ve had persistent nightmares/night terrors ever since I was a kid. My parents would tell me that I would awake screaming, they would come into the room and comfort me back to sleep, which sometimes took a half hour to an hour, then I would have no memory of it in the morning. And where there were times I would have no memory of night terrors, then there were the actual nightmares which I could remember. Sometimes they revolved around the same reoccurring themes. These themes have ranged widely, but do repeat. The ones I can remember are being in a place in my dream where there is a perception that something is coming for me and I am struggling to find a place to hide before they come. Another being in a house in the woods at night which is circular and has windows going all the way around it. I cannot see outside the windows into the dark, but feel like something is out there looking in, waiting to get me. I go to the window and peer out in dread and begin to scream because I feel it there, but yet whatever it is never reveals itself to me. And even another dream is almost like an military invasion which I am trying to find weapons to fight back or escape from.

Throughout the years as I grew older, I still had nightmares and night terrors, though it seemed not as often. However, in my teen years a new reoccurring dream started. One that would have me awake so distraught in the middle of the night, that it seriously felt like I was losing my mind. All I can remember about these dreams was that they were like being in a small confined dark area with a small window which I could peer through into which there was nothing but darkness. It wasn’t so much the backdrop of the dream that made it nightmarish, but the feeling and emotion while in this dream. I can’t describe it as anything but complete and utter black hopelessness and despair. Almost like having a revelation revealed to me that shattered the world I knew around me. I know, sounds kooky, but don’t know how to explain it any other way. There was one time I had one of these nightmares, and awoke feeling so distraught and confused, that I went and awoke my parents and asked them to help me. When they said with what, all I could say was I don’t know but just help me somehow. Then it would take an hour or two to calm down to the point I could return to sleep.

So let’s now fast forward to my young adult years, where I rented a house with a roommate where I again started having some nightmares again, but more than anything was experiencing sleep paralysis. It would occur at least 3-4 times a week where I would awake, and could open my eyes barely, but could not move otherwise. Some of these times I thought my roommate or other friends were standing in the doorway of my room trying to get my attention, and no matter how hard inside I wanted to answer them or say something, the sleep paralysis would have me frozen solid. Oddly enough these diminished when I moved out of that home.

Let’s flash forward again a few years to an apartment I moved into by myself. I started having very intense and vivid nightmares once again, along with constant sleep paralysis. What was weird this time was every night I slept in the bedroom, I would have these disturbances. They got so bad, I began moving to the hide-a-bed on the couch to sleep instead. When I slept on the couch in the living room, no nightmares at all. But as soon as I tried to sleep in the bedroom again, within minutes of falling asleep I would start having these vivid nightmares. Just to demonstrate how extreme this situation was, here are just a couple of the things that happened. The sleep paralysis here was different, in that it usually was accompanied by a dark shadowy being in the room with me everytime I experienced it. One night I awoke in paralysis, and when I attempted to move or struggle to wake myself up out of it, I felt what seemed like someone behind me with their arms wrapped tight around my torso, pinning my arms to the side. I could actually feel it squeezing me tighter. That was one of the most frightening paralysis or nightmares ever. Another occurrence there was a dream where I was sitting at my parents home, when suddenly a rumble could be heard, the sunlight turned to darkness, and then what seemed like something hitting the home and crushing the roof down on top of me. In that instant I jumped awake screaming to the feeling like I had been punched in the nose. I mean if you’ve ever been hit in the nose before and you get a weird sensation/smell in your noise like pennies or metal shavings, that is what I woke up with. I could not spend another night in the bedroom after this, and when my lease was up, I moved out, and the disturbances stopped.

Okay, now it’s been about 10 years since I lived in that apartment. I’m married now for about 5 years. In the last two years, or since we have been in our latest home, I am again having nightmares and night terrors. So much so that it is nearly every night that I have them and my wife has to shake me or poke me awake so I will stop crying out in my sleep. Sometimes they happen as soon as I fall asleep, and I do remember some of them, which typically you don’t remember night terrors. Almost all them involve me feeling trapped and crying out for help trying to wake myself up. Then even when I think I did have a nightmare free night, my wife tells me no, that I was crying out again, just that she didn’t wake me up this time. It is to the point that I really want to find out what the problem is. Part of me seriously is thinking that possibly something has happened to me in my childhood that is causing some sort of PTSD. All I know is I am sick and tired of it. I feel like I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in a year. I feel stressed out all the time, and even having some bit of depression. It doesn’t help that I am also struggling with a back injury currently which just compounds my sleep troubles and increases my stress even more.

We even joke that maybe I was abducted by aliens or something. Yep, kooky, but there are other things in my life which fall into the typical alien abduction stories. I was born with a genetic disorder which caused me to have no seeds for adult teeth. So when everyone else was losing baby teeth for adult teeth, I only had a total of 9 adult teeth come in, the rest were missing. Upon going to dentists and being x-rayed and evaluated for how they would eventually end up giving me dental implants, we were told by one oral surgeon that I had clearly had invasive surgery on my sinus passages before, and they wanted to know who did it and for what purpose. We had to tell him that I had never had surgery before on anything, not even my sinuses. He continued to disagree and said that he could see clearly in the x-ray where the scar tissue and original incision had been made. Then there was the time as a kid, an electronic toy I had started operating on its own in the middle of the night. My parents even heard it and came into my bedroom. Upon looking at the toy, it had no batteries in it, and was switched in the off position. Pretty weird huh?

So that’s my story. Just thought I would put it out there since I’m not sure where to turn anymore. I’ve told my doctor about my sleep issues, which they have said they could refer to their sleep lab. But their sleep lab only really addresses determining if I have sleep apnea, which I am pretty sure I don’t. They don’t specialize in nightmares. I just want them to end, I feel like I am slowly losing my mind at the frequency the are happening now.

I wasn't quite clear as I read, Pollux. Is this happening in some homes and not others? It seems like a very odd thing to be environmental. But any clues for you as to what's going on would help.

Do you have to be unsuccessfully screened by the sleep lab in order to access other services? Perhaps treating it as PTSD [cause unknown] and using therapy and related coping & calming skills might help? I think it's worth tracking down a specialist, though. This does seem beyond the "norm." Or, at least, beyond what you should accept as a fact of life.

It does seem to be location specific. This is going to sound weird and crazy, but I actually thought the apartment I lived in where I experienced the worst of my sleep disturbances was haunted to the point that I detailed my story to a local paranormal investigator. They concluded that my issue was possibly related to a poltergeist haunting. That something had specifically targeted me. That sort of freaked me out slightly, but was glad that once I moved away from there the problems stopped. Now it seems the place where I live now, I have had off and on sleep disturbances. I will go maybe a week feeling like I got a good night's sleep with no disturbances. Even though my wife says I was still having them in my sleep, I couldn't remember them so to me, that was just fine as long as I felt like I slept well and was rested. However, the rest of the time, I simply feel like I am being tormented as I am just falling asleep or right after I fall asleep which then immediately wakes me up. Again, I cannot even begin to explain the feeling. It is sort of like as I fall asleep, I immediately slip into a dream where I feel like I am drugged or under anesthesia, and struggling to stay awake. When I slip into this drug induced sleep in the dream, I feel the presence of something in the room with me, and one time last week during one of these nightmares, heard voices whispering my name. When these dreams happen I struggle to wake myself up, and when I do wake up eventually I do feel somewhat like I am drugged or something, and that it is near impossible to fully awake myself and snap out of it for a few minutes. Usually once I have rattled myself awake completely for fear of falling back asleep and into the dream, then I stay awake for another hour or so before I feel okay enough to try and go back to sleep. Then sometimes it happens again while falling back to sleep, others I just simply fall into a regular sleep and stay that way for the rest of the night.

I am waiting for another appointment with my therapist to hopefully get some help. I think I do eventually need to go to the sleep disorder center.