Nightmares/Terrors

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LogicfromLogic

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Original poster
Everyone has had one in their life; be it young, old, or middle.

But who among us here on Iwaku has had such bad nightmares (these are actually two very different things) that they have kept you up?

Let me shed some light into the subject of a night terror vs. a nightmare.

Nightmare

*Scary dreams caused by REM (Rapid Eye Movements)
*When you have a nightmare, you remember it and wake up
*They happen to occur in people that are stressed out or anxious about something

Night Terrors

*Night terrors occur during the Non Rapid Eye Movement stage of sleep
*It is extreme anxiety and partial awakening
*A person having a night terror will often scream in their sleep, breathe heavily, heart rate elevated.
*Person may thrash and struggle in sleep
*Won't hear/understand words of comfort, person suffering may not even be aware that you are there
*Talking usually is not coherent
*Won't remember details (does not mean that you won't remember the dream just not the hard details)
*Sleep walking can be another problem with this


So, to you brave Iwakuians, do you have constant nightmares? Or are there some out there that have night terrors?

I am one of the poor bastards that suffers from night terrors. When I was a child (I have PTSD, have had it since I was a child after six years old), I suffered from them...bad. One night I had been having a bad one (I can't remember it) but my older sister tried to calm me down. I screamed and hit her right in the face, so hard we had to take her to the ER. I felt terrible but I didn't remember doing it.

Slept in a new room and was sent to a child therapist.

I get constant nightmares (tis actually why I am writing this cause I'm afraid to go to sleep...)
.

Any nightmares to this day that you remember?
 
I can see myself laying in my bed...the very beds I have slept in over the course of my short life.

I cannot move, I can't make a sound.

I try very hard to attempt these actions for a extended period of time. I push and push myself through this cycle of agonizing, self guided, broken clarity of being asleep and awake all at once. I know I am in the bed I am asleep in at that very moment, yet know I am sleeping.

When I was younger, this... I will all is a state of being for the sake that it's neither and nightmare or night terror, scared me more than it does now. It is always the bed I slumber in at the time, and it always has had the same notion of the window beside me...open...indicating the time of day. Familiar, confined, and distant. Sometimes I spend days, immobilized on my bed. With only the sun and moon's passing, waking more tiered than when I had laid down to rest.After a decade, I still cannot say that I understand. My mind convinces itself and me, that I have been sleeping for days, and days, and days.

One time, I dreamt that I had been asleep for an entire year. 365days, within a single night, I...never told anyone about this before.

I always regain my awareness and with the help of electronics and satellite time I am granted clarity. I truly believe in my sleep that I only lie there in my bed unable to move forever.

The window and cycles of the moon and sun create this stimulating visual that I have in recent years (4-5), picked up on subtle things to remind me that I am just dreaming, like the light of the sun being more dim than in RL or the Moon not changing its phases, always a waning crescent. Even then, I cannot have the normal control that I have over my dreams.

Usually I have epic voyage dreams, I am usually trying to save a friend, or questing to help another. However this reoccurring dream is dull and saturated in realty of my waking life...it haunts me and truly has come to define my patience as a human perceiving this world for myself and how I have chosen to live it. My art therapist said, along time ago, when I was 15, "How ungrateful and selfish things we all can be".

What she said branded me.

I truly believe my subconscious began to punish me then and there.

I decided that to me, this state of being was living in a dream in which I have no control for unknown amounts of time...and it is agonizing. In turn, it has made me learn to appreciate things....most take for granted. I feel very depressed in the moments I truly believing I have been lying in a bed for an entire year. The mental strain it put on me is, in its foreignness, indescribable, yet when I wake up I am so relieved that it almost seems to me that time has reversed itself.

Odd, it may not seem very scary, and on an average I am in this state of sleep once or twice a year.

Ah, I am super hard on myself, but I have been learning to open up this year. I have always lived a very solitary life. Being alone is not what bothers me, the time I waste in these dreams are where my fears play with me and I believe that, through these strenuous sessions of sleep, I am reborn a new person each and every time. I cannot help but feel that the solitary existence I have experienced for myself has led me down a path that is constantly preparing me without my own knowledge, that there is this part of me that is so much more aware then I can fathom.

It give me tastes of what it feels.
These small drops of eternity.

Today, these dreams do not scare me, but once upon a time they made me shit myself and they can still, to this day, depress me for a short period and leave me irked.

These dreams have absolutely forged the Fijo you all know today.
 
I get a variety of nightmares. Although I can't classify them as really nightmares, as more my dreams tend to be... Random and all over the place, making little to no sense, and often, making me sometimes think it's really happening. My most recent dream was like a video game, only in real life. Several dogs, cats and I don't even know what to call the last thing, kept fighting and trying to murder each other. I would try to save them by restarting the scene, but the end result was always the end. No matter what I did, how I did it, or even why, someone ended up dying in it. Oh yeah, there was a Smoker from L4D that got one of the dogs. Maybe it was a video game dream. So... Yeah. It really depends on if the dream actually ends up scaring me or not. I used to be frightened by them, but now I more or less tend to accept them and shrug them off.
 
Yes.

I myself have PTSD since 2009. Also other mental illnesses, but those aren't important. What we are talking about are nightmares/terrors.
I don't suffer from terrors, but I do have pretty regular nightmares. Some of them I don't remember, some of them I do. A few have stuck with me throughout the years. I suppose I've had them even as a child, and even then they were filled with gore.

I think they were more terrifying when I was younger. Though I did have a dream a few months ago about a demon trying to over take me in the Gone With The Wind museum home. It was unnerving and left me rattled the entire next day.
 
I do not suffer nightmares on any regular basis. And it has been so long since I've had one I might not even be sure I'm having one if I did. When I do dream, it is either some random series of events or I'm fighting stuff.
 
nope. too busy working to get bogged down in nightm ares.
 
I do have a question for anyone reading this, some advice I need actually. What does it say when you get nightmares every night?
 
I haven't had a proper nightmare since elementary school, and I've never had night terrors before. I guess I'm one of the lucky ones. Instead of nightmares and night terrors, I have paranoia and depression to disrupt my sleep patterns. Yuup, definitely got lucky there....
 
I have nightmares pretty often, usually stress related or caused by anxiety. (Anxiety troubles I have plenty of.) Something I try is cutting out caffeinated beverages (coffee, monster, ect) and replacing it with warm tea and water. It cuts down the anxiety a lot, and by extent the nightmares. Also, putting lavender scented things by where I sleep helps, as well as mint. (though I hate mint, personally.) Also, my boyfriend will be very understanding and take good care of me, so that helps too.
 
I have one nightmare that I think I'll remember for the rest of my life.

It's the middle of winter, my sister-in-law and I are waiting on my brother to get out of work, we're laughing and having a good 'ol time. Once my brother is in the car and we're driving home, it's silent, deadly silent. (Which was weird, because we all had a good laugh before my sister-in-law started driving.) As my sister-in-law is driving, we can hardly see what is in front of us, that's how bad the snow is coming down. Just to fill the silence, I turn on the radio, which causes my sister-in-law to glance over at me.

When we look back at the road, a scream escapes my throat, we are heading straight for a large telephone pole. We hit it straight on and it's as if everything else happens in slow motion.

My brother's head goes forward, hitting into the back of my sister-in-laws seat. I can hear his neck snap, it's clear as day.

My sister-in-law's head goes sideways, hitting into the driver's side window. Her head goes through the glass, her face and neck getting cut along the way. She dies instantly.

My body is sent forward and I go through the windshield, I'm heading straight for the pole. My neck breaks upon impact, but I don't die. I'm simply numb and I can't move, I can't breath, I can't hear, I'm simply dying.

I woke up then, my body was tense, I had to catch my breath (I wasn't breathing when my eyes popped open) and tears were pouring from my eyes. That dream seriously effected me, nothing like that happened to me before. I had to go and call my brother once I calmed down, just to see that he and his wife were OK. I wouldn't get into the car with them for months and sometimes I'm still afraid to til this day.

I have many nightmares, some of them I can remember, while some of them I can't. But the one I described to you, will forever be implanted in my mind. I know that for sure.
 
Um... I'm not sure if this actually counts a night terror or not, but once when I was about 14 I woke up screaming and panicked with no memory of the dream that caused it - or anything else for that matter. Even though I was just in my bedroom I couldn't remember where I was and I didn't recognise my mom when she ran into my room to see why I was screaming either. The amnesia probably lasted for about five minutes before I was coherent enough to realise what was going on. Thankfully, I've never had one since.
 
I do have a question for anyone reading this, some advice I need actually. What does it say when you get nightmares every night?
I have no Idea what that means, you may need to see a psychiatrist.

I don't have nightmares, or that many dreams for that matter, and when I do I'll end up getting deja vu that same day for whatever reason. It's more of a mentality issue, I'll just get really freaked the heck out over something "slightly or exceedingly creepy" and sometimes that makes it so that I can't fall asleep for five hours at most.

In example, this happened recently after looking into some of the lore in Okami, this happened a while back after reading a couple of one of my favorite writers ever Stephen King's books, and it happened many many years ago when those "shadow people" videos were raping Youtube. So I guess It'd make sense that I'd be a little anxious sure, but no! it freaks me the flip out! I'll tell myself that it's exclusively somewhere else, just a book, or cgi but I'll still get freaked out and not want to sleep, until I do, and I see the sun sticking up it's middle finger in my face when I wake up.
Is it human nature to be afraid of what we don't know?
 
I have no Idea what that means, you may need to see a psychiatrist.

I don't have nightmares, or that many dreams for that matter, and when I do I'll end up getting deja vu that same day for whatever reason. It's more of a mentality issue, I'll just get really freaked the heck out over something "slightly or exceedingly creepy" and sometimes that makes it so that I can't fall asleep for five hours at most.

In example, this happened recently after looking into some of the lore in Okami, this happened a while back after reading a couple of one of my favorite writers ever Stephen King's books, and it happened many many years ago when those "shadow people" videos were raping Youtube. So I guess It'd make sense that I'd be a little anxious sure, but no! it freaks me the flip out! I'll tell myself that it's exclusively somewhere else, just a book, or cgi but I'll still get freaked out and not want to sleep, until I do, and I see the sun sticking up it's middle finger in my face when I wake up.
Is it human nature to be afraid of what we don't know?
Shadow people videos? When did this happen?

Anyways, I get the same way. Whenever I find something that really scares me, I usually discover that I won't be getting any sleep that night. For example, I've recently been getting into SCP and I occasionally play SCP: Containment Breach. Every time I encounter SCP-096, it keeps me up the rest of the night. Seriously, that thing is the scariest crap I have ever seen.
 
I don't really have any dreams, pleasant or unpleasant, that I remember any more.

When I was a child, I often had recurring nightmares where some sort of monster would sneak into the house at night and attack/eat our pets. I would be the only person around and I would be unable to protect my pets, so I would have to watch/cower as they were murdered and eaten by something that usually looked like a hell-hound.

It might not sound much, but at seven years of age, it was pretty much torture, feeling so helpless to protect the few things in the world that counted on me to protect them. I haven't had any pets for a long time, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that similar dreams start to haunt me if/when I do get another pet, or, heaven forbid, I have children.
 
I've had both before, but night terrors never came around consistently enough to signify a problem. At least now I know a possible explanation for things people around me would say, like I thrash in my sleep, talk and scream in it, and can't remember much about the dreams that caused it.
 
My earliest memory was when I was 4. I had a nightmare that there was a huge monster outside the bedroom window, (the monster being tree-sized and the window taking up a whole wall) and I woke up terrified. I've had a night terror before, when I was younger I had a weird dream and woke up to my own crying. I'm not sure what this was, but one night I had been watching a movie with some friends. I had fallen asleep and someone tried to wake me up, and they later told me I had sat up, said I was awake, and fell asleep immediately after. I had no memory of this, but I don't remember much when I'm tired.
 
My one crisply remembered nightmare, had me getting run over by a massive truck driven by a skeleton I fondly refer to as Jack the ripper. Jack is essentially that brain ghost most people have as a kid, the recurring nightmare that plague you. He was chasing me trough my sleep for most of my childhood up untill I was like 10. Then he stopped appearing after I pretty much lucid dreamed him away. Then when iwas 18, he appeared for one more time. Running me the fuck over. So I woke up in cold sweat. And heard the horn of a truck outside and felt like having a heart attack.

Likely, as the dream had just been incoherent nonsense before the truck, I heard the horn in my sleep and it worked into the dream. x.x
 
I had a year-long bout with depression, and practically couldent sleep due to constant nighmares. But that's depressing.

As a very young kid, I woke up one night screaming. My mom tells me the story about how I explained to her what might have been my first true nightmare, I just looked in her eyes and said "Piglet is evil!," pointing to my Piglet doll from Whiny The Poo.
 
I don't remember how old I was at the time, but I remember where I was living. So taking that into account, I was either 9 or younger. I would have these recurring nightmares. I often remember my dreams in extreme detail, but usually only for a day or two. Two of these have haunted me for years, so I don't think I'll ever forget them.

The first dream started out very basic, and almost fun. My younger sister and I would be playing the "floor is lava" in the kitchen. This could consist of jumping around on the kitchen chairs and the table and we could not touch the floor. There was a random bone in one of the chairs, and we also couldn't touch that. We didn't know why. We just knew that we couldn't.

During a round of jumping and laughing, my bare foot accidentally touched the bone and immediately it began to glow and shake. A loud and menacing laugh suddenly filled our small mobile home and from this bone grew an entire skeleton. Somehow we lured it outside, and we were able to lock it out. It never gave up trying to get back into the house, but once the sun came up, we were safe.

The second dream was much simpler. Our mobile home was right beside my grandparents, and farm land surrounded us. In this dream, it was night and I was across the creek. I could see the lights to the home, but nothing else. I happen to hear this growl from behind me and I turn to see myself staring into these blood red eyes. They keep getting closer and closer and I begin to run. I manage to cross the creek and I am allowed to get under a bright light. This "demon" that chased me finally came into the light. It was a small rabbit. How anticlimactic.

Now, instead of dreaming, I've been having these "hallucinations". I will be in bed and I will suddenly see this large, shadow-like hand coming at my face. I also see spiders. The other night, actually, I was trying to go to sleep, and there is a scorpion trying to get onto my bed. I stare at it, I watch it, I see it. I go to get up and it suddenly lunges at me. I cry out for my boyfriend who is in the next room, and he comes in, turns on the light, and the scorpion is gone. Other times, I am able to get up and turn on the light. All the way to the light, I see it, and as soon as I turn the light on, it disappears. I don't know if these are dreams, but they completely freak me out.