As a child I had nightmares from a very early age. I would often have the same nightmare over and over. I won’t go into details but they involved severe threat of inescapable annihilation and obliteration.
I can still get these same dreams now that are versions of these childhood dreams. They have come and gone over different periods of my life. Over the past 5 months I’ve been in a nightmare phase again. I’ve been woken by two last night which is pretty normal at present. Other times I go through phases where I haven’t had nightmares and thought to myself, I don’t really get nightmares, like I forget the fact that I have had bouts of them. I think this is a kind of dissociation where I blank out the experiences. Then I am plunged back into them again.
I am wondering if others have found or learned strategies for managing nightmares with PTSD or CPTSD? I just read about an interesting therapeutic approach this morning. It’s called Image Rehearsal Therapy. What you do is write out the dream but with a different non-scary story where there is a safe, positive resolution. I am going to try this. It sounds similar to the Somatic Experiencing work I have done where you go through a re-enactment of a past trauma where you get to act out the actions of self-protection and escape you never got to do at the time of an incident.
At the moment I have a lot of terror all day everyday and then it manifests even when I’m asleep. In the last 5 months I sleep between about 3-6 hours most nights. I often then sleep in the afternoon and have strange, disturbing dreams then too.
I guess I’m wondering if anyone has overcome their nightmares and if so what seemed to help?
