NIGHTMARES and PTSD

Everyone has bad dreams. The word nightmare is commonly used to differentiate between a simple bad dream and something far worse. These are sometimes quite vivid and even unforgettable. If you forget your dreams, it’s okay. That’s normal. Normal for others is remembering every second of a dream. They’ll wake up and tell you a novel out loud.

It’s interesting stuff because we don’t know yet why we dream. How we dream. Why some remember and some rarely do. Nor do we know what dreams mean because sometimes, they come true to some degree. Consulting dream interpretation books is akin to reading a newspaper horoscope.

It used to be accepted that dreams came in REM stage of sleep, but now we know we dream in every stage of sleep including while we’re falling asleep.

This happened to me once while I was a teenager. I was nodding off, and saw a succession of faces most finely detailed. Some brought no trouble to my mind. One did. He had blonde hair and a sailor’s cap with the brim turned down like Gilligan wore. I snapped awake. The guy was as evil as the thing I’d seen in my room upstairs a decade earlier. As evil as my father was.

I never could forget that face. It was stamped in my mind.

Years went by. I drove a tractor trailer for B Green & Co. and was on the old back dock one day looking for the forklift driver, Jerry. I couldn’t hear his lift running so I walked into the warehouse and turned a corner, where I came face-to-face with the guy I’d seen so long ago, wearing the hat I had seen him wearing. He was chilling; my blood ran cold with the look of hatred he fixed on me. A song was playing on a nearby radio: “Walk, Don’t Run” by the ventures.

PTSD affects the brain in ways that show up as abnormal on MRI results. The greater and more prolonged the trauma, the more areas that show abnormalities there are.

I’ve found that science is far behind what those with PTSD often learn on their own: that they are more receptive to the paranormal but can seldom control it; that they have vivid and traumatizing nightmares; that their social skills are never going to develop properly; that relationships are often stormy because self-esteem is low and they “settle” for the first person who gives them a second look, even marrying them after a few months of mostly sex dates; that they are never at peace or comfortable except in places they’ve gotten used to and that those places aren’t always good, therefore there is no peace, and the comfort is like a habit, an addiction, a cacoon.

Nightmares are a symptom of the disorder that isn’t reported in every diagnosis, but which is quite prevalent nonetheless. I generally do not count “old hag attacks” which the term nightmare comes from. I’m talking about sick, disgusting, horrible shit that leaves one so shaken that it counts as a trauma all by itself. The entire day or two following such dreams see the sufferer depleted, depressed and dissociatively useless and morose.

No matter how long I’ve researched, I’ve never come across any way to mitigate such dreams. No medication. No herbal remedy. No amount of exercise, no matter what you do, it’s going to happen.

I can’t even find any literature on the subject that I actually find believable.

Typical PTSD dreamers seem to have themes running through a particular dream. It is most often centered on whatever grieved or terrorized them, even if there were multiple traumas, as is the case with me. So of course I have many dreams caused by trauma that are very different. Sometimes only one element is present. Sometimes there are so many that I awaken sick and useless for a week, with migraine headaches, a need to eat unhealthy food or to smoke more than usual.

This Sunday morning as I slept I had one of the most tortuous dreams I can remember, relentless and truly terrifying.

I was back in private school, only it was a place I’d never been. Old. Hulking, with many floors and several wings. But I couldn’t find where I belonged. Where my classes were, where my dorm room was. At one point I settled into a room only to find it occupied by a girl I didn’t know. But there were no girls, only women. College age, more like, and I was just out of place. They knew about this and began to torment me, sending me all over this labyrinthine hell. At one point I was accused of wronging someone and she accepted my apologies. I reached out to hug her and she screamed and turned away. That’s when the real torture broke like a rogue wave. I had pain and grievous wounds. I kept being stripped to my jeans and bare feet. I remained as meek as I could. I just wanted it to stop. My mother called and said she and my father had lodged a complaint with the headmaster and that to make it up to me, I would be given Mac computers and other shit. I refused and said for them to get me out of this hellishness. She said they would come for me. In a snowstorm they evidently tried. In a yellow school bus. I went to meet them and found the bus empty, hollow and burned. The dream ended. I was stuck.

Nothing necessarily means anything. A psychologist would try to get to the source because the dream obviously distressed me even after waking. I was wobbly, very weak and light headed and dizzy with reflux enough to spit on a rat and watch it be digested.

What the therapist would do is note my fear of being naked in front of others and say lots of people have such dreams. What I would say is, there was over a decade of my life in which I had no privacy, no control over my own body, was sexually abused and traumatized so many times I wonder how I’ve lived with it for so long. I would also say that labyrinths and being chased through them by tormenters is another terror I frequently face in nightmares. And the antagonists being women is new.

Uh, wait. Is that because I’ve been writing about how I felt more respect for my father and more betrayed by my mother?

And being trapped and abandoned? Nothing new there. The screaming girl I tried to hug is new. I never, ever give unsolicited contact of any kind to anyone, nor do I want it done to me. I rarely shake hands because I can get empathic impressions that way and I’m tuned to the negative feelings only, nothing good. I’d just as soon we didn’t shake hands if you don’t mind.

Some of it makes sense to me. I have no one to talk to about this stuff. The other day I tried and was cut off by “I have to take this” which was followed the next day by a different reason. So I quit. I surrender. I’ll do it myself.

Which is bad.

That breeds more nightmares.