Advice on coping with bad dreams.

[rileynexttime]

I never seem to have pleasant or neutral dreams. So many feature past work situations where something is wrong or I am held responsible for something that is amiss.
Sometimes it's a family situation and then it's always my mother who is in the displeased authority role.
My mother has been dead for a decade. My father for 2. I'm in my mid seventies.

I have had counselling in the past but I can't afford that now. And didn't find it helpful as of course I viewed the therapist as an authority figure that I needed to satisfy.🤔

any advice ? I'm so tired of waking every morning with this cloud hanging over me.

I’ve had nightmares and sleep paralysis all my life and have been thinking about getting hypnotherapy

Sleep paralysis- try not lying on your back ( a MN tip that worked for me)

Nightmares and bad dreams - tell yourself nice stories - have them ready to start up if you wake up with the bad dream - also roll over at that point

@midgemadgemodge yeah I know about not lying on my back. But sometimes I do roll on my back when I’m asleep anyway. I don’t know if a nice story will work because the nightmare is more that I have sleep paralysis and there’s a creature attacking me and holding me down. But yeah I could try getting a different narrative in my mind about it. I will try rolling over as well instead of trying to move my hands. It could work

I think I am lucky and wake every time o roll over

Just breath through and chant "this won't last , it's just a dream" if you can , try to relax everything not fight it works best for me

Thankfully I don't suffer with sleep paralysis(we'll only when coming of morphine after surgery).

I think bad dreams are a way of your subconscious trying to get your attention. I had a repetitive bad dream (think haunted house) and when I began to understand that the dream was my brains way of actually trying to help me, I looked at the message behind the dream. The dream has now stopped.

@midgemadgemodge ive read that’s the best thing to do. It’s hard in the moment but I will keep trying to remember

Thank you @Hillsmakeyoustrong that makes sense and helps.

As a former therapist who worked actively with dreams, it is worth paying attention to yours. Not the literal meaning, but anxiety definitely seems to be at the basis of things. Honestly? I think your priority is to do your best to afford therapy, even if it means giving something else up. If you are still going to struggle, ask the therapists you approach if you can work on a sliding scale basis. There are also training institutes in certain places that offer reduced rates. But these won't go completely unless you address the root cause.

It sounds to me like unprocessed trauma around authority. And unnecessary guilt. I won't say more here but feel free to DM me.

Just found this from @JeanMarsh · on an earlier thread and it resonates with me. Unfortunately I can only access our garden by leaving the house and walking past neighbours flat so can't do that, though it would help I'm sure.

I get a lot of bad dreams and occasionally false awakenings, always have, no idea why as my life is generally untroubled.

To stop the dream lingering all day I get fresh air asap. Every other morning I bolt straight into our garden in my nightie, this helps to shake it off. Sounds corny but I also take the view that I feel dreadful and my day is going to be uphill so I may as well do something nice for someone (odd job around the house that isn’t mine/phone a friend who I know is struggling) and this switches my brain somehow off myself and I feel better. Finally I can’t watch any of the stuff most people love as it goes straight into my dreams. So Game if Thrones and all the crime series when kids are murdered, anything with domestic violence etc are out.

I think people who don’t get these intense dreams don’t understand the hold they have over you, how real they continue to feel long after you have woken up. It is boring for family members too so I just get into the garden asap and shake it off.

Again, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the nightmares are not caused by violent images on the tv or in movies; the psyche uses these images to convey a message. It draws on different aspects of your outer life, whether something that's just happened, or something in the past. If you look up the term "dream day" you'll see what I mean.

Essentially, a dream is a collage or a note written using letters from different sources: it seems familiar, but it can spell out something quite different and it is usually very useful information.

Dream Day

I can't help you I'm afraid, but I'm surprised you still have this in your 70s, when you're retired and have no parents left. You're independent from overweening bosses and other authority figures but not normally old enough to have become dependent and vulnerable. My recurrent nightmare is quite similar to yours: I have to re-sit my university finals at my current age (46) with unspecified horrible consequences for failure, and there are always disapproving authority figures in the background too. I can never understand how come my parents or my old tutor (FFS!) can have such a hold over me long after the age where they actually wielded authority over me. I do have exams on the horizon but not the kind where failure would be devastating, just inconvenient.

What are you actually afraid of? Whose disapproval would upset you?

I’m sorry you suffer with these, I have similar (but a bit different, panicky wake ups in a sweat with heart pounding and stuck in that place between sleep and awake and sometimes feels like ages where I’m awake but not sure what’s real or not and still think the dream stuff is real). I have a post it note by my bed telling me stuff is not real (doesn’t work that well 😆). Mine do seem to go through phases which I can’t readily attribute to being more or less stressed.
do you drink alcohol? (Sadly) I have found for me that not having any wine greatly improves things for me and lessons the occurrence and severity although doesn’t totally stop them.

it’s so horrible feeling like you’re afraid to go to sleep 😔 hate that feeling

@User63847439572 I know, right? You're awake, you know you've had a vivid anxiety dream, but you're still convinced the thing you were afraid of is real and you're frantically brainstorming strategies to deal with it, until your properly conscious brain wakes up and goes "Duh, you're so gullible".

I like the idea of a Post-It note. I'd need a big one to fit it all in: "For God's sake, obviously nobody has to resit their finals after 25 years, and if they did it wouldn't matter because a classics degree is no good to man or beast. And if Professor X sent you down he'd be doing you a favour. In fact you could call him a twat to his face and nothing really bad would happen as a result."

I wonder if something like this would help the OP. I read that one technique is to re-live the dream in your head before falling asleep, except in this version you take charge of events and behave as you would if conscious. For example, your boss accuses you of being rude to a client and threatens you with a disciplinary, so you tell him calmly that you haven't worked there for 20 years and whatever drama is going on now has nothing to do with you, and he can sort it out himself.