To find my dreams exhausting?

[friedaddedchilli]

Anyone else find their vivid dreams shattering? I constantly have "trying to get somewhere and everything against me" dreams. Feels like I'm fighting all night! I wake up still half in the dream and feeling absolutely drained.

Have you been watching Race Around the World? I can’t watch that programme as it feels like one of my stress dreams!

I dream vividly but they don’t stress me. Sometimes they’re just interesting, other times themed (packing, late, driving and find myself driving down flights of steps) but somehow there’s a sense of it not mattering in the dream. I don’t journal my daytime life, but I do keep a dream diary of the more interesting ones! Only very occasionally is there any sense of danger or menace.

I get this one. Had it last night in fact!
I still remeber vivid dreams and nightmares from when I was a child.
I think it’s peri/menopause and poss ADHD (not diagnosed but jumpy/hyper brain)

Read this thread. Went to sleep, dreamt I was back at the job I left 20 years ago. I had an exam, no designated seat and the buttons on the phone didn't work. I also couldn't work the computer system. Bingo!

No I haven’t, but it does look like a slightly more rational version of a vivid dream!

Full house for you!

Oh god, I also get the exam one! The situation is that none of my subsequent achievements will count any longer (how?) unless I take an exam I missed at Uni. No notice, no revision, no clue! I did miss a uni exam once though, so there’s a smidgin of reality in it.

Yes I suffer from nightmares. Mostly they involve a telephone. I can never find a working one and if I do I can’t get the number right. I also always have too much stuff to fit into any bag I have.

The dreams make me wake up with a pounding head. I wish someone could interpret them.

No they don't pay me. I have just finished the deptq books. I did think that i was still processing the books in my dreams.

My main version of this dream always involves:

packing for a holiday but I only have a few minutes and can't find anything

Getting delayed on route to the airport and I only have a few minutes left but I keep going as every car, train etc breaks down or gets lost

Packing up a holiday cottage. This is the one I find most exhausting as I have to clean and pack everyone's stuff, and I only have a few minutes

I see it as to do with feelings of overwhelm. I am always incredibly calm and just keep going, which is how I operate in real life too. I know I am getting too stressed when I start having the dreams again.

I've had these my whole life. I call them the frustration dreams - the phone one where I absolutely have to make the call as it's a terrible emergency and various things keep going wrong, down to me pressing the numbers but different numbers get pressed - the getting ready to leave the house but I'm not in my house, I can't find the clothes, where is the shower, there's a very complicated building and I can't find the other bathrooms, I'm late now and only half dressed - the realizing I'm starting a new course in college but I don't know how to get there, what room I'm in, what books I need, where I'm going - the I've moved to another country for college but don't know where I live, then don't have furniture for my flat, it's a dangerous place so I can't leave, I don't know to get around - the looking for a toilet but this cubicle has no door, this cubicle has a door but is open on the other side, this one is far away and I can't find it, this one is full of people, this one has all broken toilets.
It's bloody exhausting and it's all the time.
Then that's not to count the emotional dreams where I feel the very real emotions of terror or sadness or horror - the one where I can see the intruder coming up the stairs in my house, the one where my sister has just slipped under the water and I can't reach her, the one where I'm being chased through long and complicated buildings.
I describe it like Netflix in my head all night. I would love to know how to stop it and just wake up not having been through the mill every night.

Mine is also hormonal as a PP said - both pregnancies have triggered it and my dreams are always more vivid and bloody exhausting before a period. I’m either getting ready for a holiday that I haven’t prepared anything for, late for my GCSEs but the bus is cancelled / forget my pencil case / can’t remember the subject, or trying to get out of the house I grew up in. Sometimes there are scary/sad elements too like my family won’t believe something I’m telling them and I’m crying lots and they laugh. Bizarre

Oh my goodness you are me.

With the vanished car one, I’m now aware in the dream that this might be a dream, so I do stupid things in the dream to wake myself up or change the dream. Who knows what would happen if someone stole my car in real life.

I’ve had the phone one since way before even Blackberry was a thing, and the phones always had many, many buttons that I couldn’t feel properly and kept moving around. I have it less frequently since I’ve owned a smartphone, and the dreams are more about actual smartphone issues, not some weird scifi that my brain made up!

These are all the same as mine! The phone that doesn’t work!
I used to have horrific dreams about mass shootings/terrorist attacks, sometimes really graphic, but thankfully these have lessened in recent years.
does anyone have the one with a house where you find new rooms you have never seen before?

Yes - the house one is definitely in there. It's always a detached house and I always seem particularly drawn to the sides of it rather than the front or back. Why? I've had detached houses. The sides are never interesting
There are always undiscovered rooms in strange places. They're always fully made up but clearly haven't been used since Victorian times. It's so bloody odd.

Chemo resulted in me having horrific sleep paralysis nightmares that took years to go away. The thing is, it’s not exactly the dreams themselves that are the problem, it’s why you’re having them. Yes, they’re your subconscious dealing with things while you sleep, but it can actually the sleep itself that’s the issue, you’re having too much light REM sleep where your mind is active, and that’s what’s making the dreams so vivid and memorable, as well as resulting in you not feeling rested. They're a symptom rather than a cause.
Look into why you’re not getting enough deep sleep and are spending too much time in REM sleep.

My dreams are in full technicolour and often with a cast of thousands. I tend to remember them if I'm stressed and not sleeping so well.

Just revisiting this thread as I've remembered something. Had a common dream theme for years where I had to go over difficult obstacles through small gaps and I was always feeling stressed by this in the dream. About six months ago my mum randomly said 'do you remember when I put you in that teapot on Blackpool pleasure beach and you couldn't get out?'. I don't remember that. Apparently she had to recruit a slightly older child to guide me out as she was too big to get in herself. Ever since she told me about it that dream theme has stopped 🤷🏻‍♀️. So weird what our subconscious mind does! Why would my brain still be processing something that happened probably 45 years ago and that was all fine?