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Posted by Raynelle on June 11, 1999 at 17:41:17:In Reply to: Insomnia and dreaming posted by Mike on June 11, 1999 at 03:30:41:
Three thoughts: 1) Maybe you have sleep apnea and that's what causes the nightmares. Is there anyone who can watch you sleep to see if you make gasping noises, etc? Maybe you should check with a sleep center just to be sure.
2) Have you tried playing very soothing music (I like Bach piano music) in the background, or soothing environmental sounds, or soundproofing your bedroom?. Maybe there are sounds in your neighborhood that stimulate "primal" fears when you hear them in your sleep.
3) I told this story in another post on this site, yesterday but here goes, again. We moved into a new house and I immediately began to have trouble sleeping. I'd lie awake nights with a sense of "impending doom." I finally mentioned it to my husband one night, then look up and went "Oh! (Should have said "Eureka!") Right above my head, on my side of the bed, was a large paper Japanese lantern that the previous owners had put there and I'd not removed yet. I removed it immediately and slept well there from then on.
The reason the lantern kept me awake is that there are large numbers of nerve endings in our facial skin and they can sense the tiny air currents in a room. If those air currents bounce off something directly overhead, the skin can't sense whether it's a paper lantern or a big rock. Check your immediate environment to see if there's something in your room that could be causing that kind of reaction.
Another example of this kind of thing: a few years ago my adult kids and I were comparing notes about a house we'd lived in during their youth. We discovered that we all had the same mild feeling of anxiety on walking into a particular room of that house.
We finally figured it must have been because of a large square ledge overhanging the major entrance to that room. Apparently it stimulated "primal" fears in all of us. If we had been out in the woods somewhere we would never have walked under such a ledge - there could have a predator lurking on it. Just because the ledge was in a house didn't ease our instinctual fears a bit.
Maybe there's something like that in your bedroom that you can change. If I'd realized the problem with that ledge so many years ago, I'd have had someone wall it up, or put some big speakers up there or done something to make it seem less of a "lurking space" to our reflex animal instincts.
I hope these anecdotes doesn't make it seem I'm not taking your nightmare and insomnia seriously. I have insomnia, although I don't have nightmares, thank heavens, so I know insomnia alone is quite miserable enough. I'll pass on having nightmares, thanks!
There are some books on "directed dreaming" (I think that's what it's called) that might be of some help if none of the above works. Apparently there's a way to "talk to your subconscious" before you go to sleep and "program" it to have the dreams you want, and/or to take control of a nightmare in progress and change it to something non-threatening. I wish I could remember more about those books. Maybe someone else in the Insomnia Forum remembers about them. Or try asking a librarian.
Good luck,
Raynelle
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