Count myself a man of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams
June 17, 2015 4:08 AM
I regularly have bad, weird or confusing dreams and they make my mornings bad, weird or confusing. Does anyone have any tricks for separating the dream world from the real one?
This morning, for example, I dreamed that some terrible stuff had happened to me and woke very upset. I don't really have a way of coping with this other than drinking cups of tea and reading the internet until I'm safely in the real world again, which takes about an hour or two. It's inconvenient, though, and gets in the way of my productivity at work. Sometimes makes it difficult to get into work in the first place.
I'm on a bunch of medication which makes this worse but is required to prevent even worse things happening so can't be changed (trust me on this). I have a feeling someone is going to suggest exercise, but it's difficult to get myself to go running when I am reeling from murderhorror or trying to work out if I've been living at sea for six years. If you have a way to make the running (or similar) happen regardless, please do tell me! I live with a flatmate but she is not really around for breakfast time.
This morning, for example, I dreamed that some terrible stuff had happened to me and woke very upset. I don't really have a way of coping with this other than drinking cups of tea and reading the internet until I'm safely in the real world again, which takes about an hour or two. It's inconvenient, though, and gets in the way of my productivity at work. Sometimes makes it difficult to get into work in the first place.
I'm on a bunch of medication which makes this worse but is required to prevent even worse things happening so can't be changed (trust me on this). I have a feeling someone is going to suggest exercise, but it's difficult to get myself to go running when I am reeling from murderhorror or trying to work out if I've been living at sea for six years. If you have a way to make the running (or similar) happen regardless, please do tell me! I live with a flatmate but she is not really around for breakfast time.
This may be a bit out of left field, but can you lower the temperature in your bed? When I wake up from a bad dream, I pretty much always find that I was too warm. So you could try making your bedroom cooler, or using a thinner covering, and see if it helps to make the nightmares occur less often, even with the medication.
As for getting back in the real world quicker: would a shower help?
posted by Too-Ticky at 4:48 AM on June 17, 2015
As for getting back in the real world quicker: would a shower help?
posted by Too-Ticky at 4:48 AM on June 17, 2015
When you talk about horrible dreams, I assume you mean dreams of the "reliving a past trauma" or "horrible but believable things happening to loved ones" as opposed to "chased by zombies!"
This is a regular thing for me, and it really does feel horrible to wake up from. My solution: out of bed IMMEDIATELY, and straight to a COLD shower -- as cold as you can stand it. If a morning shower is your normal routine anyway, go ahead and do that but when you're done with your "regular" shower, spend a couple of extra minutes in there using COLD water.
Seriously, this creates a really clean break from the bad feelings / thoughts that can otherwise fog up your whole morning. For me, anyway.
posted by the bricabrac man at 5:19 AM on June 17, 2015
This is a regular thing for me, and it really does feel horrible to wake up from. My solution: out of bed IMMEDIATELY, and straight to a COLD shower -- as cold as you can stand it. If a morning shower is your normal routine anyway, go ahead and do that but when you're done with your "regular" shower, spend a couple of extra minutes in there using COLD water.
Seriously, this creates a really clean break from the bad feelings / thoughts that can otherwise fog up your whole morning. For me, anyway.
posted by the bricabrac man at 5:19 AM on June 17, 2015
Yeah, I go for the shower thing to separate dream world from sensory real world. The brain is pretty insidious though, and nightmares are designed to press buttons, so even though I'm aware, I ruminate on the life experiences / people who are the focus. This is where ACT really helps me. It's a combination of meditation techniques along with acceptance, so that I'm not worrying at the issues. I can acknowledge them and let them go, and distract myself with awareness of my bodily feelings and surroundings.
posted by b33j at 5:28 AM on June 17, 2015
posted by b33j at 5:28 AM on June 17, 2015
When I got a CPAP machine, my nightmares went from regular to almost none. It turns out that suffocating in your sleep = bad, bad dreams. Have you had a sleep test?
Now, on the rare occasions that I do have a terrible dream, I find that turning on my bedside lamp, getting out of bed, putting on my robe and slippers and starting my day right away - absolutely NO snoozing or lingering in bed! - is what I need to put distance between my real life and that awful dream I just had. I'm able to say "Whew. I'm glad that was just a dream!" There is nothing like getting out of bed ASAP and taking on the day to banish bad dreams for me.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 5:29 AM on June 17, 2015
Now, on the rare occasions that I do have a terrible dream, I find that turning on my bedside lamp, getting out of bed, putting on my robe and slippers and starting my day right away - absolutely NO snoozing or lingering in bed! - is what I need to put distance between my real life and that awful dream I just had. I'm able to say "Whew. I'm glad that was just a dream!" There is nothing like getting out of bed ASAP and taking on the day to banish bad dreams for me.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 5:29 AM on June 17, 2015
I read somewhere that bad dreams are functionally our brain's way of training us to be prepared to handle bad scenarios in real life. That perspective -- that my nightmares were just my brain's equivalent of running random fire drills -- made them a lot less unsettling.
posted by Jacqueline at 5:33 AM on June 17, 2015
posted by Jacqueline at 5:33 AM on June 17, 2015
Practical considerations - wake up earlier. We sleep in ~90min cycles and if your bad dreams are in the morning, wake up 90min earlier from your regular time to avert the last dream cycle (assuming it's the last sleep cycle that's causing you the bad dreams).
In essence you're asking how to quickly change state (change mood). There are some NLP tricks that can help with this. Create an anchor for yourself, it can be a gesture (pressing your thumb and middle finger together, touching your ear, rolling your tongue etc) or it could be an external thing (like a talisman, so a ring, a small stuffed animal, whatever). Whenever you feel happy, relaxed, safe - perform the gesture or touch the talisman. Do this for a few days. This anchors your feeling to the gesture (builds the association). Then when you wake up and feel weird, in addition to all the good advice above, perform the reassuring gesture and allow yourself to feel peace and relief from the bad dream. You see professional athletes do this a lot with their game rituals - it gets them into their peak state.
Additionally when you are dreaming, you may start to reach for the gesture/talisman but it won't feel right... this will help clue you in to the fact that it's a dream. You may or may not become lucid due to this, but it will at least put a bit of doubt in your dream-mind as to the realness of the dream, and thus reduce the strength of the nightmare.
(I didn't steal this from the movie Inception, it's been a lucid dreaming trick from way back.)
posted by St. Peepsburg at 5:37 AM on June 17, 2015
In essence you're asking how to quickly change state (change mood). There are some NLP tricks that can help with this. Create an anchor for yourself, it can be a gesture (pressing your thumb and middle finger together, touching your ear, rolling your tongue etc) or it could be an external thing (like a talisman, so a ring, a small stuffed animal, whatever). Whenever you feel happy, relaxed, safe - perform the gesture or touch the talisman. Do this for a few days. This anchors your feeling to the gesture (builds the association). Then when you wake up and feel weird, in addition to all the good advice above, perform the reassuring gesture and allow yourself to feel peace and relief from the bad dream. You see professional athletes do this a lot with their game rituals - it gets them into their peak state.
Additionally when you are dreaming, you may start to reach for the gesture/talisman but it won't feel right... this will help clue you in to the fact that it's a dream. You may or may not become lucid due to this, but it will at least put a bit of doubt in your dream-mind as to the realness of the dream, and thus reduce the strength of the nightmare.
(I didn't steal this from the movie Inception, it's been a lucid dreaming trick from way back.)
posted by St. Peepsburg at 5:37 AM on June 17, 2015
To piggyback on to St. Peepsburg's suggestion - try downloading a sleep tracker alarm app onto your smartphone, if you have one, and set it to wake you up when you are in a light sleep phase. I find it to be much less jarring, and an easier transition from sleep to wake time, if I can wake up when I'm sleeping lightly as opposed to the middle of an REM phase.
What is your living area like? If the place where you spend your mornings is dark and cluttered, change that so you spend your first waking hours in a light, cheerful, inviting space.
Try playing upbeat, cheerful music in the mornings. Also aromatherapy - I find citrus scents to be uplifting and happy. Burn a citrus-scented candle (or use a candle warmer, which I do - it's a lot safer) or spray some orange essential oil around.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 6:12 AM on June 17, 2015
What is your living area like? If the place where you spend your mornings is dark and cluttered, change that so you spend your first waking hours in a light, cheerful, inviting space.
Try playing upbeat, cheerful music in the mornings. Also aromatherapy - I find citrus scents to be uplifting and happy. Burn a citrus-scented candle (or use a candle warmer, which I do - it's a lot safer) or spray some orange essential oil around.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 6:12 AM on June 17, 2015
From what I read here and from my own experience this is less uncommon as you might think. I often remember my dreams and they are most of the time super-exhausting adventure were I try to save someone, escape evident death or try to meet a super important deadline (such as making it to my own wedding).
I agree with sleeping colder and getting up to a fresh shower.
My other suggestion would be to use smells as an anchor. Get / make yourself a mix of soothing essential oils which smell good to you, for example lavender and bergamotte. Have a small flask at your bedside. When you wake up from a bad dream get some oil and massage on your pulse points at your frists and under your ear lobes.
Another idea which has worked for me in the past is to relive some of my dream and then very vividly imagine another ending once I am awake. The fun part is that you can make anything up in a dream world and integrate things from movies or books which inspire you. An example: I am being chased by scary men who try to kill me through alleys. I go back to that scene and the feeling I had when dreaming. Then I imagine how I suddenly stop, turn around and draw my sword. I imagine feeling fierce and fearless. I call on my dragon spirit and he turns up over the roofs and breathes one hell of fire through the alleys until every last one of the dark figures died in flames. I feel relieved and powerful.
You should try it! Not only can it give you a smile and you feel less overpowered by the emotions caused by your dream. I have also found out that some repeating bad dreams go away entirely with this method.
One more idea is to very vividly imagine beautiful things before going to sleep, for example walking on a calm beach. The important part is to really induldge in the picture and involve als sesnses, such as feeling the warm wind on your skin or the waves around your toes, the salty smell of the sea, the sound of the sea gulls and crushing waves.
Good luck and hang in there!
posted by Fallbala at 6:16 AM on June 17, 2015
I agree with sleeping colder and getting up to a fresh shower.
My other suggestion would be to use smells as an anchor. Get / make yourself a mix of soothing essential oils which smell good to you, for example lavender and bergamotte. Have a small flask at your bedside. When you wake up from a bad dream get some oil and massage on your pulse points at your frists and under your ear lobes.
Another idea which has worked for me in the past is to relive some of my dream and then very vividly imagine another ending once I am awake. The fun part is that you can make anything up in a dream world and integrate things from movies or books which inspire you. An example: I am being chased by scary men who try to kill me through alleys. I go back to that scene and the feeling I had when dreaming. Then I imagine how I suddenly stop, turn around and draw my sword. I imagine feeling fierce and fearless. I call on my dragon spirit and he turns up over the roofs and breathes one hell of fire through the alleys until every last one of the dark figures died in flames. I feel relieved and powerful.
You should try it! Not only can it give you a smile and you feel less overpowered by the emotions caused by your dream. I have also found out that some repeating bad dreams go away entirely with this method.
One more idea is to very vividly imagine beautiful things before going to sleep, for example walking on a calm beach. The important part is to really induldge in the picture and involve als sesnses, such as feeling the warm wind on your skin or the waves around your toes, the salty smell of the sea, the sound of the sea gulls and crushing waves.
Good luck and hang in there!
posted by Fallbala at 6:16 AM on June 17, 2015
I read an article once about how playing 20 minutes of Tetris a day can help people with PTSD, and I've found that it helps clear my head of bad dreams too. Sometimes it takes a little longer than 20 minutes, but it does manage to really clear the dreams out of my head so they don't linger all day.
Here's a free online Tetris game. I don't think the theme music is necessary (and I can't get it to play in that game anyway), but just in case you'd like it, here's a link to a YouTube video with the theme music on a loop.
posted by colfax at 7:16 AM on June 17, 2015
Here's a free online Tetris game. I don't think the theme music is necessary (and I can't get it to play in that game anyway), but just in case you'd like it, here's a link to a YouTube video with the theme music on a loop.
posted by colfax at 7:16 AM on June 17, 2015
Nth the suggestions that you may be too hot or suffocating and this may be triggering the dreams. If you need the thicker bed covers to get to sleep during the phase where your body temperature drops, set an alarm to go off at a time that will match the end of a sleep cycle - a sleep cycle is roughly 90 minutes, as stated above - and when the alarm goes off wake up just enough to push off the top layer of blankets and shut the alarm off.
I read some place that I can't foot note, that people who can't break out of a depressive episode are frequently experiencing depression while they sleep by having terrible dreams. Where as people who are getting over depression or trauma gradually have their dreams get better and better and this leads to the waking life emotions getting better. The dreaming is part of the neurological regrowth and adjustment. So it may be that you need to have bad dreams while your brain re-wires itself, but the dreams are not yet effective enough to have done much healing.
Before you go to sleep talk to yourself about your dreams. Ideally your last thoughts before you fall asleep should be to assertively and calmly tell yourself that tonight you will dream differently. The word I use when I do this is effective. "Tonight I will have effective dreams." You might prefer the word healing to the word effective or use several words as you reiterate the instructions to yourself. This acknowledges that you will have the bad dreams but gives you some control over them.
If you have one recurring dream, such as that there is a monster about to grab you, or that you are doing something horrible yourself, you can instruct yourself what is going to happen. Not, "I will not dream about monsters" nor "I will not kill the children" but "When the monster grabs me I will turn completely insubstantial and its claws will go through me." or "When I hold the child's head underwater she will turn completely insubstantial and her head will rise right through my hands."
Another suggestion I would like to nth, is the one above to continue the dream by tuning it into a story you tell yourself after it ends. It doesn't matter how badly it all ends in the dream if you go on and imagine something like, "...and then as my entire family lies dead and mutilated at my feet and I am falling and gagging with desolation and shame I notice something strange... they don't look right. These aren't my family members. These are really evil demons that took the form of my family. The false forms are slipping away now that they are dead. They had convinced me. But by killing them I have saved my real family! They start to appear now, scared but safe, alive and grateful....!"
It doesn't matter how bad things get in a dream, there is still a implausible plot twist that can be concocted to continue the story by bringing in magic and even silliness. You were thrown off an overpass? This is the incident that releases you hidden magic powers. In the instant you hit the concrete below when you bones would have been splintered you rise up again your immortality revealed and ...ANGRY. You fly back up to the overpass! Now the evil people who forced you over the edge are the ones being frightened...." Or you might bounce like you were made of rubber in a cartoon. Boing.... Boing... You will not feel nearly as awful and afraid if you are snickering at the thought of yourself as the participant of kid's Disney Movie about the Amazing Human Rubber Ball.
The important thing to make this effective is to not deny anything that you experienced in the dream. If it happened it happened. But you could have been mistaken or saw it wrong. If you kept running into obstacles as you tried to get back home the obstacles did exist and did block you - but now that you look behind you, you see that those obstacles blocked your pursuers even more. Or else it delayed you so that you can finally arrive home at the perfect moment when your childhood has been restored and your sister is still your playmate etc.
There is an internal part of your brain that feels things strongly and which is credulous, so if you tell it a thing it experiences it as real. This is the part of the brain that can cause you to feel a horrible stab of anguish or fear at the idea of something bad happening. It's kind of like your inner child, or your ego. So you can say things to this inner little Acheman, such as, if I have a bad dream I will make myself cocoa for breakfast and the cocoa will make me feel better again. Or, if I have a bad dream I will say a Hail Mary and God will preserve me from the evil being a reality. Or if I go to sleep with Snuggy-Wombat in my arms when I dream Snuggy-Wombat will keep me safe. Most of us dispense with Snuggy-Wombat at the age when we can stand up and say, "Pah, it was just a dream, I don't believe that", but when your brain chemicals and medications and illnesses are at a state where you can't just disbelieve the dreams the way you disbelieve a particularly badly written horror movie, there are rituals like going to bed with Snuggy-Wombat still within reach.
Your intelligent, adult problem solving brain knows perfectly well that there is no established scientific link between ingesting cocoa and lowering cortisol levels, so you are apt to scoff and undo the reassurance you provided to the feeling portion of your brain, but your adult problem solving brain can also be convinced to get on board by evidence that rituals do work to comfort adults and children and to signal when you can change from feeling upset to feeling better. - Note also that you do not try to jump from Feeling Upset straight to Feeling Fine, you make the transition from Feeling Upset to Feeling Better to Feeling Fine.
Another thing you can do is examine your dreams for clues about why your brain is churning out this misery. If you are having frustration dreams you are living a frustrating life. If you dream you are losing loved ones, you are troubled by fear and perhaps by distance between you and those loved ones. You can then try to take steps in real life to fix the situation. For example, if you are in conflict and having dreams of conflict you can remind yourself that you could walk away from the real life situation of conflict, but that you have chosen not to walk away from it and that you continue to choose not to walk away from it. You are not trapped. This situation is the sensible place for you to be, right now, until you make the decision to walk away. You may be able to gain a sense of control over your waking life, which in turn will take away the out of control aspect of the dreams.
In my experience these techniques do not work instantly because it takes awhile to gain momentum with them, but if followed firmly, by the third or fourth night they show some progress, enough to see that I have changed direction. For really difficult situations it can take months before anxiety dreams go away - but then they may be replaced by wish-fulfillment dreams equally strong to the miserable dreams! I had bad dreams about my mother for several months. When they resolved I ended up having these amazingly pleasurable dreams that I had just finally finally made it home... dreams that gave me on waking the most incredible feeling of relief and happiness that left me smiling throughout the day as I recalled fragments of that feeling.
posted by Jane the Brown at 8:03 AM on June 17, 2015
I read some place that I can't foot note, that people who can't break out of a depressive episode are frequently experiencing depression while they sleep by having terrible dreams. Where as people who are getting over depression or trauma gradually have their dreams get better and better and this leads to the waking life emotions getting better. The dreaming is part of the neurological regrowth and adjustment. So it may be that you need to have bad dreams while your brain re-wires itself, but the dreams are not yet effective enough to have done much healing.
Before you go to sleep talk to yourself about your dreams. Ideally your last thoughts before you fall asleep should be to assertively and calmly tell yourself that tonight you will dream differently. The word I use when I do this is effective. "Tonight I will have effective dreams." You might prefer the word healing to the word effective or use several words as you reiterate the instructions to yourself. This acknowledges that you will have the bad dreams but gives you some control over them.
If you have one recurring dream, such as that there is a monster about to grab you, or that you are doing something horrible yourself, you can instruct yourself what is going to happen. Not, "I will not dream about monsters" nor "I will not kill the children" but "When the monster grabs me I will turn completely insubstantial and its claws will go through me." or "When I hold the child's head underwater she will turn completely insubstantial and her head will rise right through my hands."
Another suggestion I would like to nth, is the one above to continue the dream by tuning it into a story you tell yourself after it ends. It doesn't matter how badly it all ends in the dream if you go on and imagine something like, "...and then as my entire family lies dead and mutilated at my feet and I am falling and gagging with desolation and shame I notice something strange... they don't look right. These aren't my family members. These are really evil demons that took the form of my family. The false forms are slipping away now that they are dead. They had convinced me. But by killing them I have saved my real family! They start to appear now, scared but safe, alive and grateful....!"
It doesn't matter how bad things get in a dream, there is still a implausible plot twist that can be concocted to continue the story by bringing in magic and even silliness. You were thrown off an overpass? This is the incident that releases you hidden magic powers. In the instant you hit the concrete below when you bones would have been splintered you rise up again your immortality revealed and ...ANGRY. You fly back up to the overpass! Now the evil people who forced you over the edge are the ones being frightened...." Or you might bounce like you were made of rubber in a cartoon. Boing.... Boing... You will not feel nearly as awful and afraid if you are snickering at the thought of yourself as the participant of kid's Disney Movie about the Amazing Human Rubber Ball.
The important thing to make this effective is to not deny anything that you experienced in the dream. If it happened it happened. But you could have been mistaken or saw it wrong. If you kept running into obstacles as you tried to get back home the obstacles did exist and did block you - but now that you look behind you, you see that those obstacles blocked your pursuers even more. Or else it delayed you so that you can finally arrive home at the perfect moment when your childhood has been restored and your sister is still your playmate etc.
There is an internal part of your brain that feels things strongly and which is credulous, so if you tell it a thing it experiences it as real. This is the part of the brain that can cause you to feel a horrible stab of anguish or fear at the idea of something bad happening. It's kind of like your inner child, or your ego. So you can say things to this inner little Acheman, such as, if I have a bad dream I will make myself cocoa for breakfast and the cocoa will make me feel better again. Or, if I have a bad dream I will say a Hail Mary and God will preserve me from the evil being a reality. Or if I go to sleep with Snuggy-Wombat in my arms when I dream Snuggy-Wombat will keep me safe. Most of us dispense with Snuggy-Wombat at the age when we can stand up and say, "Pah, it was just a dream, I don't believe that", but when your brain chemicals and medications and illnesses are at a state where you can't just disbelieve the dreams the way you disbelieve a particularly badly written horror movie, there are rituals like going to bed with Snuggy-Wombat still within reach.
Your intelligent, adult problem solving brain knows perfectly well that there is no established scientific link between ingesting cocoa and lowering cortisol levels, so you are apt to scoff and undo the reassurance you provided to the feeling portion of your brain, but your adult problem solving brain can also be convinced to get on board by evidence that rituals do work to comfort adults and children and to signal when you can change from feeling upset to feeling better. - Note also that you do not try to jump from Feeling Upset straight to Feeling Fine, you make the transition from Feeling Upset to Feeling Better to Feeling Fine.
Another thing you can do is examine your dreams for clues about why your brain is churning out this misery. If you are having frustration dreams you are living a frustrating life. If you dream you are losing loved ones, you are troubled by fear and perhaps by distance between you and those loved ones. You can then try to take steps in real life to fix the situation. For example, if you are in conflict and having dreams of conflict you can remind yourself that you could walk away from the real life situation of conflict, but that you have chosen not to walk away from it and that you continue to choose not to walk away from it. You are not trapped. This situation is the sensible place for you to be, right now, until you make the decision to walk away. You may be able to gain a sense of control over your waking life, which in turn will take away the out of control aspect of the dreams.
In my experience these techniques do not work instantly because it takes awhile to gain momentum with them, but if followed firmly, by the third or fourth night they show some progress, enough to see that I have changed direction. For really difficult situations it can take months before anxiety dreams go away - but then they may be replaced by wish-fulfillment dreams equally strong to the miserable dreams! I had bad dreams about my mother for several months. When they resolved I ended up having these amazingly pleasurable dreams that I had just finally finally made it home... dreams that gave me on waking the most incredible feeling of relief and happiness that left me smiling throughout the day as I recalled fragments of that feeling.
posted by Jane the Brown at 8:03 AM on June 17, 2015
When I was on medication that had bad dreams as a side effect, distracting myself on waking worked. I became one of those people who don't remember their dreams, which for me included not "emotionally remembering" them.
posted by pickles_have_souls at 9:16 AM on June 18, 2015
posted by pickles_have_souls at 9:16 AM on June 18, 2015
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For me, slow easy stretching works just as well as harder physical exercise. I think the key is just being any sort of physical and just getting the brain to focus on it. If you like music and dancing, you could try just chilling and grooving out a bit. If your feeling more energetic you could try just getting outside for a bit and walking.
I also have to make sure that I don't stay in bed or wherever the dreams occurred. It removes the association with the physical sensations that were connected with the dreaming. On the other side of that if I want to remember and stay with a dream, I don't move and stay in bed.
posted by Jalliah at 4:39 AM on June 17, 2015