Quote by CaseyGrae

I have had 2 nightmares repeatedly throughout my life, sometimes they will happen two or three times in one night if I wake up. I couldn't describe them no matter how hard I tried! They're very strange and from what I remember about them in the morning they aren't actually scary. They just panic me for some reason. All I remember from one of the nightmares is simply a featureless face moving back and forth. I've dreamed of that since I was very little.

Your nightmares that you can't remember are called "Night Terrors" or Sleep Terror Disorder. What happens is something that you are visualizing in deep sleep instigates your instinctual fight or flight response involuntarily and you become scared and panic trying to get away from whatever you saw. Some of the potential causes that I can figure out are ... genetic, too much caffeine, fevers, lack of sleep, medication and/or drugs, anxiety, phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder, stimulants before bed, jet lag, sleeping somewhere new, stressful life events or changes (like marriage) and something touching you in while you are in the deepest part of your sleep, non-REM sleep (rem=rapid eye movement). Apparently the longer you stay in non-rem sleep the more terror you feel during the episode.

While most children outgrow it by the age 10, it is still possible for adults to experience them.

Some remedies are ... unwinding before sleep, like a warm bath or a nice book. Cool down, a high room and body temperature just exacerbates the event. Fall asleep listening to soothing music. Herbal remedies, like chamomile and finally essential oils like lavender, but make sure the scent stays around till morning.

Hope that helps even if the help wasn't necessary, the remedies can still be used for everyone with nightmares, so please abuse them!

As for me, I don't dream often. In childhood however, I dreamed of "The Shadow", a walking shadow of a man who would come and try to suffocate me ... I think. Maybe it was just him keeping me quiet for some reason or both, but he occurred numerous times a night for many years. The other nightmares were of my stuffies coming alive and attacking me, the never ending hallway that seemed to stretch forever and blast with impassible wind and where my mothers door would always remain locked or blocked. The worst part of them was I thought they were real every time, I never actually remember laying down in bed to go asleep. I could also tell when a dream would occur, as before I went to sleep my vision was accompanied by what I called at the time as "a million little arrows flying across my face" where now I think of it as "old school t.v. static". I can even remember the night my nightmares started happening, I was going to go to sleep on the couch in the living room when I decided to eat some Bugles. The moment I did I had a vision or a hallucination of two "beings" fighting above me in the air. My memory fails me on whether or not they were good and bad beings or whether or not one of them won. I keep thinking to this day that the bad being won but that could be just a false memory and it feels more plausible that they just disappeared in the midst of their fight.

I don't record my dreams, but I know that it is a training process for lucid dreaming, where you can control your dreams to a certain extent and it feels vividly real.

Forum