Nightmares

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I very rarely have nightmares but last night I had three! Each time I woke up drenched in sweat. Of course in the light of day they don't seem too bad but they seemed very real at the time.
Now that I think about it I haven't really been sleeping well for a few weeks, probably since I found out about AS but I haven't had dreams as bad as last night in many years. I used to have some terrifying 'alien' dreams.
Not sure if this is all AS related or not, but I've been looking very deeply into my childhood since finding out about my AS and thinking about things I'd been trying to forget. Is this a sign of healing or is my fragile grip on reality slipping? Funnily enough I don't mind either way. I've been waiting to be carted off to the Funny Farm for many years......

i always have nightmares about third grade, i can NEVER forget that stupid year!! !!

I had a very disturbing nightmare the night before last. I also found out about AS recently, and although it was initially a relief to understand why I'm so different after all these years of not knowing, it is really a lot to process and figure out how I'm going to get life on the right track from here. All of this does seem to be enough for us to lose our grip on reality, but I really think that things can get a lot better in time once we have had some more time to process all of these emotions and see all of our life experiences in a new light. (And work on new coping skills armed with our new knowledge.)

Well, I can't really answer this without going into a kind of personal tangent. I'm pagan, and I believe in a being called Azerith who is Queen of Nightmares and kind of a goddess of fear. I'm the first person I know to identify her, but gradually the people I'm closest to have come to believe in her as well (presuming they were already pagan, wiccan, or some other non-monotheistic faith).

Nightmares have helped to form my personality. I can remember most of them - starting with the nightmare I had the night before my fourth birthday, that completely changed my worldview and left me shaken and unable to eat the next day. It also sparked a chain of recurring nightmares I called "eye dreams" -- they always consisted of eyes being removed, damaged, simply missing, or even - ew- eaten. Other than that, the content varied. These dreams started with my gross anatomical misconceptions and a child's view of the eye - not as a sphere but almost like skin, that you could push away and there was emptiness behind. As I learned more about the human body the eye dreams evolved, but the fear level associated with them never really did - the pop-out eye was as terrifying as the CSI-detailed one. Many of these dreams contained a female figure with no eyes, whose face was... indescribable. I don't mean it was horrible, I mean it was literally indescribable - even at the time I was looking at it, I couldn't tell anything about it. Sometimes it was a little girl; sometimes it was a woman; sometimes it was an important female figure in my life. And even once, the dream consisted of everyone having no eyes, and a young girl in a red dress with vivid eyes (although I can't remember color) who walked by, locked gazes with me, and then passed with a smile.

These "eye dreams" greatly shaped who I am now, and I had them from the night of my fourth birthday until... well, I still have them sometimes. I could never go back to sleep after one of those dreams.

I have other nightmares as well - monsters & evil kings & horror movie stuff, usually - but even the kind of nightmares I understand most people have, where someone dies or you're in a bad class or you have to go clean up a pile of poo.

Starting not too long after the eye dreams were the "drain dreams" - nightmares which centered on pool drains and tub drains. Why? Again, hard to describe. My mom helpfully said "well that's a reasonable nightmare, lots of kids see the water pulled down the drain and get scared that they'll get sucked in too" and I tried to explain to her that that wasn't why I was afraid. It was because to me, there was something on the other side of those drains. Something ancient and dark - not evil - but terrifying. The water emptying into the drain was purely incidental; it was just a warning sign that the gateway was open. To this day I won't swim anywhere near a pool drain.

Over time, I've come to separate my nightmares into two categories. "Regular" nightmares, which may be horrific and gorey or embarassing or sad, and "Her" nightmares, which are usually more meaningful, symbolic, vivid, and most notably, *shared*. Her nightmares, no matter what their content, are dark and suffocating, and it always feels like there's another presence in there with me. She's usually in disguise as an object or another person, but when I look at her I feel the world tip out from under me and a kind of all-consuming fear. It's a fear with absolutely no meaning or cause, just pure distilled terror. Ironically these nightmares are usually not as bad as the regular ones, but they stay with me forever and effect me for days.

So I pretty much never have nightmares that are actually relevant to anything going on in my life or in my thoughts. I should note that it's not just my nightmares that I remember so clearly - I remember dreams, going all the way back to age 4. My dreams are intricate, vivid, and long - it seems like I dream from the moment I fall asleep to the moment I wake up, and I have over an 85% recall rate, I'd say. Dreaming is more than a mental process; for me, it's a whole other life, a life that quite honestly I value as much or more than my "real" one.

And yeah, you can explain "Her" nightmares as a temporal lobe disturbance - it can be explained with biochemistry and science. But y'know, so can all religious or spiritual occurances, and that's a risk I'm willing to take. I have a choice to believe what I feel or believe the research that mankind has done before me... and I guess I don't have that much faith in mankind.

The existance of Azerith and my spiritual value of dreaming was one of the things that got me stuck on Risperdal, even though in hindsight those nightmares actually helped me rather than hindered me. My psychologist said I was too "fantasy-oriented" with my religion, to which, my atheist mom remarked to me later, "Pentecostals speak in tongues and Roman Catholics are supposed to drink the blood and eat the flesh of their savior. So yes, your religion seems crazy to me - but no moreso than theirs."

I think the best way I can think of to explain what dreaming is to me is to refer anyone curious to The Sandman graphic novels by Neil Gaiman. The details for me are different, but the philosophy is very much the same.

Interesting. I also recall nightmares going back to, precisely, the night before my fourth birthday. I still recall most of the details of that dream and how I woke up on my fourth birthday in terror and sobbing uncontrollably.

My first nightmare would have been from around that age too. I was three I think. An axeman was chopping children in half.

In my first nightmare, a vampire had trapped a bunch of children (I was one of them) in a dark gray concrete dungeon. We were all tied to chairs that were lined up in a row. The vampire took the children one at a time into a room to kill them. I did not see how since I woke up before I was taken into the room, but I remember what the childrens' screams sounded like.

never seem to have nightmares (feed me cheese before bed if you want me to have nightmares, lol)

**Off topic** PS SoccerFreak, do I know you from Aspies For Freedom?

i have recurring nitemares, some of them being:

me being at highschool again and i cant find any of my classes
me at the mall with my family, (the being with my family is what makes it a nitemare)
me in a house hiding in a closet because a tornado is going to hit my house
me getting on the wrong bus, so now im lossed and cant get home
me walking home and never getting there
me falling, and never stoping

I got a little shiver reading these, LOL. It seems like our first recollectable nightmares are from about the same age and are of a far darker and more disturbing nature than the average nightmare... more violent, too. The night before your fourth birthday, Bou? ...that is one majorly freaky coincidence. I woke up shaken and terrified. My mom even remembers this dream, because the entire next day - my birthday - I was like a different person. She said it looked like I had come from a murder scene.

In my dream, I was in a dark place. There were people behind me, but I didn't turn to look at them. There was a baby girl in a high chair in front of me - I was still a little girl but somehow I was eye-level with the baby. I cooed at it affectionately and the people behind me were happy-ish (just a general feeling). Then all of a sudden, I stuck my hand through the baby's eye and the people behind me had a frightful, hateful feeling. Since this was only the day before my fourth birthday and I didn't have a clear grasp of anatomy so her eye was two-dimensional, and it was like she was hollow inside, and I stuck my hand down through her head and into her neck. I was still cooing and affectionate but I was saying, "Got your throat! Got your throat!" You know, like grownups do when they play "got your nose!"

You'd think since I was the one doing this to the baby it wouldn't be such a most terrible nightmare, but it was like it was me, but it wasn't me at the same time. Like when you smushed a bug for fun and then later realized what you'd done.

Aaaaanyway.... I would REALLY like to hear if anyone else had nightmares of a dark nature around this time in their life?

Addendum: I had night terrors. Anyone?

That's what I thought too.