Asperger's and nightmares

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My childhood nightmares often had water play a central role, too. I read somewhere that autistics are likely to be fascinated by water (by its look and feel).

Makes you wonder about Lovecraft, and the intense fea♦r he had of water and water-born creatures!

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I used to only dream after I had thoroughly exhausted myself physically throughout the day (itself a tactic I employed as a teenager to combat my insomnia, which I believe is in turn a learned behavior from these childhood nightmares). Afterwards I seemed to dream more often, without the exercise.

Sonata, my sleeping pill, also causes me to dream easier.

Try that.

Nope. no nightmares at all.

Oh and I seem to enter REM as soon as I fall asleep. If I am promptly woken I can recall dreaming. But I used to sleep very oddly, several times per day, and I guess that makes sense. Somewhat like polyphasic sleep, which I am considering trying.

You reckon? Oh well... I always have a "black hole" in my head when I wake up... The studies have shown that it is common in those on autism spectrum to have problems with sleep... But they don't mention about the dreams. Anyone found something about dreams in aspies/autistics on the net?

I haven't had a nightmare in a very long.

Yeah - I used to have really bad (horrific) dreams and insomnia - combined with OCD was not good!

They stopped a while ago, according to a psychologist I was seeing at the time, they were to do with sexual frustration - embarrassing but probably accurate.

So no, I do not think adult Aspies are doomed to have horrendous nightmares, but since Aspies tend to have bad social skills and no romantic relationships I guess we aren't getting any action which causes the frustration.

I may be wrong.

most greatest of my nigthmares include war between robots and men it was acsually fun to shoot those metal thinks(i migth playing too much games lol)

I had probably a couple in my life, and I hardly ever dreamed. I actually don't dream in the typical sense now. I have to be partially awake to dream, and even then, it is more that I fall in and out of a trance like state and start to see things clear as a bell as if I were right there, parts of my life, etc.

That has only been going on for a month or so, but it went on several years ago as well.

A very interesting read so far.

I have less frequent nightmares than the average person. None, as far as I recall.

I think it's because my whole drams are atypical compared to the average too because I'm neurologically different.

To read about the opposite poses interesting questions.

Yes, I find this post to be fascinating as well. Like I said I have tried to find the difference between bad dreams and nightmares. I also want to find out about this Asperger's connection with nightmares. I will have to really take the time to research it lol. At least I know that I am not alone in having bad dreams that make no sense.

I thought that a "nightmare" was basically the same as a bad dream? 2 words that mean the same thing? At least, I use the 2 words interchangeably. (?)

When I was younger, I was very disturbed by bad dreams. Sometimes I was afraid to go to sleep, and I was afraid of the dark. As I got older, I sometimes still had nightmares, but at other times I had indescribably beautiful dreams. Nowadays, I rarely have bad dreams anymore. I think that nightmares are often a constructive way for your psyche to work out certain problems that are occurring in your life, or pushing you to make changes; therefore, the amount of nightmares you have at any given time may have to do mostly with what´s going on in your life at that time.

Like some people have mentioned, I also have problems with insomnia at times. I probably don´t get enough sleep...

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Last edited by claire-333 on 30 Nov 2008, 6:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I used to have very vivid horrifying nightmares. Not so much anymore though. I've described my dreams to a couple of my friends that are into magick and such, and they're so detailed and vivid, my friends believe I might've accessed the astral plane, lol.

What I really hate is when I have a horrible nightmare, and in the nightmare wake up, but actually go right into another nightmare. Has this happened to anyone else? When I actually did wake up I was terrified to get out of bed, because I didn't know if I was awake or dreaming.

There have also been a couple dreams that were so real that for awhile I forget they were dreams and think they really happen, and then I realize later they were dreams. Like once in seventh grade, I had a dream I yelled at my teacher, and when I went to class the next day, I was trying to remember if I dreamed it or if it really happened, but I could tell by the way she was acting it must've been just a dream.

Oh! I sleep talk too. And not just sleep mumble, like people can understand every word. Apparantly I've really creeped people out with things I've said in my sleep. o_0

As a child, there was one nightmare I used to get quite frequently - I would dream of an infinite space, a room (or sometimes a pit) that was infinitely large, and it would terrify me. There was a special quality about it - it wasn't like looking at the night sky, there was a "knowledge" of what I was seeing, and that was what was so scary; I knew I was seeing something impossible to comprehend. Freaky. I've not had it for years fortunately. I don't get many nightmares these days, maybe once a month.

I share the insomnia that other posters have mentioned above.

Once I had a dream about penguins in my bathroom. Then I had the same dream again (the same night), only that time I thought it was real. Probably one of the most terrifying dreams I've ever had.

Strange because in the waking world I like penguins.

I've always had bad nightmares as a kid. I remember when I was about 4, me, my mom, my sister and my mom's boyfriend watch what I found out later to be "Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn" in one scene a couple of Starfleet officers had worms that crawled into their ears. I had nightmares for about two weeks with that. I had to have the radio playing softly as I went to sleep. My mom's ex had to sleep in my sister's bed for the duration, the nightmares were that bad.

Same thing happened when I watched the final installment of Nightmare on Elm St where the Carlos kid was tortured by his hearing aid, though my episodes weren't as bad as the one above.

Fidgit, I have had that happen to me alot, where I seemed to be stuck in a nightmare or dream loop. I've had dreams where I would wake up and when I went back to sleep the dream picks up where it left off.

I too, also suffer from insomnia and take medications to help me sleep. This also could be contributed to my bi-polar.

I had frequent nightmares as a child, but that's probably normal. They mostly centered on my fear of heights and were very vivid, detailed, and colorful. I had a long epic negative dream resulting from reading "Redwall".

My dreams hardly wake me up anymore, though (unless they turn into lucid dreams and promptly end), but they can get quite disturbing. The ones I remember are very dark. Last night I dreamed of some huge massacre in a boarding school, a typically random and violent one. The more interesting ones are based on stuff I read, like one variation on the basic plot of "El sur" by Borges.