Nightmares

[Nomada]

I could write fairly long on this subject but I'll attempt to keep it as short as I can.

I've had the same nightmare since I was 13-14 years old:

Dreams flow "normally" up to a certain point, when I realize I am dreaming. At this moment --awaiting what I know is going to happen-- I have a small chance to say to myself: "shit, hold on to something, here it comes". And it does...

My body --in the dream-- gets VERY stiff, panic plunges into inconmesurability, and a swarm of little electric worms fills my bones (like when blood doesn't flow to a part of your body and when restituted feels funny). Whatever is going on in the dream goes fuking Chaos, everything melts and starts shaking at some unknown speed. Forms looses form. All the objects are reduced to long electromagnetic knives that fuck the shit of my body. Finally, like everything else, I start vibrating (actually feels like convulsing) and it goes on to eternity until I decide I've had enough and begin the often slow process of waking up, one, that is always sooooo hard. I make this huuge effort, motivated by the panic, to lift my body from bed and sit on it....I usually find myself standing on the floor of my bedroom or, sometimes, somewhere in my house (I have been known, since childhood, as a sleep-walky-talky).

The panic is just awful. I usually can't go back to sleep for a while after an experience like this and it happens rather frequently, once or twice every two weeks.

Beginning last year I started my dream journal and, after one particular LSD experience I had the idea that this panic is tainted as "awful" for no particular reason other than its amazing intensity. I decided to explore it. "Next time this happens I challenge it"--I said, in a rather ritualized evening with some cannabis and psycho-trance alone in my bedroom--"I'll laugh my ass off tauntingly and receive this energy open hearted."

And well, it happened again and it was one of the most profound experiences of my life. From one night to the next morning all my anxiety was deluded. I felt so liberated I didn't care I could die in the next five minutes.

The experiences rapidly diversified over the next weeks: all my dreams where filled with panic, the vibrating knives that when through my body, the intensity. But this time, I enjoyed it in some twisted way. I would imagine myself sitting on lotus position receiving the worms of convulsion, I would practice being silent while it rushed. I realized all my nightmares, ever, where just the product of my fears; the line between nightmare and dream blurred until it disappeared.

This week something new happened. After receiving the worms I felt I was moving through the knives' space (something different because I usually always stay put) and I could see different doors along the way. I entered one and I was in a monumental deja vu, a dream scenario I've experienced lots of time before. I would eat everything and everyone in it, I mean literally (!) as if I was possessed by some cannibalistic berserk. I would journey through the inter-space again and repeat the same liberating violence with whole scenarios in lots of different doors. Two nights ago, I had more dreams I can count, I stopped after spending forty minutes writing on my dream journal. Today I'm spending the day thinking about it.

It has been a beautiful and liberating experience. Wanted to share that's all.

Do you have "nightmares"? and how do you face them?

peace,
Nomada.

 

[skoeip]

whoaw interesting, is i lucid dreaming when you got these dreams? or do you have to go with the flow?

never had real nightmares that I can think of, but then again, I cant seem to remember my dreams for more than 20 minutes after waking up.

 

[Arcticpheonix]

That's incredible Nomada, congratulations on overcoming your nightmares. If you can realize you are dreaming while still asleep, you should look into lucid dreaming if you haven't done so already. It's basically what you have been doing. Congratulations again, nightmares can be incredibly hard to handle but you seem to have dealt with them very well.


@skoeip:
If you can't remember your dreams for very long, you should try a dream journal. So long as you write in it RIGHT AWAY after you wake up, you'll be able to remember your dreams just by reading it. I can't stress the "right away" enough though, if wait even five or ten minutes, it becomes very difficult to make an entry.

 

[Dreamsters]

I've been having this nightmare almost once a month now a days but it used to be nightly for awhile. I see myself in these old 1940's gangster suite and all of a sudden this little girl gets hit by an old model t car, as she's laying on her stomach I run over to see if she's ok and as I flip her over her face is nothing but this black hole, that has a slight suction to it. The suction begins to get stronger and stronger and I start running away. The faster I run the more furious the suction is. Eventually I give up and get sucked in. Just before I get sucked in I wake up out of breath.

Like I said though I've had this nightmare repeatedly for almost 3 years now. About 6 months ago I realized as the blackhole stared in my dream I can just end the dream and get sucked in and wake up. But I can't always tell myself to just get sucked in.

Sorry to get off topic here, but I've had trouble falling asleep for a real long time now, only thing that really helps is this prescription I have of xanax and I really hate the stuff, are there any natural sleep aides?

 

[Nomada]

thanks Arcticpheonix, the journey has just begun! (well, one can always say that)

Sorry to get off topic here, but I've had trouble falling asleep for a real long time now, only thing that really helps is this prescription I have of xanax and I really hate the stuff, are there any natural sleep aides?

Maybe some Tilia tea with a little warm milk. Don't eat before going to bed, for me that's at least two hours. Wear yourself down during the day --I always say to myself; I too have sleeping problems--, get up early in the morning and live, move, dance as if it where the last. If so, in the night I end up running away from sleep not after it.

black hole, that has a slight suction to it.

The image sticks, where is it sucking into?

 

[Dreamsters]

I have no idea where it sucks too, once I give in and stop fighting it I wake up panting...

As for the Tilia tea I will have to try and find some.

 

[IJesusChrist]

I challenged my nightmares before... they always win. :?

 

[misfit]

I had a nightmare as a kid that I felt being struggled in a very weird way. Not like I was suffocating, but rather my mind felt struggled.

Like my mind would be in the middle of two balloons, an there was a never ending pressure.

The collors I felt were black and a little yellow.

The ending of it, just before I wake up, would be the classic feeling of being falling forever on empty space. And I would wake up scared, with a weird pain in the chest and feeling dissociated from reality.

Eventually, from time to time I have the feeling of that dream. Not in my dreams or while I'm sleeping. But when I'm awake.

 

[Crimzen]

When i was about 7 or 8 i used to get a recurring nightmare about a zombie or living corpse thing, it would chase me through the entire dream and i often woke up unhappy from it
it happened very often, then one day i was lucky enough to be lucid in this nightmare and i was fed up with it, so after hiding from the thing for half the nightmare i found a broom handle and beat the zombie with it until i broke it into pieces which i then proceeded to throw into a volcano (which was always there in the recurring dream) and since then i havnt had the same nightmare again
i felt liberated after doing that, was a big thing at the time for me

 

[tryptonaut]

I've regularly had nightmares where I was stuck somewhere unable to move. I could move my limbs very slowly with a lot of effort, but then it didn't have any effect like I was swimming in gel.
Sometimes I would move a little, but actually I needed to run (from something mostly) but I was caught in place because my limbs felt like they were 90% paralysed and I needed all the power I had to just make one or two very slow steps.

Haven't had that kind of nightmare in a long while.

Another nightmare is being caught in some house, sometimes the rooms are getting smaller and smaller, and always I don't have a clue where I am but I need to go some place and can't because I'm lost in a weird, dark house.

To me it seems that with tripping experience and regular tripping on larger doses of mushrooms, my dreams have gotten brighter and friendlier. Maybe because I'm having to deal with a lot of darkness on shroom trips as well, and I learned to be stronger.
It just seems that almost all dreams I remember from since long ago were always dark, night, colorless. In recent years I've had more and more dreams were there was bright sunlight and open spaces.

 

[Dreamsters]

I have the falling dream all the time. By falling dream I mean where I just feel like I keep falling and falling and falling. I only have it when either I am starting to fall asleep, or if I actually roll out of bed.