Embrace the nightmare. Learn to take joy in the thrill like a roller coaster. They’ll stop at some point when you no longer view them the same, saddly. I learned to like them as a teen and then i either just stopped having them, or stopped remembering them compared to me other dreams.
You are in this dream but we do not grant you the rank of happy. Please, take a seat.
Same problem. After having a nightmare I wake up with a headache from the stress/anxiety.
Best solution I came up with, try to force yourself to become lucid in every dream by realizing that shitty experiences aren’t real (anymore) so you must be dreaming. Once you know you’re dreaming, you can consciously decide to not care anymore. Laugh in the face of your monsters/adversary, and calm down.
Whenever I relive happy memories in my dreams I wake up sad because I remember what I’ve lost.
Still better than re-living traumatic memories…
Observational bias : You remember only the bad ones, especially as they are the ones most likely to wake you, and thus cross the memory barrier to the conscious. You likely have good ones as well that you don’t remember.
If it really bothers you consider keeping a dream journal for a few months which should make you able to remember more, and more of your dreams. If it turns out you really have no good dreams, the next step is to learn lucid dreaming and fix that shit. If that’s too much work, you can try repeating “I will have good dreams” in your head as you go to sleep, you might be lucky.
I genuinely never remember dreams. Until one day recently I dreamed of dreaming of my work laptop getting stolen, then waking up (in the dream) and going to work while telling a friend about the internal dream.
same, even remembering a dream is a big moment for me, I have to tell people.
Your brain is there to keep you alive
It isn’t there to make you happy
Life isn’t fair, it never was, and it never will be
Just make the most of things, because it’s all we have
“Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight
Your brain is there to keep you alive
No matter the technology we develop, will we ever escape the mindset of being prey?
It’s not a mindset, it’s our whole system. We’d have to be made of something else.
Or de-condition maybe.
You must have done something bad to deserve this. Trying thinking about everything bad you’ve ever done. That’ll help.
I think it has something to do with your brain playing both sides of the dream. You are coming up with how to react, but you are also at the same time coming up with what happens next. So if you dream a lion and you are like “uhoh, what if the lion tried to chase me, that would be a problem, I’d have to run away,” then you’re now dreaming about a lion that is chasing you and how you are running away.
Am American. I guess the solution is always guns. Guns, guns, and guns. Kill anything that moves. Have a problem? Pew pew pew. Kill it dead, then kill it again. YEEHAW! (not texan, not white, not even born in this country, but I thought it’s funny, I guess I’m assimulating very well xD)
This is a common symptom of CPTSD, if that is relevant to your prior experiences
Oh fuck.
Family, lovely isn’t it.
I remember when I was younger, my life was more peaceful because I suppressed the memories of my brother’s abusive behaviors. But as we keep fighting more and more, those memories resurfaced. Also parents are yell at me all the time. Mom why? 😢 You were supposed to protect me… where was that protection when I needed you the most.
Omg I remember that day when I told my mom I wanna kms then she said she regretted giving birth to me.
Now she’s telling me she loves me and when I confront her about it she never meant the bad thing she said.
Bipolar much?
Or it’s filial piety bs. Fucking hell. Fucking confucious runing lives from the grave.
Sleep/central apnea diet/medication/alcohol/lack-of-weed are the four horsemen to my nightmares. The damn persistent dreams where my legs take 1000% effort to just crawl. Usually I have to walk/lunge backwards just to get anywhere. Fuckin weird and constant.
That’s 100% your gateway to lucid dreaming though. If you can pick out one or two things that for whatever reason happen in most of your dreams, you just need to be able to remember them as they’re happening and you can take control. Of course, then you have to balance it with not realizing you’re asleep too hard, otherwise you wake up.
Has anyone else had that dream where a friend is explaining some sort of obscure trumpet offshoot with a tremolo key and a ridiculously intricate tuning compensator valve, and then he’s holding one except it’s basically a very small trombone with a weird apparatus off to one side, and then he plays it and the overtones are so incredibly rich that a single note almost sounds like a chord?
No?
Just me?
Okay.
Man I had the exact same dream last week
Two factors in my view:
- You don’t remember the good dreams, because we humans generally focus more on the bad things. Dreams generally don’t get remembered very easily, so you only remember the very impactful ones, which would thus be the bad ones. It is possible though to want to focus more on the good stuff and train yourself to do it.
- Afaik, you do have more bad dreams if your life is filled with anxiety or danger or whatever. Your dreams in some sense are a reflection of your waking life. So if your life is very stressful, maybe try to change that, and that might also change the dreams.
I’m at the point where I don’t even remember the bad dreams, my brain just blocks it all out when I wake up lol. According to my SO though, I have very intense, likely unpleasant dreams. Maybe you can be like me one day OP!
I’ve read if we wake up knowing what we dreamt about we likely aren’t getting enough sleep. Since then I’ve worked hard in my sleep cycle and haven’t remembered more than a dream or two a year in more than a decade. That was my solution, maybe give it a go?
You might. But the scary or anxiety producing dreams are more likely to wake you up.
As far as I know- and I’m far from an expert here- dreams are really just your brain trying to make sense of your brain doing whatever the fuck it is your brain is doing why you sleep. (maybe a de-fragmentation cycle to keep everything nice and functional? bad analogy, probably.)
in any case, your brain is trying to make sense of signals and synapses firing off, in what is basically a random pattern. so it cobbles together a reality as best it can and fit things to that.
Its also trying to maintain a certain amount of continuity with where you are. So, if you’re anxious while you fall a sleep, your brain is going to incorporate that anxiety.
Also, as Bigfish mentioned, the freaky/weird/anxious ones are more likely to wake you up so that you actually remember them.
In any case, I would suggest maybe changing your bedtime routine up and finding something positive/calming to focus on. crotchet works well for me. but it could be just about anything. a feel-good novel, or whatever. (I also suggest turning the screens off.)
might not change that the only things you remember are the unpleasant ones, but it might make them less frequent.
This is mostly correct. It’s also the case that “dreams” are formed after you wake up. You aren’t dreaming while you are asleep, your brain is firing random shit that makes no sense. As soon as you start to wake it tries to piece together what the fuck was going on into something resembling a narrative. This piecing together is part of the waking up and not a part of the sleeping. This is why you can have a dream about an alarm going of for seemingly tens of minutes or even hours, while you are being woken up by your alarm going off. Your alarm probably hasn’t been going for more than a few seconds, but your brain incorporates it into the narrative. Now this isn’t to say you can’t have a bad dream or nightmare and be woken up by them. The random firing can definitely cause enough stress to wake you up. Especially if you are ill (fever dreams) or under a lot of stress in general, your brain can misbehave during sleep and wake you up. It’s just that the “story” part of the dream only happens when you wake up, while you are sleeping it is random.
Oh this is interesting. I’ve recently come to terms with the amazing plasticity of the brain. So if the brain assembles a narrative only after the flood of random stimuli, it should be possible to train it to use certain baselines for what narratives to assemble.
Any neurologists and psychiatrists and other brain specialists in the house?
IIRC, what you’re describing is called Lucid Dreaming. most people who lucid dream are aware, though some can actively control their dreams. The degree of control varies, though.
I think it sounds like something different. Lucid dreaming is being in a state between awake and asleep to stay in first person control with the brain in unrestrained creative mode, while this is about training the brain to make up desired interpretations after waking up from full sleep mode.
