BigBoss
Your Local Scrub
Does anybody get nightmares when/everytime something/a certain thing has happened? Does anybody have anything that triggers nightmares for them? Like any certain set of events that, if it happens, it will always 100% of the time trigger a nightmare when you lay down to go to sleep.
I was just wondering because I get nightmares when I undergo opiate withdrawal symptoms. I'm on Methadone, which starts to ware down right around Midnight. But earlier last week I had accidentally spilled one of my bottles down the sink and, the day before yesterday, I had to go through the day without a dose. I was under withdrawal's that day, which weren't anything close to terrible whatsoever, because 1) it was only the first day, so it wasn't absolutely all-out terrible and 2) Methadone withdrawals, while they last longer, aren't as severe. Heroin (never touched it, and never will) and opiate painkillers last 72 hours for the acute withdrawal symptoms, but they are very severe. Methadone lasts 2 weeks (which originally scared the living hell out of me when I researched that), but their withdrawal symptoms aren't nearly as severe. I haven't experienced severe withdrawal symptoms (meaning as bad as they were when I was prescribed painkillers (I originally took oxycodone, ten milligrams. Then my doctor jumped me up to 30's one day when I told him I was having trouble sleeping after work (I used to work at a health-food grocery store, which was called Sunflower Market when I worked there. It's Sprouts now. I'm working at Wal-Mart now). Those helped tremendously (I didn't know they were the highest you could go to the time though), but then the suddenly took me off them and then pointed me to a Methadone clinic, with no real reasonable explanation for taking me off of them other than "he could lose his license for prescribing painkillers of such high dose to a minor" (I was under 18 at the time when I got hit by a pick up truck as I was crossing the street), and that's how I ended up where I am now. Anyways, I'm getting off track.
When I was taking painkillers (oxycodone, hydrocodone, morphine, oxycontin, etc. there would often be times when I didn't have the medication and I was under withdrawal symptoms (this was before, of course, I was approved to be enrolled at an outpatient methadone rehabilitation clinic [it's known as ASAP. Look up ASAP Methadone Clinic Albuquerque on Google, and you'll hit the website of my clinic). Anyways, when I would come under withdrawal symptoms, of course it would be hard to sleep. But when I was able to sleep (albeit only for maybe two to four hours at a time), I remember having nightmares (very, very vivid and realistic nightmares).
These nightmares, when describing them to people, didn't "shock them into terror" just from the contents of the nightmares or anything. It would seem like just ordinary nightmares to anybody else. But, I always had them when I was withdrawing, and even though these nightmares don't sound extremely dreadful to other people, for some reason they always had a deep, emotional impact on me. I would just find myself waking up (not jumping out of the bed, but quickly gathering myself) and just feeling a very, very deep sense of emotional impact and dread. I didn't feel like I was terrified, I just always felt like something majorly negative had just happened to me, like I had just found my child (if I had one) dead in his room. It wasn't a fearful or terrifying impact in which these nightmares would get me, it was just always that deep sense of emotional dread and hopelessness/helplessness, and they only come around when I'm withdrawing. I would wake up everytime drenched in cold sweat, and I can always remember that everytime I would wake up from one of these nightmares, I would feel just like I had felt during my father's funeral (those of you who know me well, know I haven't had a lot of people in my life, and those that I did have are gone. But we'll not get into that). Just complete, emotionally disturbing, hopelessness feeling of terrifying dread. It's one of the worst feelings I've ever had in the world, coming close (but not quite) to comparing it to the initial shock of when you find out a loved one you we're very close to has passed away.
A quick note here about my prior history; when I was 16 I was hit by a pick-up truck (small, two-door version of one of the older Fords) as I was crossing the street. My injuries were: to my left arm's shoulder, which was highly dislocated; two injuries to my head, both of which ended up in skull fractures, one of which was hemorrhaging inside of my brain (so they say) but apparently the bleeding stopped on it's own, which I was assured was the best case scenario; and finally slight damage to my lower spine. Not the spinal cord/bone itself but to the sciatic nervous system in the lower back that links to the spine. This pain from my damaged sciatic nerve, along with the occasional migraines I now get every once in awhile (I never, ever got migraines before this) make up the bulk of what I know to be permanent issues with my accident. My doc originally prescribed me Oxycodone, 10mg pills without the acetaminophen so they would release faster, but then later switched me to the ones WITH acetaminophen to combat my migraine pains, he get me the ones with 10mg oxycodone/375 (I think, might be 365 I'm not sure) acetaminophen. It was a oblong, thick yellow pill that held the letters WATSON and three numbers below (I don't remember the exact number, but the first number was a 5, and the second and third numbers may have been 7 - 3. Anyways I'm now enrolled to an outpatient substance abuse clinic as per doctors suggestion (after he took them away from me... bastard) to get off of opiates permanently. I'm not going to sit here and give you any bullshit about how it's been a "fight" or "struggle", that's not why I made this thread...
I want to know if dreams, nightmares more to the point, can be triggered by certain things or actions. (EDIT: I've been reading through other forums on the net out there, and there are also other people who experience nightmares, as I do, when under withdrawal symptoms of opiates and/or alcohol (which I'm not physically addicted to. There's even some people who, if they don't have a small cup of coffee or a cigarette before they go to sleep will always experience nightmares, but they don't describe it the same as having being vivid or emotionally unsettling).
Here's an example for a few of the dreams I can remember having (that I tried to write down best I could remember):
• I remember, when I was still on opiate-based pain killers having a dream something like this when I was withdrawing. I was in a line of several people. All of them were nude, and all of them were crying. They all looked extremely saddened. There were more and more of these lines of people formed up on the left and right sides of me and my own line, and we are all shackled together. There is a meat-hook type device ripped deeply into my elbows and knees, and is connected to other meat-hook like devices that are ripped in to the other people in the exact same spots. Ahead of us is a large, heavy wagon forcing us to walk, we were all nude. We're just walking forward all together, and I don't remember them crying anymore. Weird. When I woke up, I remember the first feeling from the withdrawal symptoms that hit me, was the joint pains, more specifically in my elbows and knees....
And then after my father died, more recently, I had these (I've had many more, it's just these are the only I can remember in detail:
• Me and my father are hiding behind a building. We're looking for someone, but I'm not sure who. We start slowly approaching a man. I notice the building we're at is a school. As we get closer and closer to this man, no one else around, he suddenly draws a chainsaw and tries to strike at me. I cross my arms in front of it, with some type of metallic gloves on. I can feel the burn of the chainsaw slowly cutting through the gloves. I release one of the arms I had crossed to block him, and hit him in the head. As he falls to the ground, I sit atop his body just beating his head in with these metallic gloves on over and over again (one thing I can remember that I should note, is that he had a weird mask). I then hear my father cry out my name in fear as the fight is over, as if he's worried about my safety. As I find him though, and approach him, he is lying on the ground, his stomach cut open with intestines hanging outward. Last thing in that dream I can remember was holding his (now) lifeless body and crying, rocking back and forth. I woke up with tears on my face and again like always, a deep sense of emotional loss and dread.
• This one is a little bit harder to remember since I don't remember as much of it as the other dreams I posted above. But, I'll write here what I do remember. I remember being in some kind of plane. From the way people perceive things, it looked immediately as if it was Hell. Rivers of lava, the ground being black stone, broken steel buildings in the distance (funny, now that I think about it, it reminds me a lot of the plane of oblivion in TES 4). Finally, I remember reaching, and talking to, a demonic creature. This creature was very large from what I can remember, and hovered over me hundreds of feet high. I can't remember any exact words of the conversation I had with him, but I do remember that I was asking him about my father, and almost as if I was bargaining with him - again, having to do with my father. That was the end of the dream.
• Finally, this last one I'm going to put up, I also don't remember well. I remember me being in the middle of the desert. All my major family members, including my father, are there. I can't remember exactly what I said, but again I'm having a conversation, this time with my father and we're both distressed. I remember clearly knowing that he was about to leave. Exactly to where I don't know, but he was going to leave and apparently, forever. Again I don't remember exact words, but I remember arguing with him about not leaving/why does he have to leave, and while he wasn't angry with me, he seemed to be more saddened when he would reply. I remember all the major family members there with us were happy, as if they were celebrating something. This is all I can remember from this dream. While this dream wasn't exactly terrifying, as always, I again wake up with a sense of emotional distress.
So, I don't know why, but for me when and if I ever go without my medication, I have these very vivid, deeply emotionally impacting (always in a negative way) nightmares. But when I have my mediation, I never have them....
Does anyone else have something like this? A certain event which is 100% sure to trigger a series of nightmares? Does anybody else have any kind of connection like this, because I'm really interested in figuring out what this is, and hopefully figuring out a way to keep them from happening again if I ever get myself stuck in a situation, or when I eventually decide to get of my medication I don't want to be kept up all night because of vivid nightmares. Thoughts, opinions, anything? Anything would be definitely welcome guys, thanks (also I removed the last one since checking my "dream journal" which my counselor (at the clinic) advised me to keep, the details aren't that vague and I'm not 100% sure what exactly happened there, all I know is I was talking to myself (literally, to myself. As if you're talking to another person who looks, thinks, and acts like, and is you), and we we're arguing over something, but I'm not so sure it was about what I originally thought I remembered it to be about). Thanks guys.
I was just wondering because I get nightmares when I undergo opiate withdrawal symptoms. I'm on Methadone, which starts to ware down right around Midnight. But earlier last week I had accidentally spilled one of my bottles down the sink and, the day before yesterday, I had to go through the day without a dose. I was under withdrawal's that day, which weren't anything close to terrible whatsoever, because 1) it was only the first day, so it wasn't absolutely all-out terrible and 2) Methadone withdrawals, while they last longer, aren't as severe. Heroin (never touched it, and never will) and opiate painkillers last 72 hours for the acute withdrawal symptoms, but they are very severe. Methadone lasts 2 weeks (which originally scared the living hell out of me when I researched that), but their withdrawal symptoms aren't nearly as severe. I haven't experienced severe withdrawal symptoms (meaning as bad as they were when I was prescribed painkillers (I originally took oxycodone, ten milligrams. Then my doctor jumped me up to 30's one day when I told him I was having trouble sleeping after work (I used to work at a health-food grocery store, which was called Sunflower Market when I worked there. It's Sprouts now. I'm working at Wal-Mart now). Those helped tremendously (I didn't know they were the highest you could go to the time though), but then the suddenly took me off them and then pointed me to a Methadone clinic, with no real reasonable explanation for taking me off of them other than "he could lose his license for prescribing painkillers of such high dose to a minor" (I was under 18 at the time when I got hit by a pick up truck as I was crossing the street), and that's how I ended up where I am now. Anyways, I'm getting off track.
When I was taking painkillers (oxycodone, hydrocodone, morphine, oxycontin, etc. there would often be times when I didn't have the medication and I was under withdrawal symptoms (this was before, of course, I was approved to be enrolled at an outpatient methadone rehabilitation clinic [it's known as ASAP. Look up ASAP Methadone Clinic Albuquerque on Google, and you'll hit the website of my clinic). Anyways, when I would come under withdrawal symptoms, of course it would be hard to sleep. But when I was able to sleep (albeit only for maybe two to four hours at a time), I remember having nightmares (very, very vivid and realistic nightmares).
These nightmares, when describing them to people, didn't "shock them into terror" just from the contents of the nightmares or anything. It would seem like just ordinary nightmares to anybody else. But, I always had them when I was withdrawing, and even though these nightmares don't sound extremely dreadful to other people, for some reason they always had a deep, emotional impact on me. I would just find myself waking up (not jumping out of the bed, but quickly gathering myself) and just feeling a very, very deep sense of emotional impact and dread. I didn't feel like I was terrified, I just always felt like something majorly negative had just happened to me, like I had just found my child (if I had one) dead in his room. It wasn't a fearful or terrifying impact in which these nightmares would get me, it was just always that deep sense of emotional dread and hopelessness/helplessness, and they only come around when I'm withdrawing. I would wake up everytime drenched in cold sweat, and I can always remember that everytime I would wake up from one of these nightmares, I would feel just like I had felt during my father's funeral (those of you who know me well, know I haven't had a lot of people in my life, and those that I did have are gone. But we'll not get into that). Just complete, emotionally disturbing, hopelessness feeling of terrifying dread. It's one of the worst feelings I've ever had in the world, coming close (but not quite) to comparing it to the initial shock of when you find out a loved one you we're very close to has passed away.
A quick note here about my prior history; when I was 16 I was hit by a pick-up truck (small, two-door version of one of the older Fords) as I was crossing the street. My injuries were: to my left arm's shoulder, which was highly dislocated; two injuries to my head, both of which ended up in skull fractures, one of which was hemorrhaging inside of my brain (so they say) but apparently the bleeding stopped on it's own, which I was assured was the best case scenario; and finally slight damage to my lower spine. Not the spinal cord/bone itself but to the sciatic nervous system in the lower back that links to the spine. This pain from my damaged sciatic nerve, along with the occasional migraines I now get every once in awhile (I never, ever got migraines before this) make up the bulk of what I know to be permanent issues with my accident. My doc originally prescribed me Oxycodone, 10mg pills without the acetaminophen so they would release faster, but then later switched me to the ones WITH acetaminophen to combat my migraine pains, he get me the ones with 10mg oxycodone/375 (I think, might be 365 I'm not sure) acetaminophen. It was a oblong, thick yellow pill that held the letters WATSON and three numbers below (I don't remember the exact number, but the first number was a 5, and the second and third numbers may have been 7 - 3. Anyways I'm now enrolled to an outpatient substance abuse clinic as per doctors suggestion (after he took them away from me... bastard) to get off of opiates permanently. I'm not going to sit here and give you any bullshit about how it's been a "fight" or "struggle", that's not why I made this thread...
I want to know if dreams, nightmares more to the point, can be triggered by certain things or actions. (EDIT: I've been reading through other forums on the net out there, and there are also other people who experience nightmares, as I do, when under withdrawal symptoms of opiates and/or alcohol (which I'm not physically addicted to. There's even some people who, if they don't have a small cup of coffee or a cigarette before they go to sleep will always experience nightmares, but they don't describe it the same as having being vivid or emotionally unsettling).
Here's an example for a few of the dreams I can remember having (that I tried to write down best I could remember):
• I remember, when I was still on opiate-based pain killers having a dream something like this when I was withdrawing. I was in a line of several people. All of them were nude, and all of them were crying. They all looked extremely saddened. There were more and more of these lines of people formed up on the left and right sides of me and my own line, and we are all shackled together. There is a meat-hook type device ripped deeply into my elbows and knees, and is connected to other meat-hook like devices that are ripped in to the other people in the exact same spots. Ahead of us is a large, heavy wagon forcing us to walk, we were all nude. We're just walking forward all together, and I don't remember them crying anymore. Weird. When I woke up, I remember the first feeling from the withdrawal symptoms that hit me, was the joint pains, more specifically in my elbows and knees....
And then after my father died, more recently, I had these (I've had many more, it's just these are the only I can remember in detail:
• Me and my father are hiding behind a building. We're looking for someone, but I'm not sure who. We start slowly approaching a man. I notice the building we're at is a school. As we get closer and closer to this man, no one else around, he suddenly draws a chainsaw and tries to strike at me. I cross my arms in front of it, with some type of metallic gloves on. I can feel the burn of the chainsaw slowly cutting through the gloves. I release one of the arms I had crossed to block him, and hit him in the head. As he falls to the ground, I sit atop his body just beating his head in with these metallic gloves on over and over again (one thing I can remember that I should note, is that he had a weird mask). I then hear my father cry out my name in fear as the fight is over, as if he's worried about my safety. As I find him though, and approach him, he is lying on the ground, his stomach cut open with intestines hanging outward. Last thing in that dream I can remember was holding his (now) lifeless body and crying, rocking back and forth. I woke up with tears on my face and again like always, a deep sense of emotional loss and dread.
• This one is a little bit harder to remember since I don't remember as much of it as the other dreams I posted above. But, I'll write here what I do remember. I remember being in some kind of plane. From the way people perceive things, it looked immediately as if it was Hell. Rivers of lava, the ground being black stone, broken steel buildings in the distance (funny, now that I think about it, it reminds me a lot of the plane of oblivion in TES 4). Finally, I remember reaching, and talking to, a demonic creature. This creature was very large from what I can remember, and hovered over me hundreds of feet high. I can't remember any exact words of the conversation I had with him, but I do remember that I was asking him about my father, and almost as if I was bargaining with him - again, having to do with my father. That was the end of the dream.
• Finally, this last one I'm going to put up, I also don't remember well. I remember me being in the middle of the desert. All my major family members, including my father, are there. I can't remember exactly what I said, but again I'm having a conversation, this time with my father and we're both distressed. I remember clearly knowing that he was about to leave. Exactly to where I don't know, but he was going to leave and apparently, forever. Again I don't remember exact words, but I remember arguing with him about not leaving/why does he have to leave, and while he wasn't angry with me, he seemed to be more saddened when he would reply. I remember all the major family members there with us were happy, as if they were celebrating something. This is all I can remember from this dream. While this dream wasn't exactly terrifying, as always, I again wake up with a sense of emotional distress.
So, I don't know why, but for me when and if I ever go without my medication, I have these very vivid, deeply emotionally impacting (always in a negative way) nightmares. But when I have my mediation, I never have them....
Does anyone else have something like this? A certain event which is 100% sure to trigger a series of nightmares? Does anybody else have any kind of connection like this, because I'm really interested in figuring out what this is, and hopefully figuring out a way to keep them from happening again if I ever get myself stuck in a situation, or when I eventually decide to get of my medication I don't want to be kept up all night because of vivid nightmares. Thoughts, opinions, anything? Anything would be definitely welcome guys, thanks (also I removed the last one since checking my "dream journal" which my counselor (at the clinic) advised me to keep, the details aren't that vague and I'm not 100% sure what exactly happened there, all I know is I was talking to myself (literally, to myself. As if you're talking to another person who looks, thinks, and acts like, and is you), and we we're arguing over something, but I'm not so sure it was about what I originally thought I remembered it to be about). Thanks guys.
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