Thank you for the excellent and shared experience Davit!
Red take what you need with the advice and move forward with the program to help assist you with your anxiety while sleeping. Writing is an excellent way to put down your thoughts and feelings, so use the diary to help you start.
Thanks for answering my post. It good to know that I am not the only one on this planet with this problem. These dreams are not always the same format but I do know that they are not real upon waking up. I do not take meds because they make me worse and also I want to be able to wake myself up and get out of the bad dreams. It is encourageing to hear you say that I will learn how to tell them to go away. Well I guess I will have to start getting serious about working the program if I want to get better. Thanks again Davit for listening and caring. I must say good night for now its getting late. Hopefully I will get a good nights sleep without a demons to fight and I hope you get a good nights sleep too.
The dreams were always there and every one has them it is just with anxiety disorders they get moved to the head of the line. There are a few things that make them worse, one of them being certain Beta Blockers.
You will learn how to tell them to go away. They don't really, they just get moved to the back of the line where they can do no harm. I make note of this very thing in one of my blogs. If the dreams are the same format then they are easier to handle. If as soon as you wake you write down what you dreamt. you will probably notice that it doesn't make sense or that it is something that you wouldn't normally do. This is why the fight or flight woke you. It doesn't know how to handle some thing that doesn't make sense. After a few times of doing this and saying "this is just stupid" they will start to fade. If they don't then modify them. Here is an example. I used to dream that I was stuck in a culvert. It was probably because the sheets were too tight. Now I would never crawl into a culvert but I couldn't shake the thought so I modified it. In my mind I would shrink myself down till I was so small I could sit in the culvert. It no longer bothered me. By the way having a smoke is called distracting and it is a way of breaking the hold that panic has on you. For us that don't smoke, writing what is happening at the moment works. between writing and positive thoughts you should be able to stop this routine, and it sounds like it has been going on long enough to have become a routine. You will probably get a few set backs even after you get this beat because of the length of time they have been happening. I was so happy when I got my first panic free night, and you will be too.
I have a lot of anxiety and ptsd type dreams while sleeping at night and wake up several times a night. Sometimes I am huffing and puffing with anxiety and agitated and it wakes me up and I have to get up out or lay in bed and have a smoke to relax and get back to sleep. Sometimes I just give up after waking up 4 or 5 times and just get up and stay up. This has been going on for about 10 yrs now. Does anyone else have this kind of problem or is it just me? I was just wondering. Is it common for dreams to play a part in this type of disorder or condition?