PTSD: Dreams, Nightmares and Healing

PTSD can bring nightmares and dreams.
As scary as some of them are…
Rest assured everything about our bodies is on our side,
including our subconscious sleeping mind.

PTSD, dreams, nightmares… To sleep, perchance to dream… After these hijackings we look to sleep as a respite from all the daytime whirling thoughts. Our bodies need more sleep. Sleep as much as your bodies desires as you heal and extract them from your bones.

During PTSD we want to sleep and sleep and sleep. And we need to. We aren’t being lazy, or avoiding moving on; we are healing and we are moving on. – All that extra sleep heals PTSD and is purposeful. Not only our our bodies designed to heal us in sleep, those dreams we have are on our side as well.

Dreams and Sleep Heal Trauma

Moving on from traumatic experiences takes extra sleep and with that sleep comes dreaming, the life of the unconscious mind. Sleep is essential. Sleep occurs in stages beginning with light sleep and deepening into what’s called REM sleep, standing for rapid eye movement.

When we look down to the ground at a bug in our dream, though we’re asleep our eyes physically move down to look at that bug! – Amazing!

During REM sleep we dream. The dreams contain messages about ourselves. In addition during this miraculous deeply restful sleep, scientists have discovered REM sleep has the effect of editing memories that no longer serve us from our minds. How amazing is that!

PTSD Dreams and REM Sleep Diminish Bad Memories

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As an example of this editing out the memories that don’t serve us, take a soldier in combat. During war the sound of a helicopter might signal an oncoming immediate attack and create the reaction of ducking for cover while the heart races, cortisol and adrenaline spike, and fear flood the mind and body.

When returning to civilian life, this response to the sound of a helicopter is out of place and becomes a handicap. It’s during REM sleep that the body discovers and sorts out memories we don’t need for our current circumstances. -Incredible.

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Our Brains Is Incredibly Active During Sleep

Rapid eye movement, REM occurs in deep sleep. That very nice, restful deep sleep is the sleep that brings our dreams. We don’t know what’s happening outside of our sleep, but there’s a lot going on inside of us even as we sleep.

We aren’t conscious of it, but during REM one part of the brain remains “awake” as we sleep and dream. This awake bit of our brain lets out bodies participate in the dream and takes care of us too, signaling things like, roll over, or kick off a blanket your’e too hot... How incredible is that, that we take care of ourselves while we’re asleep.

Our bodies also participate in the dream… If in the dream we go upstairs, our eyes move up and up and up. When we look down to the ground at a bug in our dream, though we’re asleep our eyes physically move down to look at that bug! – Amazing!

PTSD Dreams and Nightmares Are Messages of Healing

Early humans wondered and thought about the meaning and purpose of dreams and we still do today. Like every other thing about this experience we call life, new understanding, shifting perspectives and discoveries are continuous.

There’s a wonderful series on Netflix in which one episode is devoted to explaining the current understanding of what dreams are made of and why we have them.

Breaking Up With Evil

Breaking Up with Evil: Escaping Coercive Control on Amazon

Five women’s true stories of being ensnared hauled through the confusion, lies, fear, and pain, and breaking away.

Told in their own words, they leave nothing unsaid. Find validation and see new glimpses of the truth as they share their stories… Stories that could be any of ours.

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Dream Away… And Dream About Whatever We Like

While our dreams are healing us, we can direct or alter dreams, as we dream. The ability to remember and to influence our own dreams is called lucid dreaming. It’s a skill we develop like any other skill.

I’ve experienced this myself and it’s documented in information about lucid dreaming that if we tell ourselves to remember our dreams before we fall asleep, we do. The more we do this and other kinds of lucid dreaming skill development we can talk to ourselves in our dreams and redirect the action in our dreams.

The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of

All the images and thoughts and emotions in our dreams come from our very own memories. The people in our dreams represent ourselves or our state of mind or fears or desires.

Learning to decipher what we see in our dream as encouraging rather than scary or weird is key. A great way to do this is to write out our dreams.

Have some paper and a pen or pencil on your nightstand. Then, in that sleeping moment when we drift to consciousness and are also aware of the dream we’re having reach out for that paper and pen and write. Scribble out the dream as it is in your mind, and without attempting to start at the beginning.

Dream and Stream of Consciousness

Begin with writing from what’s in your mind at that moment as you wake out of the dream. Let the dream flow from your mind onto the paper in its own way. Spelling, grammar, punctuation, and penmanship are not important. It’s fine to get up and write the dream as soon as you can.

This isn’t about writing a beginning, middle, end, essay, or linear narrative of the dream… let it flow.

There’s bound to be a moment when a phrase comes out of your body, your mind, and your hand onto the paper that is the essence of the dream. It will likely surprise you. It will be an “ahahhaaa” moment. This won’t be a literal scene from the dream, but more your unconscious thoughts about the dream that are not felt or in our awareness during the dream. – It’s like magic.

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Homeopathy for Nightmares: Shock, Trauma, Grief, Loss, Anxiety in the Aftermath

There’s a nifty homeopathic remedy to handle and reduce or end our terrorizing nightmares in the aftermath. This little remedy is for shock, trauma, loss, grief, anxiety, and the scary films playing in our heads at night. It’s called Aconite. Or more fully, Aconitum Napellus. It’s going to say in the description in the Amazon link there that it’s’ for “fever”…and it is. It’s also for shock, trauma, grief, loss, anxiety, and nightmares. You can read more about it and other homeopathic remedies for PTSD here >> The Homeopathic Coach, Dr. Sam Adkins.

Our Natural Body and Selves are On Our Side

This whole odyssey through hell and back to the whole is a time we get to decide what we believe and why. Our dreams are here to support us. Our bodies are naturally designed to erase and edit out traumatic memories as we sleep! We can let loose of the old habits we expertly developed to stay safe. These are things we don’t need them anymore.

Our dreams and nightmares as well hold messages of how amazing we are. Dream away the trauma and these parasitic predators. They can fade, dissolve, diminish and no longer take up space…not in our lives and not in our dreams.

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As a certified coach, upholding industry standards I strive to inform, educate, invite thought and dialogue, to co-plan, co-strategize, advise, consult, refer, recommend, train, teach, guide and coach people in guided recovery and discovery specific to these crimes, and from hell and broken in the aftermath to whole again, and more. You decide what winning is.