Dealing with PTSD Nightmares

My old therapist taught me a way to deal with intrusive thoughts right before bed. She had me start imagining a room. Very detailed; texture, size, color, sound, shape, lighting. Then imagine a shape, again very detailed. Then imagine the shape doing a movement in that room, again very detailed. Is it making a noise, can you feel the movement, where in the room is it located. That helped alleviate most of my PTSD dreams.

Achilles thank you I appreciate your advice. I will try these techniques

Neptune I took prazosin for a while too and it gave me terrible nightmares. Everyone is different I’m glad it works for you!

Prazosin has been super helpful for me as well. I still have infrequent nightmares, and here's how I tackle them! It's the nightmare protocol from the DBT workbook, but adapted slightly: 1. Do something that makes you happy and calms you down. Personal examples are meditation, watching a comfort show, or listening to calm music. You need to be in a good space to work on anything PTSD related. 2. Choose a recurring nightmare that you want to work on. DO NOT target the most traumatic nightmare first. It's something that you should work up to. 3. Write down things about your target nightmare. This includes sensory descriptions (anything your 5 senses pick up). 4. Choose a changed outcome for the nightmare. The change should occur prior to when something traumatic happening in the dream. A personal example being: on my walk to a traumatic event, I find some cats before I actually get to the event, and I never get there. 6. Visualize the changed nightmare before bed multiple times, and then practice relaxation techniques. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I know it sounds kinda dumb, I thought so at first too. A lot of DBT skills do. But they do work, at least they did for me. And I know a lot of other people who have had success rates with it too. For sure not for everyone though!

I take Prazosin because I have nightmares every night and have my whole life (I have C-PTSD). It has been a total game changer for me! I also take melatonin and R3set too.

EMDR has been the only thing that has helped with my nightmares. They can get worse while doing the therapy, but then they get a lot better once the trauma has been reprocessed

We are taking several meds that are theoretically supposed to help with that( you can check those out on our page) but beyond that it really just took time and changing our behavior so we stopped getting re victimized as much and doing things that got us gradually used to things that would trigger us that weren’t actually going to hurt us anymore. We also did a ton of just yelling and punching pillows and singing angry music and allowing ourselves to be super super scared and shaking and whatever else needed to be felt but felt like we weren’t allowed to or that it would have been unsafe before to express. Also look up lucid dreaming you may have some luck there going internally when you’re sleeping and changing things around that way.

It’s really a hard thing to pinpoint. But dreams are based off of our subconscious problems, struggles, and insecurities. To resolve the dreams you have to resolve the area of your life that is causing the nightmares. FEEL the emotions while also EXPRESSING them outward instead of inward. Pay attention to the imagery of your dream and see how the overall message might pertain to a current, previous, or future problem that may have not been resolved. Hope this helps!