Question: I am 32 years old and for the last 6 months have had nightmares every night. They wake me up all through the night, sometimes my heart is racing so fast it feels like I must have had a full workout, I have terrible night sweats also and wake up feeling very anxious and shaky.
I remember a lot of them and sometimes during the day find it hard to remember if certain things that happen have been dreams or really happened. Some of them are so graphic and brutalI can’t believe that I even think those things up. I have suffered from this problem in the past over short periods of time but this time it just seems to be never ending!I also realise now after reading others posts that I have been suffering from sleep paralysis. I thought I might have been suffering from some kind of fit. I know that I am awake every time it happens. I try my hardest to move or scream but nothing happens.. I had a sleep at my parents house the other day and had a episode, I wanted to get up but I couldn’t move. My mam had came into the room and I knew she was standing over me so I was trying to make a noise so she would wake me.Later when I did wake up I asked her if she could hear, she said it was like a snoring kind of noise I was making but she didn’t want to wake me as she knows I’ve been having problems with my sleep. I told her I was trying to get her attention but she didn’t really understand, Laura
Answer: Hey Laura, thanks so much for sharing your experiences with us. I think you would really benefit from reading this book by Ryan Hurd. It has some amazing insights about controlling your sleep paralysis episodes and nightmares. I would also recommend you read about lucid dreaming if you aren’t already familiar with it. There is extraordinary potential in it to control your nightmares and turn them into enlightening experiences. World-Of-Lucid-Dreaming.com has some more great material on this. And in fact, Ryan Hurd’s book even contains insights and techniques into how to use episodes of sleep paralysis to enter lucid dreams.I hope some of this material is helpful. Feel free to let me know what you think 🙂
Thanks for your question and good luck,
Kevin
Hello Laura! I know how you feel. The first time you wake up from sleeping in the middle of the night probably, heart racing and probably hallucinating or having a realistic dream or lucid dream. I’ve been having those for years. I think you are having Panic Attacks. My epileptologist put me on Zoloft to fix that problem but you should see a doctor about that. I don’t have them anymore but I do have Sleep Paralysis and Hypnogogic hallucinations where you hallucinate right before you wake up. Hope this helps.