Tanya,

Have you talked to your psychiatrist about taking a medication to help stop the nightmares? I was having nightmares every night and I just couldn't take it anymore. At least in the daytime, there are things we can try to do to help when we have flashbacks and bad thoughts. But in our sleep, there is nothing we can to do stop them. Mine seem to mostly come toward the end of my sleep and I wake up in the midst of one and am sometimes paralized by it and can't get up. They are so real, absolutley no mystery about why I had them or what they represent, it can be hard to convince myself it didn't really happen.

Sometimes I can shake them in an hour or two, sometimes it takes all day or even days. Some fade when new ones come along and others are embedded in my mind as vividly as actual trauma in real life. My sleep habits are awful and between that and the nightmares, I finally told my therapist I couldn't take it anymore. He put me on Minipress/prazosin which is a med for high blood pressure that they have found helps nightmares as well. I was on 1mg for many months and it worked great. I was having few if any nightmares at all. Then I had a tramatic dissociative episode and it stopped working, even when I upped the dose.

Periactin is another med being used to help with nightmares which I was put on next. Unfortunetly, it didn't have any affect on me. We have stopped intensive PTSD treatment which has provided some relief.