Do you and T look at your dreams at all? It seemed like the harder I worked in therapy the more vivid and "disturbing" dreams I had. I had the worst nightmare I've ever had where I woke screaming. Since I'm almost completely deaf in one ear and sleep on my "good" ear, I could not hear myself scream so I did not wake up quickly, spent a lot of time waking myself up. It was early on a Saturday morning and I woke my husband with my screams and because I was shaking him, to see if he was alive (he had died convulsing in my arms in the dream). He could not get back to sleep but I did

I learned over the years in T that recording my dreams and discussing them with T took a lot of the pain out of them for me and made them and my work in T much more exciting. I started wanting to go to bed earlier when I had had a hard T session, just to see what I would dream! I began to notice details better, things like my husband's or T's presence in dreams, which meant it was "safe" for me to dream/think about whatever the "real" subject was, the problem or difficulty I was trying to get understand or get past. I started seeing my dreams as a really good library/source of information on "Me" and that made me proud and took the fear right out of the worst dreams. It seemed too, the more attention I paid to my dreams the less they needed to be quite so extreme/scary, I no longer needed monsters to get me to pay attention: