I had a big challenge with nightmares myself. I think when it comes to trauma, the brain is trying to figure out how to process it during sleep and because a person doesn't know how to process trauma it ends up waking them up and disturbing sleep.

I finally began leaving the TV on and I would drift off to sleep thinking about "now" things to help my brain get distracted with now things rather than trying to process the trauma. Trauma can make it very challenging to figure out how to live life everyday in spite of the trauma that upset our ability to do that because trauma "changes" how we think about life and manage our lives to where we have a sense of "safety" to do so. Trauma is something that happens so unexpectedly that it dramatically changes our sense of safety in "self". Human beings by nature like to establish a sense of predictability in how to stay safe and thrive. We are designed to feel threatened if an environment we are thriving in becomes threatening which forces us to seek out a safer environment because we begin to experience that lack of safety in becoming more hyper vigilant.