[ThatSpaceDude]

Alright, this may sound a bit strange but I'll do my best to articulate my thoughts. Does anyone else ever have nightmares that are, for lack of a better word, symbolic? Like, they may not be your exact memories that play out, the events in the dream and the circumstances may not be the same, but there may be certain key points- things you can or can't do, certain emotions, things like that-that are still similar or even the exact same and still end up evoking the same distress?

I'll try to use my own as an example. After, shall we say, The Event, I began having these intense, eerily similar nightmares. I noticed that although the dreams were never exactly the same (and, purely from the events perspective, were totally different), certain things in the dreams, like the threats and dangers involved in The Event were always present, as were other circumstantial elements, for example the feelings of powerlessness and fear and horror that perfectly mirrored the reactions I had in real life in response to the same danger, even though the exact event in the dream wasn't quite the same as in real life.

I suppose the point I'm trying to get across is that although what happens in these nightmares isn't the exact same thing as what happened in real life, some elements present, such as:

• specific threat/danger, same as real life
• inability to prevent what happened, as in real life
• horror, fear and feeling of powerlessness, as in real life

along with the presence of certain other details and items, do mirror what happened in The Event perfectly, even if, again, the exact happenings and circumstances aren't exactly the same.

Okay, I know that probably made absolutely no sense, I'm sorry. I promise it makes sense in my head. Does anyone else experience anything like this? Or am I just nuts?

[PumpkinPieHead]

Makes perfect sense to me. I hae very vivid and disturbing dreams. Often, they are symbolic. Thos morning was symbolic of fear.

[Open Eyes]

Ok, picture yourself doing a search on your computer, what you will end up with are lots of different things to click on about whatever you are searching for. That is how your brain also works. While we sleep our brains are doing their own searches in an effort to find some way of resolving the events that challenge us the most.

When someone experiences a trauma the stress of the trauma creates an imprint in the brain because we are designed to remember things that are life threatening so we do avoid them, but also make it a point to learn about them so we can think about better ways of self protecting. All the things you feel, guilt, anger, desire to sound an alarm, desire to avoid desire to vent and articulate the trauma are all part of how we are designed to ensure our survival and also seek out a "safer" environment.

So, your brain is doing a search at night while you sleep, not to keep traumatizing you, but instead to find some way of experiencing an event where you find a way of better self protecting. We have recently discovered that our brain actually "learns" at night while we sleep.

Our brains are designed to learn a pattern where we can follow a structured way of living our lives. So, in that we tend to live our lives on auto pilot more than we realize. The frontal executive part of our brain is designed to keep track of our daily challenges and only briefly check into our automatic structured way of living our lives. When a major trauma takes place, it changes our sense of automatic structure to the point where one doesn't feel safe to continue on with that automatic structured way of living their lives. You know the saying "ignorance is bliss"? Well, that saying is actually true in that we all live our lives in a automatic structure and there can be things or people around us that are unhealthy in some way, but, if we don't experience a major disruption to a structure we get used to living, we can continue to function on an auto pilot in whatever way we developed that auto pilot.

Trauma disrupts our structure, and can set a person back where they begin to examine their auto pilot, and that can be exhausting because our excutive functioning part of our brain gets overworked. It's much like if you were working a job that you developed a rythm of doing and then suddenly experience an extra work load dump that overwhelms you. Well, that is what is taking place with the frontal lobe executive functioning part of our brain. What can happen is that the frontal executive part of the brain gets distracted by doing a file search, and so much so that a person begins to lose track of time. When that happens it can be scarey, well ofcourse it can because the average person isn't used to doing these deep searches and it does change our sense of time and it's also tiring.

So, while you are concerned about these dreams, it's important to think about "why" you are experiencing them and it's because your brain is trying to find ways to "learn" what to do about whatever the situation is so you can put it to rest and move forward and hopefully regain your sense of structure again.

[Open Eyes]

If you look at all the symptoms of PTSD, what these symptoms really mean is that your internal sense of how you developed an auto pilot where your brain really functioned so much on it's own, example, you can move around your house/apartment knowing where everything is instead of having to look for where each light switch is, where the bathroom is, and which cabinet you keep your glasses in or which drawer you have your silverware in. That is why moving ranks so high on something most people find to be one of the most stressful, even some of the things one may find more desirable in picking out a new place to live unknowingly. Often, living in a new place can be stressful until our brain gets used to functioning in that new environment where so much of that environment becomes on an auto pilot.

Also, one of the things about being so uncomfortable in the environment where a trauma occured is that our brains register a lot more about that environment then we may consciously realize. That is simply another way we are designed that is meant to help us in our ability to survive, and a lot of mammels have this feature in their brains.

So ThatSpaceDude, what you posted as "sounding strange" isn't really all that strange if you understand how the human brain actually works and why that is so. By understanding how the brain works, you can actually learn how to help yourself instead of seeing these challenges as something to fear. The whole point of recognizing yourself as "a survivor" is that you did have the ability to survive a trauma, even many traumas that you may have experienced in your past. What you managed to do is continue to preserve your sense of "auto pilot" and sense of structure.

Now, that being said, the purpose of working with a therapist is not meant to "retraumatize" or have another person decide that whatever challenged you is to be criticized or judged, but instead to get an idea of what structure you developed that you functioned well in and help you "learn" that while you experienced a major trauma, that you can get back on track with regaining your personal sense of structure. While we can never go back and change a trauma that we experienced in our lives, we CAN learn to rebuild our lives and function in spite of a major traumatic setback and the symptoms that we experience that confuse us that can interfere with our getting our sense of structure back again. This ability has been recognized and is called brain plasticity. This has also been crucial to our human survival as early man learned how to move from one location to another and adapt to a new environment that provided more food and other things in an environment that provided a way to sustain early human beings.

I had one of those dreams last night. Everyone I love turned on me and the emotions were oh so powerful and all too familiar. I woke up in a panic, angry, scared and crying...I ran out and kissed my husband the moment I woke up. I have these types of dreams often and they are terrible.

[ThatSpaceDude]

Thanks for the responses, everyone. It's comforting to see I'm not alone in this. Also I'm sorry for the late reply, I got busy for a few days.