Reoccurring nightmares

Hi,
I was just wondering who else on here is taking sertraline and if it affects your sleep at all?

I've been taking it for nearly a year now for depression and anxiety but in the last month or so I've started having really realistic, stressful nightmares. I wake up in a cold sweat and feeling confused because it takes my mind a while to adjust back to reality.
The nightmares usually involve events that see my life falling apart and quite often I have cruel dreams about my boyfriend deserting me. As I said above they are really realistic and upsetting and they affect my mood for the majority of the day.

Is anybody else experiencing the same and how do you cope with it?
Also, is it a side effect of your medication or would you put it down to stress?

Dreams are all about your feelings. Medications do affect your feelings.

Surely though if that was the case then the medication is supposed to be releasing serotonin to make me feel better, so shouldn't my dreams become less intense?
I'm sorry if that sounds stupid, I don't really know a lot about how the subconscious works

There is a website I sometimes use (google "dream interpretation") to help me understand what my dream is trying to tell me. As an example, I have a lot of dreams where my mouth is filled with different things and the more I try to get it out the more there is. One of the things in my mouth is gum. I looked up gum and actually found a section that talked about having having gum in ones mouth that keeps coming.

I've noticed that I do get very graphic and unpleasant dreams while taking SSRIs in particular. I do find these meds affect the quality of sleep I get too, i.e. it isn't always refreshing sleep. I don't really know how the cause and effect works, but I suppose it is because SSRIs don't actually release serotonin, they prevent the body re-absorbing what is already there, so as to make more of it available for transmitting messages across the synapses. I guess that having more available serotonin means more messages can pass across the synapses, even when we don't want them too - like when we're asleep and it is this increased capacity for transmitting messages that causes the dreaming.
My usual nightmares are not being able to find a toilet, or finding every toilet that I visit is filthy. Those don't take much interpretation. I have dreams about my teeth falling out, again that is quite a commonly occuring nightmare. The other night I dreamt my dog came home without her tail and that it was sent to me by post three days later. There are others too, these are far more graphic and they leave me struggling to re-orientate myself when I wake.

"serotonin" do and can make dreams more vivid.