[XWarriorPrincess5]

As a note, I have depression, anxiety, and PTSD from a recent, year-long traumatic and stressful experience, and also from my emotionally abusive childhood. Anyways, I've never really had sleep problems before the last 6 months. I began having insomnia, and have every night since. It takes me hours to fall asleep. It's almost as if I don't want to fall asleep or I'm scared for some reason. I have to listen to a T.V show because if I don't have a distraction, I'll start worrying and thinking myself into insanity. When I DO sleep, I have some seriously messed up dreams. A lot of times I don't wake up scared, just really disturbed. If I tried to list them all, this would be a novel, so I'll just describe some of the most common ones, and some that freaked me out the most.

I have a lot of dreams that I someone wants to kill me but no one believes me, and the person will be chasing me down the street with a knife, and I can't scream. One particularly creepy one involved this strange girl with a lot of knives following me around a restaurant, trying to kill me. She eventually fell into a pool and couldn't swim. I couldn't let her die, so I jumped in and pulled her out. Her eyes were huge, rolled back in her head, bloodshot and water logged, just really disturbing. Another similar one: I was in the front yard of my moms house with her. The brother of a boy in a wheelchair (doesn't actually exist) accused me of making fun of his brother. He then proceeded to torture me in a variety of ways, like holding my hands under scalding water and my mom just kept weeding the garden. A lot of dreams where I need help, and no one will pay attention.

I've also had several dreams involving hell, or the devil. One where the gateway between hell and earth was opened. The two that scared me the most were about my beloved dog, Xena. She always sleeps curled up with me, but one night she slept under the covers by my feet. In my dream, I was laying in bed as if I had never fallen asleep. Something under the covers started screaming and shrieking and scratching Xena to death, and I couldn't move or else it would find me too. That one was really unsettling and I had to check under the covers after that, just to make sure The other one about Xena: She had caught some sort of disease that made people/animals bleed out of their orifices, and crave blood. We had to kind of quarantine her so she wouldn't spread it to us. She was finally cured, and we were burning everything she touched as she played in the backyard. It was like a happy ending, until a baboon (random, I know) came into the yard. I tried to chase it off, but it started running towards me to attack me. I ran back into the house, but Xena didn't follow. She bit the baboon, and it started to kill her, and ripped her throat out with its teeth. Then I woke up.

Last one; I had this a couple nights ago. In my dream, I found emails from when I was 6, between me and this 40-ish year old man, who was essentially grooming me. Then I remembered all of this stuff that happened that I had somehow forgotten about. This man pretty much got me to trust him and be “friends” before he tried to sexually assault me. Eventually he kidnapped me and I was sold to a child trafficking ring, which was in my parent's basement for some reason. There were a bunch of other little kids there, and we had to do horrible things. Apparently I somehow escaped when I was 9, and wrote a book about my experience, which my future self had forgotten.

So I guess I'm just curious why I'm having such dark, twisted dreams. I feel weird telling them to other people because they just sound so disturbing. My therapist thinks it's me working things out in my dream that I could never express before (I have been working on learning and expressing my emotions, since I was never taught how to do that as a child). She also mentioned that the common theme seems to be a lack of control over my circumstances. Well, any input would be fantastic! Thanks, and sorry for such a long post.

[Thunder Bow]

Your Therapist is totally right on. You got a good Therapist when it comes to dreams. Doing therapy will cause these kinds of dreams. Keep up the good work, and you will do well!