I really wish we understood everything about dreams and nightmares. I've been haunted by nightmares consistently ever since I was a kid and now, let's say, 14 years later since one of my first nightmares that I can remember, I still have them consistently. I've found ways to minimize and maximize how many times I can have nightmares, to a certain extent, because of how many I've had.
Whenever I start to have a nightmare it decides to long overstay it's welcome. I will have a nightmare and go through about 50%-70% of the nightmare before waking up terrified. I will spend the next 10-15 minutes reassuring myself it was just a nightmare and I'm awake now, so nothing can hurt me or happen to me. That fear and dread you feel when you watch a scary movie and want to turn on every light in the house to protect yourself from this non existent evil, that's how I feel every time I have a nightmare. I will have a nightmare then wake up at certain points throughout it. The interesting part being that I'll wake up at exactly the same parts every single time I have that nightmare with zero exceptions. If I wake up 43% of the way through a nightmare just as soon as a specific plot point in it finishes up, then I'll wake up at that point every single time from then on. And when I go back to sleep I will pick up exactly where I left off like I just unpaused a game I paused earlier.
I have nightmares more than I have dreams. I only have 2-4 dreams every year that I have any memories of at all even if it's faint. But I have reoccurring nightmares happening every few months. These nightmares will start happening one night and, like I said earlier, will wake me up at a certain point in it. Then I will reassure myself for a while that it was just a nightmare. Next I'll go back to sleep and I'll show up in that nightmare right where I left off when I first woke up. Finally I will either get through the rest of the nightmare or I will wake up anywhere between one more time and like five more times before the nightmare finishes. And it stays consistent too, if I wake up twice for one nightmare, then I will always wake up twice for that nightmare when I have it. If I wake up six times for one nightmare, then I will always wake up six times for that nightmare when I have it. These nightmares will occur semi frequently throughout the year to make things worse. Say my first nightmare is on January 15th. This is only a rough estimate and made up time to show how annoying it is, but anyway. There is a very good chance I will have that nightmare and then it will repeat again the next night. Then I will most likely see it again the night after that. After that it usually starts to die down on how often I see it but sometimes I see the same nightmare like 4-5 times in a single week, not counting me waking up and falling back asleep into the nightmare. These are solely different days and different times that I've fallen asleep with huge chunks of time that I have been awake separating these sessions. But after I have that wave of the same repeating nightmare, I'll either get a small break where the nightmare starts repeating again a week or two later, or I'll get a big break where I don't get a nightmare for another month or more. This just reoccurs all year long, so despite the first nightmare I had all year happening on January 15th, I likely see that same nightmare happening again 3-4 months later after having been haunted by it reoccurring for a month or more straight, several times a week. And then one day, seemingly completely randomly, I'll stop having that nightmare and I'll get a longer break than normal before a new nightmare is introduced and the cycle repeats for this new one.
I can still remember a few nightmares I've had throughout my life despite the oldest one being one I haven't seen in over 10 years. Yet I can still remember everything about it in detail including the who/what/where/when/why/how for the nightmare and how it affects me every night when I had it. I will give a rundown of how it all happens. I had a teddy bear growing up, a light blue color with a slightly darker blue than its fur colored bow tie. That teddy bear would be the center point of this entire nightmare. I would fall asleep and find myself walking down a sidewalk, to my right is a gated off community. I'm not sure if it was an apartment complex or houses, but I'm pretty sure it was apartments. That part was just never clear, but it greatly resembles the apartments my dad lived in after my parents got divorced years after this nightmare, so I assume it was apartments. To my left is a road but it's weird, the road is there but it's not a focus of the nightmare so it's almost like it's grayed out and hidden by fog. The world itself is dreary, it's grayed out into black and white like some noir film. There are even those lamp posts that are black and go straight up like 8-10 feet and have that square/rectangle shaped box at the top with a pyramid shaped roof on and a small little 1-2 centimeter pole that comes out of the top center of it that is on this sidewalk against the fenced off apartments every so often. Now these apartments are interesting for sure. I can tell there are buildings beyond this fence to my right, but I can't really tell what type of buildings or anything about them. I also can't even tell what's at the ground level around them. It's like there's a void between the fence and the buildings since I can't see it directly. I had this nightmare around 6 years old, so in the nightmare I'm really short and can barely see through this fence. It's like a wall of bricks or cement blocks on the ground but it only goes up a foot or two before a fence comes out of it, and every so often the bricks continue up to form a pillar the same height as the fence before continuing the fence on the other side of the pillar. But this is all in a straight never ending line going forward as I walk down this sidewalk. Because of that small 1-2 foot wall at the bottom of the fence I can't see into the parking lot though. Back to these buildings though. They are tall, around the height of a two or three story apartment. But I can't really tell the shape or anything about them except that they are tall. I can't really see windows, doors, or anything else about them, but I know it's there. Kind of like it's just out of sight but you know it has to be there. Eventually though I'm walking down this sidewalk looking up at the buildings and suddenly in one of these buildings there's a window near the top center of the building I can see into. It's my teddy bear sitting there, watching me from the window. It's not moving at all, but I know it's watching me. It's one of those teddy bears that is in a sitting position but it's body is stiff enough that despite not being held up by anyone/anything it can still sit upright perfectly. I notice my teddy bear though and my entire body feels dread, I'm absolutely terrified to the point I want to call for help. Nothing has happened and nothing does happen but I'm terrified nonetheless. It's just like suddenly seeing that it was watching me made my body go from no danger detected to fight or flight mode in less than a second. But after I see my teddy bear and I become terrified, the nightmare just ends. I'm left to feel the existential dread for a second, then nothing. The nightmare is over and I wake up. It feels incomplete, like something is supposed to happen, like something did happen and my mind just can't remember it or refuses to remember it. But I don't think that's the case, I've had this nightmare several times while growing up and it always goes the same every single time. There are no differences in environment, atmosphere, or anything else. It always ends after I become terrified for my life.
I mentioned that I can minimize/maximize the amount of nightmares I have. I found that playing videos/music helps me sleep at night. I'll throw on a youtuber I regularly watch who plays lots of indie horror and fnaf games. The only way that I know these videos aren't the sole cause of my nightmares is that I've had these reoccurring nightmares long before I found this guy's channel. But I've found ways to control how often I get some of these nightmares just by switching what videos I watch on his channel while I sleep. I've noticed that I can put on a vod from one of his streams, let's say it's 4 hours long. When I have a nightmare watching a video of that length, I always have it after the video ends. Or when the video is so quiet that I can barely hear it at all, even after waking up fully. It's like the second that my brain has time to think without background noise interfering with its processes, I suddenly become more likely to have a nightmare. I've also noticed that sometimes when I fall asleep to his videos, I'll have nightmares more consistently, even with the video being loud enough to hear. This time I will have nightmares when it's too quiet/the video ends, but I will also have nightmares when it's audible/the video is currently playing. But if I switch the video to something else after waking up then I suddenly stop having nightmares. I haven't fully tested it out yet but it seems that certain videos give me nightmares while I sleep to them. And others, while they don't prevent nightmares, they also don't make them happen. The main reason I don't listen to music when I sleep is that the music just doesn't go on long enough. I'll put a 20 minute album on my phone, throw it under my pillow, and sleep to the music. It usually helps me fall asleep faster, but as soon as it ends, I almost always have a nightmare.
I'm sure there's more I can say about these reoccurring nightmares, like what ones I can remember and what happens during them. But this post is already long enough and I need to go back to sleep. I started typing all this out right after waking up from a brand new nightmare. It's both scary and interesting to me, these nightmares. I've been haunted by them my whole life and still wake up terrified of them when they happen, but I'm also curious to find out what's going to happen next in them. These nightmares are huge annoyances that I wish I could get rid of permanently, I hate waking up 4+ times a night at times because I'm having a nightmare that just decides it wants to wake me up a bunch despite nothing happening to me that would normally cause you to wake up like falling, being hit, reading words, etcetera. I have no idea why I have so many of these nor why they have been so prevalent throughout my life but I'm almost as interested in them as much as I hate them.