giggles & grind

I wonder how many people suffer like I do from sleeping. Not specifically the act of sleeping, or lack of sleep, but what happens while I sleep, which is, dream. And I don’t mean a random dream now and then that I can barely remember after a few minutes of being awake. These dreams are long, vivid, constant, and usually cause some level of disruption to my mental and emotional state.

I think my mind has trained itself to actively fight to forget them. However, sometimes, the real intense or disturbing ones, stay with me for quite some time.

Even as a child, I would have nightmares, sleep walk, and sleep talk. But in the last few years, my dreams have went absolutely nuts. To the point that I take two different prescribed medications each night just so I can tame them. It doesn’t make them go away, but it makes them bearable.

I went through a stressful period of my life where I was basically homeless. My (now) ex husband and I were not in a healthy place. It was getting to the point where I was barely functioning and losing myself almost entirely. So, I took my daughter and left, and we lived in a camper for awhile. That’s right, just a short step away from being homeless. But it was quite the castle compared to the terror at home.

And then, he convinced me change was ahead, things would get better, and that we should come home. I suppose since I’ve already stated he’s my ex husband, it’s not hard to predict what happened. I’ll spare the details, because it’s not exactly relevant to what I’m writing about today.

After I finally left for good, I was broke financially, mentally, and spiritually. I had to rebuild everything. And I did. And I did it swiftly. But I was drowning in stress. And stress triggers my dreams to get more intense.

Then something else happened in my world, just as I was starting to feel more grounded. It was devastating. It devastated my family, my children, myself. And I wasn’t sure how to process it. I was filled with rage, and not able to seek justice. Lack of justice, and the torture of thinking about what happened made me mad.

But, from the outside, nobody could tell. I buried it deep and focused on getting through each day. I didn’t have time to express how I was feeling, and quite frankly I thought the only thing that would satisfy me would undoubtably put me in jail. So I shut it all down and went numb.

I guess my brain decided that I needed to start sifting through my emotions, and the only time it could avoid me shutting it down was when I was sleeping. And that’s exactly what it did. During that period, I just learned to cope with it, and ignored the dreams. They were fairly easy to forget still.

Shortly thereafter I had made the decision that I had been hooked on cigarettes my entire adult life, and it was time that I took on the challenge of quitting smoking. So, I set a doctor’s appointment and talked to a provider about all my failed attempts thus far, and they suggested this “magic pill”. A sure way to quit smoking, if I could handle to side effects–intense dreams.

The name of the drug is called Chantix. The doctor warned me of the side effects and I laughed it off, letting them know I was no stranger to intense dreams and I’d rather keep enduring those than continue to smoke. So, I started the pills, and within two weeks I was done smoking. The medication made me hate cigarettes. It was magic. I couldn’t believe it.

Now, although it worked great, the intense dreams that came, as promised by my doctor, were so extreme and horrific that I started getting little to no sleep. I was terrified to go to sleep. I remember about day two of taking the medicine, I took a nap, and I had a dream that I could probably still to this day, two years later, write down exactly what happened in it. It’s stained in me almost like a memory. I was only asleep for a couple hours, but the dream itself was an entire day of a memory. And people died in it, both my children died, and others too.

The dreams kept coming, so I avoided sleep at all cost. I was drinking 2-3 energy drinks a day, working two jobs, staying up until the wee hours of the morning, until my body couldn’t fight it any longer, then sleeping just a couple hours before waking up traumatized after another round of chaos in dream land.

I thought that once I got off the medication that I would be better. I wasn’t. But I was really, really damn tired.

So, I went back to my doctor. I begged them for help. They suggested I seek therapy. I wasn’t interested. So they put me on anxiety medication to take before bed to help settle me down so I wasn’t so reluctant to sleep. That didn’t help.

After a few more visits, and a switch to a new doctor, I finally found somewhat of a solution–another pill.

If you knew me, you’d know I was brought up by a parent that did not believe in rushing to the doctor for every little ailment or relying on medication to help, especially with any emotional impairments. However, I was desperate.

Prazosin was the new medication I was on, coupled with a different anxiety medication. I’ve been on it ever since. And, unfortunately, I don’t foresee and end in sight of my reliance of it. It’s not the type of medications you can just jump on and off of. Your body becomes very dependent in may way.

Prazosin is used to help block night terrors triggered by PTSD. And, it works, most of the time. Now any then a horrible dream sneaks past the drugs and gives me a hell of a ride, but for the most part, the traumatic dreams I was having are few and far between. But it doesn’t block having dreams, or how vivid they are.

So, I continue, nightly, to go into a land of all sorts of turmoil. I wake up feeling mentally exhausted, revisiting in my head all the “fun” dreams I had. A common thing in my dreams is unresolved issues. Yes, maybe therapy would help.

I started keeping a journal of them, but then quickly realized it wasn’t helping me to forget them, so I stopped.

Now, I could likely manage having nightmares on top of vivid dreams, however, as I mentioned earlier before, I walk and talk in my sleep too. Some of the dreams that Prazosin blocks are very violent, and I was (God’s honest truth) terrified I would act one of those out.

So, I live medicated until I find a new remedy.