When Nightmares Are a Part of Your Day By Terri Rimmer

From the time I was three years old, I’ve had nightmares.

And I remember the very first one I had because it became a recurring one for a very long time.

When I tell you what it was you’ll at first think it’s very silly and that it doesn’t sound like a nightmare at all but to a child it very much was.

I asked an older woman if I could borrow a pencil and she handed it to me. Then I was going through a tunnel.

Then my body became heavy, then light, then heavy, then light. But then it felt like I couldn’t breathe and everything was going in slow motion and she was talking very slow to me, then very fast.

I remember running to my parents and trying to explain the dream to them and why it was so terrifying to me but they couldn’t understand.

I would continue to have this nightmare periodically.

Maybe because I was an abused child, nightmares would plague me all my life and continue through present day at the age of 52.

I wake up every hour with nightmares. They’re very graphic, gory, detailed, disturbing, and the older I’ve gotten the more unsettling they’ve become.

I’ve been told to pray them away but it hasn’t worked for me.

I’ve been told to write them down but when I wake up I’m so distraught, I don’t want to remember them.

Very rarely do I have good dreams, spiritual ones, though I do have those.

But they’re always coupled with nightmares about my fears – drowning, going off a bridge in my car, someone trying to kill me or someone I love, my sister dying, my family leaving me to go to Europe, my house caving in, me losing everything, someone trying to hurt or kill my daughter or other things.

Even more disturbing are the ones where I’m trying to hurt someone or the nightmares where the country is at war.

I suppose because I’m such a visual person and a writer, the nightmares are very detailed and it’s like they’re happening right now. Sometimes I have trouble waking up from them and I can hear myself struggling, crying out, yelling, talking in my sleep.

My psychiatrist gave me some pills once for nightmares and I was ecstatic! I had no idea there was medication for it!

But then I found out that the number one side effect was difficulty breathing and I have severe asthma, having been hospitalized nine times.

My heart sank. I was devastated.

Having nightmares has driven me to be suicidal more than once.

It’s a rare day when I don’t have these horrible monsters in my life.

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