Repeated Dream Trauma
Something that’s only relatively new to me in recent times is experiencing sheer panic or panic attacks in my dreams. We all have nightmares growing up and throughout our life but this is something entirely different that I’ve only been experiencing for maybe the last year at most.
It’s a reoccurring nightmare where the environment and story change, but the theme is the same. Even though my IRL marriage/partnership as I knew it ended 4 years ago now, in my dream that never happened but there’s some awful situation where her life is in danger and I either need to rescue her or get a hold of her by phone for whatever reason. And in either case, I repeatedly try but always fail and the whole time I’m panicking and it feels as real as I imagine it would in that scenario IRL. Because in these dreams I’m unable to get ahold of or save my wife/life partner/best friend and I’m experiencing that loss for the umpteenth-millionth time.
This all happens several times a week.
I always wake up from these exhausted and sweaty. If I awake from one in the middle of the night, I often can’t go back to sleep for quite a while. I’ll have to take a shower to calm myself down. And no matter how hard I try to keep myself busy or distract myself after, it will frequently come back top of my mind throughout the day.
It’s absolutely torture having these anxiety filled nightmares about someone that stopped loving me some time ago. Someone that I still clearly care about so seriously and intensely.
My doctors and therapist don’t really have a solution. Mostly just getting a, “well that sucks,” type vibe from them when I talk about. Not that I necessarily should expect them to have a magic solution, I guess. I just wish I had something that’s more hopeful for fixing it than more time.