Nightmares

I've suffered from very vivid and disturbing nightmares for as long as I can remember.

I rarely have good dreams. I don't dream of flying. (Though once I had a dream I could levitate.) My nightmares are not the I forgot to wear pants to school and oh! there is a big test that I didn't know I was supposed to study for variety. They are more like being chased by Michael Myers, my eyes burning out in a nuclear blast, running from flesh eating zombies, finding myself trapped in a room by giant hairy spiders, suffering Dantesque tortures of hell, legless mutants reaching for me with long arms from under the bed... *shudder*

Okay, we can stop talking about that now...

I think part of my problem is my issue with low blood sugar. When I am awake I should eat every 3 or 4 hours. If I don't I end up feeling like this: anxiety, moodiness, negativism, irritability, belligerence, fatigue, shakiness (from the wikipedia page on Hypoglycemia) It is not like it happens all at once and if I don't eat some cheesy crackers every four hours I become all demonic. I have gotten pretty good at managing it. But, I don't get up in the middle of the night and eat. And I think that might be part of why I have nightmares 5 out of 7 nights of the week. (I have some kind of bad dream pretty much every night but I am kind of used to it.)

Also Patrick McNamara, a neurocognitive scientist, who has been studying nightmares for the last ten years has this to say:

In about 2 percent of the adult population, nightmares occur frequently.

In adults, recurrent nightmares occur in people with so-called thin boundaries, who are especially sensitive to sensory impressions.
Check.

Creative people, like artists, writers, musicians, and so forth, also report more nightmares.
Check.

A different form of nightmare, heavily influenced by memory, occurs frequently in people who have experienced trauma.
Check.

It is amazing to me that only 25% of the populace has at least one nightmare a month and that 7 - 8% have nightmares once a week.

I used to suffer frequently from Sleep Paralysis:
Sleep paralysis occurs when the brain awakes from a REM state, but the body paralysis persists. This leaves the person fully conscious, but unable to move. The paralysis can last from several seconds to several minutes "after which the individual may experience panic symptoms and the realization that the distorted perceptions were false"
In addition, the paralysis state may be accompanied by terrifying hallucinations (hypnopompic or hypnagogic) and an acute sense of danger.[10] Sleep paralysis is particularly frightening to the individual due to the vividness of such hallucinations.[11] The hallucinatory element to sleep paralysis makes it even more likely that someone will interpret the experience as a dream, since completely fanciful, or dream-like, objects may appear in the room alongside one's normal vision.

My sleep paralysis was worst when I had an irregular sleeping schedule - like all through high school and then when I used to work nights.

Sleep paralysis... man, it's all kinds of horrible. I don't have it so much anymore, just a few times a year. But it used to be a few times a week.

I've had a lot of other weird sleep issues happen here and there, sleep walking and sleep talking only a few times, narcolepsy when I was working the night shift, lucid dreaming, sleep terrors, insomnia.. but I don't snore. :) I also remember my dreams/nightmares very well.

But you know me, I'm the lemonade from lemon's type of gal. The novel that I am currently working on, the novel that's been swirling around in my brain for 6+ years, the subject is dreams and nightmares. I'm including lots of yummy world folklore and superstitions about all this stuff, you know, the explanations that people gave themselves before we had all this nifty science.