Impossible Task Night Terror

[Boo1der15]

Me and my husband both have these. No explanation accept the left side of the brain overlapping and not connecting to the right side. The left being abstract type stuff and the left being real stuff- to put it simply. Its just a dream of trying to make sense of something that doesn't make sense. Numbers words letters.. nothing is real or makes sense and it freaks you out. And nonsensical numbers and problems are being thrown at you mentally. Everything is slow distorted vibrating blurry. Its usually kind of hard to form words cuz you're like deep down in a hole. It feels like death or hell or insanity maybe. Sometimes you wake up with the feeling and it takes 20 min for it to go away. You just can't even explain it cuz your brain wasn't even working correctly. It usually happens during times of high stress & lack of sleep. Anyone else been there? I hear that its rare.

[Darkmatters]

That sounds very similar to N-REM dreams, which means non REM dreams. The REM dreams are the ones we're most familiar with, they're like little movies with moving pictures, sound, story fragments, and they can include memories (false usually), ideas and feelings etc. But non REM dreams are just an obsessive series of thoughts - usually accompanied by a sense of frustration or a sort of panic, as if you absolutely need to try to solve this riddle or answer the question or whatever it is. I've sometimes experienced this with a fragment of a song playing obsessively over and over and still had it stuck in my head when I woke up. And there's often just a single image, usually very abstract or sometimes realistic or cartoonish. I've had them look like the design on a Turkish rug or something - very geometric. People dream like this every night I believe but usually don't remember it. I'm not sure what causes us to sometimes wake remembering them, it might be due to when you wake up - which cycle of sleep you were in last. For me when I was experiencing it I had been working on my dream recall - developing my ability to recall dreams up to the point where I was remembering 6 or 7 each night in great detail, and I think that's when I started having the N-REM dreams (or rather noticing and remembering them). Not sure if there were any other factors - possibly stress or insomnia? I think I just developed my awareness and recall of dreams to the extent that I was noticing them for the first time. It went away after a while - along with my enhanced recall - now I just wake remembering a fragment or 2 of the last REM dream of the night.

[TravisE]

In recent times, I've noticed a series of what I also consider likely NREM dreams which have little or no visual imagery (though there may be very loud, intense but indecipherable sounds), with some sort of cataclysmic or apocalyptic scenario running through my mind and a focus on intense scary/panciky/doom feelings. These usually happen very early in sleep (about an hour or so in), right around the point where I would expect to be in NREM or delta sleep. I'm not all that familiar with night terrors as they're usually described, but I wonder if this is essentially what they are. In my case, they're not much of a problem because for some reason my waking-life emotional state seems to be well-separated from my emotional state in a dream (whether REM or NREM). That is, even if the dream is really scary, when I wake up I'm instantly fine and still calm, as if I'm merely switching my focus from the intense dream state to a calm, neutral, waking state that already existed all along. It's hard to explain in words, and I'm not sure if anyone else experiences it, but it means that I tend to never have a dream bad enough to actually call a nightmare despite how scary it is, simply because the instant I wake up it's immediately not that bad (if anything, I find it very intriguing and fascinating). Funny thing is, I wouldn't be surprised if I found these things actually happen all the time and I simply never remember most of them. As I've practiced my dream recall and lucidity, though, I've been noticing them more and more in recent years, even to the point that I'm now beginning to recognize them and become lucid as they occur. I'll realize that I'm actually sleeping and experiencing only imagined doom, which gives me an interesting opportunity to calmly explore and play around with the experience.