Traumatic Dreams

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I keep getting really horrible dreams. I can deal with the violent ones and even the ones where people I love die, they happen very regularly. But every now and again I get ones about sexual assault and I know this sounds stupid but they genuinely leave a mark. Today I had one and I kept having intrusive thoughts about it today and was so overwhelmed by it when I woke up that I lay in bed for about an hour as I was overwhelmed with guilt fear and disgust.

When I have these dreams I really wonder if something happened to me when I was young. There's this fuzzy memory of something that could have happened when I was 7, but it is so fuzzy I don't know if it is real or not. I remember at the very least crying about it and going to my mum at night but she thought it was a nightmare, hence I don't know if I was actually assaulted and this haunts me a lot. I have so many dreams about sexual assault that scare me so it really makes me wonder. I feel really ashamed for some reason.

I am sorry to hear you're going through this. It's probably not idea and only you will know if this is a good idea for you personally but maybe you should ask your mother if something happened. Obviously this could cause problems depending on how close you are with your mother. Also she might not even know if something did happened. Though let's say something did happen. Abuse is never one's fault regardless of age. I am not minimizing such an event just saying that maybe the road to healing is similar whether abuse occurred or not. That is to say, realizing you did nothing wrong and focus on being comfortable in your own skin and etc. This is complex issue and many may feel uncomfortable answering it so you might consider therapy if that is possible.

I'm so sorry you're going through this. Regardless of whether you are a survivor of sexual assault or not, I hope you can get support and/or counseling to help deal with the dreams and their effects.

Sorry that you’re having such an issue with this. Sleep is supposed to be a refreshing thing and is critical for our well-being but when it results in terrible visions like that, it’s anything but.

We still don’t have much of an understanding of dreams and what they are. I think most of the science that does exist on it posit that dreams are our brain’s way of organizing / reorganizing information that we experience from all different inputs through the day, with heavy input from our emotional state. Not to diminish your possible interpretation or brief snippets as a child, but it can also derive from the news, stories that we’ve read, movies / shows that we’ve seen, the brain’s imagination mode going off in a scary direction…. Our thoughts are not always to be believed because as Dr. Amen (who does brain imaging) on the PBS specials says, our brains lie to us ALL the time. That cubic foot above our shoulders is a very weird and impossibly complex place that we’ve barely scratched the surface in studying. If you’re having such a tough time with it, as the other responses have said, it might be beneficial to try some professional help with a therapist or such.