Any ideas on what this may be?

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I'm seeing a psychiatrist this coming week specifically about this, so please don't say "you should seek professional advice on this". Because I already know that not doing so would be foolish - I'm just trying to gather some perspectives in the meantime on what is going on, and if any others have known or experienced this personally. My primary care doc is aware of my other diagnosed conditions (ASD and ADHD-PI, (informally) mild chronic depression) and I brought this to her attention - she suggested it may be PTSD, which coincided what I initially stumbled upon when I looked up "bad dreams" online.

Basically, the past few months I have had some terrible and vividly convincing dreams. In the beginning they increased in frequency to the point of being prevalent on a daily basis. They are semi-realistic; i.e. dreams of nuclear war erupting in the Bering Sea; my mom getting raped when she stepped outside for a walk near my apartment at night; a new acquaintanceship that I had just formed ending abruptly; being cornered into an unfair arrangement at work.

At first, I would wake up so convinced they had happened. For instance one day I had a dream that my apartment had been searched by legal authorities; nothing illicit was found, but I did not appreciate the intrusion into my apartment, and I had hid into the one location of the apartment they didn't think I would hide in and didn't check. Upon waking up, I was in my bedroom, and this was near where I had hidden. It seemed like I had simply continued from my dream into my regular life (this mirrors a situation in which I was accused of possessing MDMA in my backpack upon my car being searched, only to find out a month later on my court date that I could 'simply turn around and go home'. I had woken up at 3am to drive 5 hours away to attend this, as well as being stressed as over the month of waiting).

There's more detail that I will omit for now, but ultimately what has happened is that I've gotten very good at knowing, upon waking up in the mornings, that what happened was just a stupid dream again. I still experience the dreams hardcore as they happen, and I'm waking up several times throughout the night. One instance was immediately after a threat of nuclear warfare was erupting, and my parents had come over to my apartment offering to pick me up from the city (I live 1 mile from the downtown of the closest US city > 500,000 people from the geographic 'epicenter' between US, North Korea, and Russia) and leave town. I told them I needed to think about it for a bit, but they were insisting that I should escape with them at all costs. I was uncertain because I told them that even in the case of surviving this nuclear world war, the world would likely not be a peaceful place to remain in, and that if I was meant to die soon that I would not try to change what inevitably comes my way in life. I started yelling at my mom and in the midst of this confrontation I had experienced what my belief of a seizure may be - a sudden loss of motor control, while collapsing to the ground accompanied by an awful headache. This is only the second "seizure" I may have had in my life; the other was believed to be a few months back, but there is this huge gap of memory of what was a similar onset and suddenly me being in the situation after some time passing and having a huge headache.

A few weeks ago I had gotten to the point of realizing the dreams were nonsense, but they would result in me getting about 1-4 hours of sleep per night. My nighttime sleep duration has increased, and my primary care doc prescribed some sleeping/anti-anxiety medications. The dreams have become less intense, back to normal levels, not vivid or convincing, but I am still waking up quite frequently in response to these 'normal dreams'.

Help please?

Fears push there way into our dreams if we don't face them.

What do you fear?

Ask yourself, the answer will come.

Sounds like Nightmare Disorder.

Have you ever heard of "Lucid Dreaming"? It's a way in which you can actually control your dreams while you are still dreaming. Maybe you should look into that? You have nothing to lose trying.

Did you dream not that much as a child? Or was the quality of your child dreams much more peaceful from how you dream lately? Your dreams seem to be partly not that nightmarish, and also not that strange and you appear a bit irritated about how dreams are going, that s why I am asking. Your remarks about dreams reminded me about what Tony Atwood once said about schizophrenia and ASD: that some Aspergers discover their inner voice much later than us normal folks as adolescents or young adults, can get very confused by it, and even experience schizoid-like fears, and I was wondering if something similar exists with Aspergers and dreams. It would make a lot of sense to me, if dreams pop up also later in some Aspergers lifes than in other Aspergers and NTs lifes.

I (NT) had most of my intense dreams and partly nightmares at kindergarden and primary school age, and only at two occasions more intense dreams as an adult: one series of nightmares at the age of 19, after a food poisoning had made me loose some hair (not that much hair, but apparently enough to freak me out a bit), it ended after 3 weeks or so with a very nice and impressive last dream; then years later two or three dreams during the break-up of my marriage from an abusive husband, that were not that much like a nightmare, but instilled nevertheless a lot of fear in me; since then I consider these 2 or 3 dreams as well as the typical girlish dreams about being persecuted and nearly killed as a warning against a real threat that the conscient self is blending out. Other dreams since teen age (and some before) have been pretty boring, quite close to reality and were sometimes like what MollyTroubletail calls "lucid dreams". In some dreams I also recognize having used some material from movies or from what I had imagined from a book, once a dream was also boringly close to a movie I had seen a few days before, it had a more aesthetic feel to it than normal dreams.

Apparently some or many Aspergers have very intense and quite frequent dreams and nightmares as adults, while most NTs dont dream a lot as adults anymore, and only rarely as intense as they did in childhood.

Anxiety issues play a bigger role with Aspergers, and that is linked to having less of that cognitive empathy with which NTs manage to keep their affective empathy in check. (see Adam Smith e.a., Empathy Imbalance Hypothesis of Autism). So although there is always a lot of truth in dreams, you neednt be too scared about them.

Sure an intense dream is always realistic enough to be taken as reality during the time you are dreaming it, and its effect on the dreamer ranges from being frightening for the weirdness of some things in it till terrifying for its nightmarish quality. That one very nice elevating dream of mine at 19 was the big exception to the rule, and very lucid dreams are more in between day-dreaming and a real dream. It happens often at the end of a dream that it becomes more lucid and controlled, and the story of your dream gets you back to reality (must have something to do with passing from the deep sleep period to the light sleep period before waking up). From other dreams you wake up all of a sudden from terror, or because you have been screaming or made a movement in your dream or from some other noise or something (that is from deep sleep more or less directly to wake-up, without passing through a light dream phase, it is the normal wakeup for more terrifying dreams). That is all perfectly normal for dreams.

Should I be wrong with my hypothesis, I dont quite understand why you are so worried.

I guess it is your dream about your mother being raped that your primary care doc is most worried about. She might consider it as a sign for a bigger underlying oedipal conflict with your mother, which it not necessarily is. Maybe you could describe that one a bit more, and also your relationship to your mother.

Dreams don't mean s**t.

Besides, the more you start thinking about the bad dreams you are having, the more you will have them. We just dream about things that have crossed our mind throughout the day. It all gets patched together into a bunch of nonsense. One thing I've noticed is I do retain morals and inhibitions during dreams. I can only have sex with people during dreams unless I am convinced I am dreaming. So if you can prove to yourself you are in a dream, you can have some fun. Lol.

Well, there's my take on dreams. Not a fan of dream analysis. Sounds like anxiety coming out in the form of nightmares and nothing more.

Thank you to everyone who replied.

To be honest, Ettina's link to Nightmare Disorder fits my symptoms to a T. Nightmare Disorder an official diagnostic category in the DSM-5, and I'm seeing a psychiatrist today about this.

You should also check your meds: being on meds or reducing them (google "lithium" and "nightmares") can lead to more vivid dreams.

I have a lot of nightmares and vivid, strange dreams. I often dream that I am trapped in an abandoned school, house, hospital, or care home. I also dream that I am walking around shopping at an abandoned shopping mall, and sometimes my dead family members are there and sometimes they talk about a little boy setting the mall on fire. In my mind, the mall had burned down at some point and is haunted.

This dream is very vivid, as I can actually go and look through racks and go into the dressing room and try clothes on and I can feel them on my skin as if real. Sometimes I have perverted dreams about people I hate in real life, like my old teachers, and often I am plagued with dreams of incest with my parents or other family members. These upset me. I also have a lot of dreams that I am still in school, trapped in a haunted school or one that is in shambles, and I am usually having a huge meltdown at school and some one is making fun of me. I often dream about celebrities, people dying, my mom having another child/being pregnant, me being another person from another time, etc. Some times I dream that I am in another time like Old England or the Wild West. Sometimes there are spaceships, ghosts, or zombies in the dream.

Occasionally I dream that I am being abused or assaulted and I often dream about getting sick and throwing up (which is my biggest phobia.) I have a lot of dreams about fires igniting or being set, graveyards or dead bodies or Nazis in my house, wars or other disasters like Tornados, hurricanes, and the apocalypse. I have a lot more too, but I'm rambling way too much now.