Where Do Nightmares Come From?

I have been in a good position to know about nightmares, having had them all of my childhood, and also because I have hundreds of patients who have had them, relived them and understood them.  Let me disclose what should not be a secret but is.

Nightmares are either first line memories (brainstem or lower limbic system) or terrible memory/imprints from childhood that have the punch of first line. That is, basically life endangering.  The latter would be the loss of both parents during an auto crash at a young age.
I had a patient like that and it was devastating.  In brief, his life became a literal nightmare.  He lived it every day: depressions every day, agony, loss of drive, no ambition, giving up, feeling he could not go on.  He felt his life was over.

Ordinarily it is the lowest level of brain function, the brainstem with its memories of pain; a mother smoking or drinking, poor nutrition, chronically anxious and fearful, unable to relax,  constantly worried and totally confused.  Taking drugs at the beginning of the pregnancy.  All of this and more,  leave an imprint of severe damage.  That imprint impacts almost everything.  This far we understand, but how do these imprints become nightmares?  Because they were!  I will use me as an example since I know me best.  My mother was always hyper-anxious, a refugee from the Cossacks in Russia,  had no parents and was actually a four year old.  Illiterate all of her life.    She had me by accident but was nowhere near strong enough for such a task, so she handed me over to my grandmother.  From the start there was no one and from the very start there was a frantic mother who could not be a mother.    I was born afraid.  And as life went on with two empty parents I had no support and no care.  That exacerbated the problem and it was compounded by terror and pain.

Where did it all go?  The pain evolved like the rest of me:  terror got partially suppressed but I was a fitful sleeper and never could concentrate.  All my marks in school read “nervous”.
As I grew it got worse in school and I did badly.  As I became an adolescent I could not learn nor focus, and above all, became plagued by nightmares; not only because of my gestation but because of the total lack of love and support for my terrors.  Every night I was terrified by having to go to sleep, knowing that I would wake up terrified in the middle of the night.  When I said to my parents I was afraid, they said if it got bad to go sleep with my sister, which I did.  That became a nightly affair and lasted years.  So how did it happen that my pain from way back and down deep rose to the occasion,  so to speak, and pump out nightmares?  Aah, here is where it gets complicated.

My pain was compounded daily by a psychotic mother and tyrannical, loveless father.  No one to turn to and so the pain just built and built.  It reached a critical point where my gating system could no longer hold back the force of the early imprints.  The terror seeped through and there was nothing I could do to stop it.  No one had any idea what they were, including my doctors.  So I suffered due to a mystery that I now understand.  Oh. Wait a minute.  It is clear to me know that my symptoms evolved with me.  I was terrified during gestation with colic and many other symptoms, then I had bad dreams all of the time as my childhood pain broke through, and then finally, when all my defenses crumbled the nightmares began.    First line was evident because in my therapy they were the avant garde or forerunner of nightmares to follow.  I would come in anxious and could not relax.  I also could not concentrate.  I was already far along in my therapy, and soon my nightmares rose.  And what did they turn into?  First-line birth trauma, beginning with severe anxiety and then terror and then suffocating and feeling stuck and unable to move.  Wow, that was the content of my nightmares and my early life.  They were one.  Interchangeable.  And the nightmares led me directly to my gestation and birth traumas, which I began to relive.  As I did, my concentration improved and my anxiety lessened.  I could sink into my skin.  The feelings were finally fully experienced, as they were meant to be at the start, only it was too overwhelming to integrate.

So we must always keep evolution in mind when trying to understand all this.  All my nightmares were terror filled, and since terror is organized very deep in the brain, that it should be obvious that nightmares derived from there and not later.  Just as very fearful dreams may be limbic/feeling brain, but a bit of brainstem to give them power.  The content of my nightmares (which have been gone for years) was of being in a dark hole with someone coming to kill me.  I could not breathe. Someone coming to kill me was the inchoate realization that death was approaching.  I made that terror into a phantom, which is why so many kids love horror films. They can feel that terror for a moment.  They think it is the masked guy on the screen but we know better.

And what we also know is that as we evolve and have ideas and words we can be driven crazy by these forces and imagine that the guy in the ice cream booth “wants to kill me”.  Our poor victim too sees death approaching and for the very same reason: death is approaching from way down deep.  He too, gives it a content: the guy in the booth.  I mean he cannot say, “Oh yes, my mother is taking speed or many cups of coffee and that is speeding me up.  And also she is drinking whiskey all throughout her pregnancy. “  He has no idea where the danger comes from and that is the real danger because it can be acted out randomly.  He will act on anyone in his presence.

One thing I have left out is the evolution epileptic symptoms.  They often begin in childhood as petit mal and grow to grand mal major seizures.  We have had good luck with seizures, often changing them from grand mal to petit mal, or from grand mal to no seizures  as they relive convulsive pain from early on.  We change the seizure from a major symptom to a major Primal.  Not always but often.  We lower the pain/terror threshold.  We lower terror/pain to below the level where symptoms begin.  They then are not cured but can be symptom free.  I make no claims for cure; only that we have had some success with this problem.  In the more severe cases what we see is a lessening of the symptoms.  It the case of convulsions we see how the imprint impacts the whole system and causes seizures.  In the case of nightmares, the terror is still contained within the limbic/feeling system and does not escape out to massively produce serious psychosis.


What stops psychotic symptoms is the same thing the blocks nightmares and panic attacks:  first line blockers; heavy duty tranquilizers that put a cap on the brainstem imprint for a short time.  Could it be that all three are related?  No doubt at all.  Do they come from the same area and same epoch of our lives?  From my clinical experience, the answer is a “YES.” How so?  Because the symptoms either diminish or go away as the terror is relived and brought to the surface.  So then we can treat ADD, panic attacks,  nightmares and many other symptoms with the same thing?  You think I mean drugs?  I mean Primal Therapy, which permits patients to travel down deep to reach those terrors that underlie so many divergent afflictions and relive them to be done with them.  Oh yes,  they also can be dulled for a moment with drugs which help repression.  These drugs are called “anti-psychotics.”  Why is that?  Because they reach deep in the brain where psychosis emanates.
And that is the way with nearly every current therapy, alas.    Psychiatry has become synonymous with drugs.  Only because they have not observed the imprint which would give them the key answer to all their unasked questions. So they drug what they can’t see and then write theories about the mystery of it all.

A person doesn’t just suddenly become psychotic.  He was already disturbed; only we did not call it psychosis.  He has gastric problems or asthma or incipient cancer.  He was highly disturbed but neither he nor us had any words for it.  His system was going awry.  Epigenetics was kicking in and methylation of cells was beginning.  The whole system was becoming deranged.  And compounding of no love and pain was taking its toll.  And now we have to rewind the biologic clock and revisit our lives in a real way.