Very detailed dream!! Deals with illness, insects, needles, suicide and other triggering stuff!! I had a terrifying and disturbing dream in which me and other people had a very rare and new disease. It was already disturbing as that also because the illness was carried by some very strange insects and we had to stay at the hospital with needles in our arms and stuff. At a certain point a girl (who had the most serious form of the illness) started screaming and she was covered in blood, and she was suffering so much that she decided to k*** herself...I woke up covered in sweat and almost had a panic attack. Does someone else have VERY disturbing and triggering dreams like this? They stress me out so much :(

It sure was, I can't understand how my brain can give birth to such horrible things :( I've been feeling weird all day

@chianugget Brains are super creative. Sometimes it's enjoyable, sometimes it's not

@NOCD Advocate - Katie That's so true though!!

Oh really? Does it? What do you do to meditate? It would really help me ^^

@chianugget Use the Calm app. It has a lot of guided meditations and if you do it enough you’ll find you can relax a lot quicker and since I do it before bed I naturally feel sleepy. There are also sleep stories and sleep meditations you can use in the app to play while you fall asleep :)

@evkrey Oh I've heard about it!! Well I'm definitely gonna try it, thank you so much for the advice ^^

@chianugget I found that a lot of the time these dreams would trigger my fight or flight response and cause me to wake up in the middle of the night. So what I’ve been theorizing is that if I’m able to relax and control mental compulsions as best I can throughout the day, plus exercise daily (light walk, bicylcyle machine 30 mins), seems to reduce the dreams, I wake up with no memory of them, and the best part is better sleep. But I’ve only tried this past 3 days so can’t confirm this will be sustainable.

@evkrey Well trying is always good!! Hope u will feel better soon :) I'm trying too, hopefully this will work

I am currently doing CBT which involves exposure with my therapy, it's going well with my other fears but with things involving like...suicide and self harm (I got harm OCD) I still got quite anxious and scared. I hope that working on it everything will get better ^^

@chianugget Yeah I’m also thinking it will take time. I’m doing CBT with erp with an ocd specialist as well. You’re doing great! Just shrug off the dream as best you can and keeping going. Buying into the content will lead to a rumination spiral/anxiety attack

@evkrey Thank you sooo much!! You're doing great too ^^ I wish you the best for your healing. We will be okay :)