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I will not go into graphic details of any sort here, but there may be some triggers for SI, suicidal thoughts, and possibly for swearing, because I don't have the energy to censor myself tonight.

Sometimes I sleep. Usually people have to encourage, cajole, beg, demand, insist or outright force me to do so, but sometimes I just sleep. Sometimes I can be convinced or can convince myself, for months on end, to sleep every night like a good girl, regardless of the horror I find myself facing, or the bruises and scratches I wake up with at times, or the periodic full days of feeling exactly as I did the days after each of the rapes. Sometimes I can be strong and sleep anyway. Even when I sleep "well" I sleep exceptionally lightly; my therapists have called it hypervigilence and told me is is a typical part of the PTSD. That's very comforting when I wake up 479,358 times in any given night because of frogs farting eight blocks away.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, either on my own or because my friend has woken me. He stays on Skype and listens, sometimes all night long. When he wakes me from a nightmare and talks to me soothingly, I usually feel incredibly fortunate to have such an amazing friend, someone who cares for me enough to make such an astronomical sacrifice to ease a little of my suffering. I can't help feeling guilty, though, because my nightmares have an impact on our friendship, and on him. Just as I imagine it would be for any two people who care for each other a great deal, my suffering is hard for him to witness.

Tonight I woke because my friend awakened me. I was apparently having a particularly violent nightmare, reliving past traumas in new ways, my mind ever finding neoteric methods of torment for me, rife with historical inaccuracy. He said he had a hard time waking me; I can tell I must have been very deeply asleep because I have several sore red marks that will probably be bruises in the morning, and also a handful of long scratches. I could not feel the immense gratitude I usually feel, or the relief, or the safety... Tonight I just felt anger and frustration and desolation. Tonight I just wanted to give up. The prospect of facing even one more of these nightmares is so overwhelming, I simply do not want to continue. When I was enduring the abuses and events in my life that led up to this point, I always had this idea that if I could somehow divorce my mind from my body and become this ephemeral, amorphous thing, this purely astral being, I would finally be safe and feel whole. Now that my life is within my control and the abuses have all ended, I find myself looking at my situation in this sick paradoxical state... if I could only divorce my mind from my body and be a purely physical being, without thought or fear or abusive limbs in REM sleep, if, if, if.

I start to feel sorry for myself, and I think back over the nightmares I have had at other times. Forget the traumas themselves, and all the work I have put into healing; forget the years I have put between myself and the sick people who did these things. The nightmares are the one thing that never let me forget or really move forward; they are like vice strong cold hands around my wrists and ankles, and the experience is like being raped over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again. The two worst kinds of nightmares are the ones where I am reliving almost exactly, but my body responds in an awful way that makes me feel a sick shame and hatred of myself that often leads to doing self injurious things; and the second worst type of nightmare is a sort that blends two separate types of traumas from my life, a break-in and the rapes, into this new kind of terror. I used to think the worst nightmare was the sort where I did not recall what had happened at all, and I woke feeling more run down than if I had not slept at all, and covered in bruises over my thighs and abdomen and arms, but those seem to have fallen away some, and I am remembering most of the nightmares I am having, and... I would trade them in gladly.

This sorrow for my inability to sleep, for my inability to be "normal," to have "normal" relationships because I can't even begin to broach the topic of sleeping with someone (among other things), it wears me down. Today I feel incredibly suicidal. I lay in bed for awhile after the nightmare and cried, images in my mind of my own demise sort of superimposed or flip-book inserted with the nightmare images. I wonder frequently if there is any point in continuing. I don't like to think of myself as weak, or as a quitter, but... years of going without sleep, feeling like a freak, waking with injuries, and reliving horror just... eats at the soul. My friend tells me there is this therapy I have never heard of before called EMDR (short for Eye Movement Desensitization Reprogramming), and it is specifically geared toward people with PTSD. I am a bit dubious, but I'm sort of at a point where I will try standing on my head covered in chickens blood while reciting Sutras in reverse if I thought it would just make my head quiet down.

So, I had two hours of sleep, and I am probably up for the day, because I can't face my pillows, or my blankets. My puppy cuddles me and licks my thigh because he knows this routine, and when I pick him up and drench his fur with my tears, he'll forgive me, and because of him, maybe we'll make it until tomorrow.

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I know some of what you're going through, and I'm so sorry that this is happening to you. My therapist keeps telling me to try to live in the present and ground myself... she doesn't seem to realize that it's my dreams that won't let me move on. Another person here on AS suggested something called lucid dreaming,and I've bought a book to read about how to do this. I'm not sure if it will work, but I'm willing to try just about anything. I've been awake since Saturday morning, and yet I'm sitting here drinking as much coffee as my stomach can handle because I'm afraid to go to bed.

I hope that you will find the rest and peace you're looking for.

Take gentle care

~coffee~

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:aswelcomesu::youcanheal::notalone:

So sorry for all you are enduring. You are so fortunate to have such a caring friend, worth his weight in gold that one. :console:

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Hello SleeplessEni

welcome to AS, My name is Paula and I am one of the newbie support team here. I'm sorry for all you've been through, its good that you have such a great friend, I hope you make some more friends here too. If you need any help with the board, please let me know and I will do my best to help

take care, Paula

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I can empathise completely with what you're going through,for me too sleep used to be nightmare. I feared,loathed and craved it.

When your not getting enough it's hard to think straight and for me too suicidal thoughts came.

I didn't want to take sleeping pills out of fear of being trapped in the nightmares etc.

Anyway I'm the other side of that now,I learned how to take control of my dreams,I found I could change the outcomes or simply just wake myself up(i still get the odd pretty bad one where it leaves me shaken),in comparison to how I was before,things are alot better. So my message is to please don't give up hope :candle: You're experiences with sleep problems sound very similiar to the problems I used to have and I'm telling you that there is hope,just hang in there :flowers:

I'm glad that you have what seems to be such a good friend and I hope AS helps you through this difficult time like it helped me :luck::notalone::supportu::aswelcomesu:

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Thank you all so much for the kind words of support. I am deeply touched by them. I, too, am afraid of taking sleeping pills, not so much for fear of being stuck in the nightmares, but for fear that I won't wake up if something happens, like a break-in. I sleep very lightly, and at times have tried to sleep with ear plugs to prevent waking every five minutes, but I have ripped them out in my sleep on more than one occasion and thrown them, scratching myself a time or two in the process. People tell me those fears are irrational, and I can see how, to someone with a different live circumstance and perspective, my fears ad reactions would seem wholly nonsensical. Sometimes I want to shake my own self and tell myself to get a grip. But... I lived those things. I am this way because of those things. My fears are rational, in some sense, because those horrors that I am frightened will occur did, in fact, occur. Am I alone in that? I spend so much time going back and forth with myself; I fight myself so hard to just try to be "normal" and happy and stop seeing monsters in every shadow, and then in the next breath I'm rationalizing my fears. I spend even more time wondering how much of this actually makes me certifiably nuts.

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We know our fears SEEM irrational to other people, they haven't (thankfully) had our experiences,

you are not alone in that, they will eventually subside as you process. Normal, what is that? Is any

one *normal* You certainly aren't certifiably nuts that's for sure. Logically you know that the fears

are sometimes irrational but that doesn't make them any less real, they will diminish in severity,

sometimes things get worse before they get better. :youcanheal: take gentle care of yourself :hug:

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Hi there.

Welcome to AS.

I hope you find this site to be helpful.

Found

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