YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

I've always had nightmares for as long as I can remember and unfortunately that hasn't changed. Anyway I had this dream several years ago but it's always stuck with me (along with more of my more frightening or disturbing nightmares). I don't remember the beginning of it all too much because it was just odd not scary. All I remember about it was being with my friend and walking except physics must not have been a thing cause we were walking at almost a ninety degree angle straight up a road and thought nothing of it. me being with my friend kept changing back and forth between that and this basement-like area where a small girl was being held and all i remember is her crying. the dream went on like that until the very end where my friend and i showed up at this basement and our other friends were there and they started beating the shit out of the friend i'd been walking with throughout the dream and i was screaming at everyone else that they were killing him but they didn't hear me or didn't care and then I noticed the girl a ways away and a man was with her and she was terrified of him and he was stitching her mouth closed so she couldn't scream except when he was done her mouth was clearly open but a layer of skin seemed to have grown over her mouth and a rat was sitting on the skin over her mouth and she was sobbing but she couldn't get it to move because she couldn't move and she couldn't scream and then i woke up. it wasn't until i awoke that i realized the girl looked like i did when i was a kid and had been wearing a nightgown that i used to have when i was young. it still disturbs me thinking about that dream.

Wow, what an intense nightmare! It sounds like there's a lot going on in your subconscious. I've found that when I have intense dreams there's usually something going on in my life that manifests in my dreams- like when I was failing Spanish and I had a dream where a lady who looked suspiciously like my professor told me I would flunk out of college and end up as a housewife. But once I connected the dream to my anxiety about passing that class I felt a lot better.

I'm guessing you've been through some serious shit. Maybe you've felt that no one's listening to you, or that people put you down? It might help to take each part of the dream and think of them as metaphors for something going on in your life or in your head. It may just be the English major in me, but I've found that it helps me. I hope it helps you!