I had a pretty good day, actually.  But I'm feeling discouraged and still deeply upset about extremely twisted dreams I had last night, which prompted me to make this post.

Like a lot of us I imagine, I have major issues with sleep.  Sleep paralysis, sometimes (not the kind where you see aliens, so much, but the kind where you can't move and fight to come out of it but can't and get panicked), but mostly, chronic, awful, horrendous nightmares that leave me shaken and can even ruin entire days when I do remember them enough.  And my (natural) sleep, when unaided by any substances, is almost always unfreshing, spotty, and almost painful to wake up from.

Recently (in the last year and a half or so) it's actually improved quite a bit, thanks to my psychiatrist and actually finding the right options medication-wise.  When I was untreated and then when I was on bupropion (horrible drug for me in every way, which is a long story, but especially mangled my sleep), they'd be so vivid, often violent/graphic/disgusting, sometimes trauma-based, and petrifying all-around that I'd literally wake up screaming and be afraid to fall asleep.  Now I take micronized progesterone before going to bed daily (as we realized that part of the problem was hormonal/neuroendocrine), and eszopiclone, which seems to work quite well when taken properly/sparingly enough in quelling both the nightmares and sleep issues entirely.  So they're not nearly *as* bad, though I still get them--dreams usually revolving around emotional abandonment by everyone I have left and similar BPD anxieties.

Now, though (full disclosure this is especially personal/gross), I'm almost having the opposite problem.  When I take hypnotics, particularly the one I'm prescribed, I end up having dreams that are so good they're bad--erotic/sexual dreams, in other words.  I guess this makes sense because I'm dealing with a ton of severe isolation, repression, and self-loathing about my sexuality, so that's firmly rooted in my subconscious.  But they just prompt extreme feelings of guilt, shame, and disgust upon awakening, so it's not like I can enjoy them and the impact might as well be that of actual nightmares.

Now, perhaps as I'm building a bit of a tolerance to the meds, I'm dealing with the worst of both worlds (!) which really came to a head last night.  Having nightmares that are emotionally heart-wrenching and jarring yet graphically, vividly sexual at the same time.  :(  

This always involves my ex, the love of my life I lost because of unchecked BPD that led to abusive patterns.  The ones last night were so warped because we weren't even in a relationship (in the dream-realm), I think she was with someone else and the divorce had happened, but for whatever reason we were meeting up just to have crazily intense sex like we used to, but completely devoid/drained of any of the emotional nuances and love that actually accompanied that when it happened throughout our marriage in real life, and I was going along with it just out of desperation and wanting to be able to have *any* shred of contact with/attention from her.  It was so vivid, the sensations felt so real that I felt like I had several orgasms in the dream that were as intense and overwhelming as any I've had in waking life, paired with emotional horror and pain.  I've never felt so disgusted and disgusting.  It's everything I exactly didn't need right now, which is why I'm still feeling triggered by it.  :(

Damnit, I just want to have peaceful, dreamless sleep when I go to bed at the end of the day.  The kind that's completely 'black'--no dreams, no sense of consciousness at all.  I feel like I'd give the use of one of my legs for that sometimes.  Because basically what it comes down to is that I almost *never* feel like I'm actually fully 'asleep', that is, totally unconscious and unaware, with the constant dreams that happen.  So it never really feels like I have a chance to totally recharge and be truly gone from the world for any length of time.  

I half-wonder if a lot of my chronic fatigue might be able to be traced to this.  I'm an introvert, low-functioning, and constantly having to keep my symptoms in check and put up masks to interact with other people is exhausting.  So is dealing with my own mind, thoughts, obsessions, hangups and self-talk.  And I can't even escape all that in my sleep, the *one* time in our lives when we're supposed to be able to.  It's just exasperating and I've had it up to here with it.

I also find a strong sense of utter humiliation in the lack of control I have over whatever goes on when I slip into sleep, the dreams, the paralysis too, to a lesser extent.  It feels like almost like an incontinence of sorts and I hate it.  I can at least control my other inescapable bodily functions like when to eat, go to the bathroom, and can even hold/change my breath for a short time if I want to.  But with dreaming, there's no control and I'm completely at the mercy of the darkest, most messed-up, twisted parts of my disordered mind.

So I'm to the point now where I'm starting to detest and resent the whole phenomenon of dreaming.  It seems weird to frame it this way, but if you really think about it, it's overwhelmingly negative.  As human beings, we have the potential to be involuntarily transported every single night into utterly bizarre alternate realms in which we have no control even over our own behavior and decisions, capriciously and more-or-less at random.  Why on earth do we just accept this?  I know we don't really have a choice, of course, but seriously, this is one of those mundane 'facts of life' that's actually incredibly surreal and disquieting if you really think about it and what it entails.  The fact that REM sleep is  vitally necessary for our health and survival is one of the things I hate the most about being human.  Our muscles are useless too in that stage when all of that's happening, though our sexual organs, of all things, seem to work still.  Fantastic.  :P

I also recently read somewhere that adults past a certain point of neurological development overwhelmingly have nightmares compared to any other type of dreams.  I know that several important scientific discoveries and other inspiration came together through dreams, and they've even served as creative fodder for me too on rare occasions, but mostly, it's weird nightmares the vast majority of the time, and God help you if you're mentally ill in any way.  I wish I could just have what feels like the holy grail currently: innocent, magical, pleasant dreams in a childlike space that actually provide peace and maybe real insight into life dilemmas.  But that's very very rare, so in practical reality I'd just settle for a little slice of nothingness and oblivion.

Anyway, there's my little sleep rant.  Perhaps other pwBPD on here can empathize somewhat.  I feel like the sleep aspects of this condition go somewhat underappreciated clinically.

As a final afterthought, with a lot of those celebrities who infamously ODed on ridiculously excessive combos of prescription sedative-hypnotics and opiates and alcohol and whatever else, I really wonder if this was why.  Not that they were just addicts or even severe 'insomniacs' per se or clueless or suicidal (though probably all those things were contributing factors too), but that they just wanted some real, long-enough, refreshing sleep, without anxiety-ridden dreams or demons taking over or things that go bump in the night.  I imagine if you're famous and have to be 'on' constantly like that, this would be all the more precious and important to you.  I think I *completely* understand why Michael Jackson (perhaps the most extreme example, but there's also Anna Nicole Smith, Heath Ledger, Marilyn Monroe, etc., many of which were actually BPD too!) just finally gave up and wanted to be fully anesthetized with the propofol, no dreaming, no REM sleep at all.  And with some of them I wonder if they just got so frustrated with poor sleep that they said 'to hell with it' and downed fatal quantities of drugs in a hypnagogic state of complete desperation just to achieve this, something that should be a basic human need.

**TL;DR: Sleep and dreams are miserable when you're borderline, especially the awful nightmares that are so common.  I have chronic nightmares, sleep paralysis, used to have full-blown night terrors, now things are a little better with meds, but recently have been having erotic dreams that trigger shame/anxiety/anguish/self-loathing and self-harm/etc./all those BPD symptoms in themselves when I take the meds, and now for the last few weeks it's been both, highly emotional nightmares and graphic sex dreams combined in unholy nocturnal abominations that leave me waking up into the emotional fallout of both.  I hate it.  To hell with dreaming--I just want refreshing, dreamless sleep in the abyss for a few hours, that's all.  But that's so hard to achieve and that exasperates me.**