Maybe I am just hard wired for depression and anxiety

By Christine Stapleton

I want the dreams to stop. They are not nightmares. They are bad dreams. Years of therapy have given me an explanation, but no solution. It seems to come down to this: I cannot control my subconscious, which really sucks.

I have these kinds of dreams over and over, year after year.

I say something that seems innocuous but apparently it is terribly offensive and I get yelled at.
I am on a ski slope, skiing by myself, trying to hook up with my friends. By the time I get to the bottom of the hill the snow has melted and I am trying to ski on mud. I still can’t find my friends.
I find myself in a predicament and I jump up into the air, hands over my head like Super Man. I do a few butterfly kicks (I swam butterfly as a kid) and I am off, away from my problem, looking down at it. I fly around, people see me, I go about my business and I am so happy I can fly. Then I fly too high and realize I never learned how to land. I am terrified.
The classic last-day-of-the-semester dream, I am getting A’s in all my classes, then realize I haven’t gone to a single class or done a single assignment for one class. I can’t find the professor or the lecture hall or even the day and time of the class.
Sometimes I have nightmares. I wake up trying to scream but all I can muster is some guttural moan and I wake up.

You can read a lot into these dreams. They are kind of no-brainers. I just want them to stop. I have had only two happy dreams that I can remember. One involved me, George Clooney, and the privacy of a tent. In the other I was Lance Armstrong’s girlfriend and he wanted my opinion of his training regimen. Exciting, huh?

I have made so much progress in the last three years of therapy, medication tinkering and sobriety. My life is good, stable and consistent. I can trust myself and my feelings. But I can’t seem to do a damn thing about these dreams. Sometimes I think I am just hard wired for anxiety and depression. No matter how much I work on and improve my waking life, deep down the depression and anxiety are still there, wanting to come out and play.
I will keep working on it. Saying my Hail Mary’s until I fall asleep – praying that George and Lance will reappear. Dream on.

Christine Stapleton has been a reporter for The Palm Beach Post for 23 years and in 2006, began writing a column entitled, Kicking Depression.

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Treating Your Anxiety | Give Up too Fast! (September 15, 2009)

2 Comments to
“Maybe I am just hard wired for depression and anxiety”

Carter at 10:10 am on September 9th, 2009

Probably a long shot, but I don’t suppose you’ve been swearing, shouting, acting out during these dreams? I have (during really, really vivid dreams, usually of fistfights, etc.), & apparently research over the past couple years has established the disorder (REM sleep behavior disorder, or RBD) can be caused or triggered by antidepressant use, esp. in people who don’t fit the typical profile (which is men in their 50s or 60s).

And there are certainly other diagnosible sleep disorders that can go along with unpleasantly vivid dreams. Just went through a sleep study last night; got a sleep apnea dx, but I slept poorly & they didn’t get enough data to dx or rule out RBD.

Good luck! Bad sleep sucks much worse than most easy-sleepers realize, I think.

Dawn Pugh at 5:37 am on September 15th, 2009

Hi Christine,
Firstly let me thank you for sharing yourself with us all.
I wanted to say I work therapeutically with dreams quite a lot but I do not intend to offer you any interpretation.

What I would like to say is that your subconscious is your friend and that it will not present anything that it doesn’t think we cannot deal with.

The simple fact that your dreams are re-current can mean that you are not implementing new learning’s but yet repeating old patterns.

I hope this is useful?

Thank you
Regards
Dawn Pugh