#obviously nothing is totally black and white I can't diagnose you everyone's different yadda yadda

[delusion-of-negation]

thanks to your post i discovered that nightmare disorder is a thing and i can now give my experiences a name (yay!), i thought i was the only one haunted by visions and demons.

yee, chronic nightmare disorder is a bitch, it can be co-morbid with ptsd but also a thing on its own or with other disorders, and it's the bane of my existence. the universe said "fuck your entire waking life", and chronic nightmare disorder said "and ye shall know no peace". I've had it my entire life - some of my earliest memories are nightmares, not my very earliest memory but I've been having them for as long as I remember and my family also remember me having them my whole life. I met a kid on the bus recently who told me he also doesn't sleep because his dreams always are horrible. it's a lot more common (and a lot more serious) than people think. it always pisses me off when shows want to make a character's nightmare sound serious so they call it a night terror, because nightmares are "just what kids get" and thus aren't serious (spoiler alert but they're serious for kids too, and night terrors are serious too), but nightmares and night terrors are different things - in a night terror you scream and flail and thrash about and stuff, but you wake up with no memory of doing so or of what you were thinking/dreaming at all, or very occasionally almost no memory of it (contrary to the misunderstandings of the writers of a particular show, that doesn't mean "some people always remember them clearly", because if you remember them consistently then you're having nightmares and just happen to also move in your sleep, what it means is anybody might occasionally have an individual night terror that they remember a teeny snippet of, the reason for this difference is that they happen in different sleep phases where memory is stored differently iirc), while nightmares are much less likely to result in as much movement while you're asleep, a little if you're prone to that otherwise, but nightmares are usually very vivid and you usually remember a lot more of them and clearly, in fact relatively often people struggle to "come back to reality" for a while (hence things like spending periods of time paranoid you're still asleep, or the time a family member of mine who also has it spent a while convinced their spouse had eaten our pet, because it happened in their nightmare). so when shows depict what is very clearly a nightmare, then call it a night terror to make it sound Grown Up and Serious, it bugs the hell out of me on every level, especially when they outright demean nightmares explicitly as "just scared kids" or whatever - it's wrong, it hurts kids struggling with this, it leads to adults with it not using the right language with doctors and/or shaming themselves and/or not even knowing it's A Thing, etc. so I am glad to have helped you find a name for the Visions and Demons, and I'm sorry to rant about the dumb people who don't have this issue and think it's silly childish shit and that we should just Grow Up and realise It's Just A Dream (gee whiz I wonder why the "vivid horrifying dreams, filled with agony, preying on your weaknesses" disorder makes "just a dream" not as comforting as it is to someone with "normal" dreams), so much so that they'll also misinform people on this and an equally serious disorder. then again, at least nightmares didn't become a meme like sleep paralysis, every time I'm lying awake frozen solid with my teeth crumbling painfully to bits in my mouth I'm like "damn sure is great that people know how serious and painful this condition is". sorry. I haven't taken my meds properly and I'm angry about everything. I'm as haunted by people not understanding that actually going through hell almost every time you fall asleep has Psychological Downsides, as I am by going through hell when I fall asleep, so us fucked up bitches gotta stick together and support each other, okay? your brain is a fucky bastard who is mean to you in ways you don't deserve, and anybody who acts like you're a pussy for being freaked out by the meat sack that knows all your weaknesses creating a torture universe for you can catch these hands. I'd fight the meat sack but that would hurt you so I can't.