I Have Had A Reoccurring Nightmare
Sometimes when you're alone in bed at night, you wake up from a terrible nightmare. It often takes you a couple of minutes to come to your senses, but eventually you realize it was all just a bad dream. It may take you a little while, but eventually you fall back to sleep, knowing that you're safe and sound from whatever it was that scared you. Nightmares aren't the only types of bad dreams a person can have though. Night terrors can also plague a person. The type of dream where they still feel locked inside their nightmare even after waking up. I remember having those types of dreams when I was younger. I would sometimes wake up, feeling like something was in my bed with me, like a rat or snake, or that an evil person was still chasing me around and had tracked me down to my bed.
When I look back on it all now, I can attribute some of my night terrors to the fact that I had high levels of stress earlier in my life. At the time, I was working at a job as a temp and saw several of my fellow employees laid off over a 14 month period. They were all temps too and they would come and go like a casual wind blowing through a quiet town. When the company had a need for more workers, they would simply hire a new round of temps. Some of the lucky ones were offered a job as permanent employees. I always waited around and wondered when it was going to be my turn. Then I got word that I was next in line to be hired. But before the hiring process happened, the company instituted a hiring freeze. It had to reanalyze its budget and that meant reanalyzing how many people they could put on a permanent payroll. Several people got stuck in limbo. We didn't know if we were going to be hired or not. We could be fired without notice at any time and there were no company benefits for us. Several of my co-workers didn't stick around, they left to find a more stable job.
This is when I remember having some of my worse night terrors. They were very vivid and often left me in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. One time I woke up thinking that rats were running around under my bed covers, crawling over my feet. I jumped up out of bed at that point and stubbed my toe so badly that I walked with a painful limp for two weeks. I remember being concerned that I might be laid off if I didn't show up to work. I was still a temp after all and could be let go for any reason. My job required me to stand on my feet all day and most weeks required overtime too.
I struggled through my injury, sucking it up as best I could and had several more night terrors over that year. I'm not sure why most of them involved creatures in my bed, but that seemed to be a common one. The other was feeling like someone had broke into my apartment, or that a ghost of some type was present in my room.
Eventually, I was notified at work that I would be hired as a permanent employee. I signed the paperwork and my name badge was changed from the temp one to the official company one. That was a good day for me and my night terrors seemed to occur less often after that. They didn't disappear totally though. At the same time, my life was transitioning away from the early young adult period to a more stable environment, where I lived in a home and started a family.
So there you have it. Stress was responsible for several of my night terrors during my past. I barely have them now. Although I do get the occasional strange one about an intruder in the house still. I deal with it better now. But since my stress level is down, that one must be linked to another area of my life that I haven't figured out yet. Maybe I'll have the answers for it someday, but at this point, it's still a mystery to me.
Thanks for reading.
When I look back on it all now, I can attribute some of my night terrors to the fact that I had high levels of stress earlier in my life. At the time, I was working at a job as a temp and saw several of my fellow employees laid off over a 14 month period. They were all temps too and they would come and go like a casual wind blowing through a quiet town. When the company had a need for more workers, they would simply hire a new round of temps. Some of the lucky ones were offered a job as permanent employees. I always waited around and wondered when it was going to be my turn. Then I got word that I was next in line to be hired. But before the hiring process happened, the company instituted a hiring freeze. It had to reanalyze its budget and that meant reanalyzing how many people they could put on a permanent payroll. Several people got stuck in limbo. We didn't know if we were going to be hired or not. We could be fired without notice at any time and there were no company benefits for us. Several of my co-workers didn't stick around, they left to find a more stable job.
This is when I remember having some of my worse night terrors. They were very vivid and often left me in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. One time I woke up thinking that rats were running around under my bed covers, crawling over my feet. I jumped up out of bed at that point and stubbed my toe so badly that I walked with a painful limp for two weeks. I remember being concerned that I might be laid off if I didn't show up to work. I was still a temp after all and could be let go for any reason. My job required me to stand on my feet all day and most weeks required overtime too.
I struggled through my injury, sucking it up as best I could and had several more night terrors over that year. I'm not sure why most of them involved creatures in my bed, but that seemed to be a common one. The other was feeling like someone had broke into my apartment, or that a ghost of some type was present in my room.
Eventually, I was notified at work that I would be hired as a permanent employee. I signed the paperwork and my name badge was changed from the temp one to the official company one. That was a good day for me and my night terrors seemed to occur less often after that. They didn't disappear totally though. At the same time, my life was transitioning away from the early young adult period to a more stable environment, where I lived in a home and started a family.
So there you have it. Stress was responsible for several of my night terrors during my past. I barely have them now. Although I do get the occasional strange one about an intruder in the house still. I deal with it better now. But since my stress level is down, that one must be linked to another area of my life that I haven't figured out yet. Maybe I'll have the answers for it someday, but at this point, it's still a mystery to me.
Thanks for reading.
By:
paclark
Age:
31-35
