IMO, there is no need to seek professional help unless the underlying problem is some sort of severe emotional distress. For example, the nightmares you experienced during childhood likely reflect the struggle to learn to deal with normal childhood fears and problems. Sometimes, these dreams are carried forward into your adult life when certain events or memories are triggered. Other people experience nightmares when they are undergoing stress or anxiety during their day. If you can identify something that has deviated from your normal routine, pinpointing the cause is relatively easy. Address the issue at hand (or at least accept it) and your nightmares should go away. In your situation, that human predator might be your new fiance. Heed the signs.
I have, about-i suppose, 40 or so recurring nightmares., since i was a kid-much less now, and they dont tend to bother me as much. All horrific and disturbing, and always identical. They even go in cycles, which is odd. From blood filled rooms, to crumbling teeth, morphing zombie faces, and a particularly disturbing one where i keep going back to school, year after year, trying to get better grades. Absolutely terrifying. But, i dont find them as bad as the sleep paralysis, that sucks altogether. When im wide awake, fully aware, and i cant move a muscle, not an eyelid, nothing, thats damn scary.
i hate trading dreams. you know they one where you are stuck holding some crappy 5,000 share position and it is running against you and for some reason you cant unwind the position. i cant tell if i am having a nightmare or a bad day.
Most dreams are just your mind filing away information. Not sure about the continuous nightmares though. If it's interfering with your life, by all means get help. I wish you all peaceful sleep in the future.
Dreams are, in part, an effort to work out our problems. You need to look at what happened 2 months ago in your life that triggered the dreams. That should give you some significant answers. I think the correct interpretation would be that you're feeling threatened by something (being chased). It's something that you either cannot face, or are unwilling to face, consciously. The "getting lost" suggest confusion or fear of how to deal w/the problem, or that you don't know how to get out of some situation you're in. The thing that's making you feel threatened could be all kinds of things, either from the outside world or from inside yourself. For instance, say they just hired someone at work who you feel may eventually take over your job. You haven't really faced this consciously but it threatens your very livelihood. Or say you just found out your wife is pregnant and you think it's great, but inside you're scared you won't be a good father. And so on. You get the idea. You have to examine what's happening in your life, what changed or occurred 2 months ago, and examine honestly how it's making you feel. Harold (not a shrink, doesn't even like 'em)
I've had my share of nightmares certainly, but they've never been recurring ones. I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist. By all means see a professional if it's causing a major disruption. Still: chronic nightmares -- by definition, being frequently occurring dreams unpleasant enough in some way or other to actually wake you up, seem to be a surprisingly common problem, the prevalence of people reporting experiencing them at one time or other being as high as 5% to 8% in the general population. They seem to become less frequent with advancing age, so that's hopeful at least. These days psychologists/psychiatrists seem to think that a simple cognitive-behavioural technique called imagery rehearsal helps. There are no large randomized controlled studies proving it, but there's an accumulating body of smaller and uncontrolled studies that are suggestive. The basic idea is that you record the nightmare in as much detail as possible. Write it out fully, no matter how terrifying. When you're finished, you change the ending of the written down dream imagery / story, preferably into something positive and peaceful. Then you mentally rehearse the new imagery every night, as soon as possible to the time you go to sleep. You do this on an ongoing basis until hopefully the dream stops. If there's more than one dream, you tackle them one at a time. There's a reasonable description of the trick here: http://www.guidetopsychology.com/dreams.htm Seems as if, at least, this method couldn't hurt. A nice recent review article about nightmares and their treatment is referenced here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...tool=iconabstr&query_hl=8&itool=pubmed_docsum You can at least read the abstract, and a simple search will turn up a lot more interesting articles. Experiencing sleep paralysis is pretty common too, I used to have this sometimes. It's scary as hell if you don't know what it is, and understand that it will go away pretty quickly. Many people who report being possessed or held down by demons at night are likely describing sleep paralysis. It's not hard to understand how they could think that, if they had never heard of the syndrome.
LOL I have these occasionally. I usually have a bunch of positions & due to some computer problem I can't manage them...like my trading program is down or the computer doesn't work for various reasons (very frustrating). During the dream, sometimes I can see the P/L & sometimes I can't. Years ago, the p&l would always be red, but within the last year or so, it's always been been green....maybe an indication of my increased confidence. I also have the school test dreams though not as much as years ago. How about the dream where you are trying to run but you can't....anyone have that one ??? My legs slip out from under me, so I grab on to the wall to pull myself along.