Teen Son
Hi, new here and need to connect with people. I have been struggling with my son for long time. he has made it through first 2yrs of high school and it has not been easy. I honestly do not know how the school system let him get this far! lucky kid. There has been some consistent nightmares that he has had that concern me deeply. His night mares always have something about me and (recently my daughter) being murdered, laying in dripping blood and I can't help but feel that this stems from his hatred that I gave birth to someone other than him. this apparent jealousy has been there all along. The dreams just started again.
I'm not sure what to do about this. It sends a red flag and weirds me out. I am trying to make sense of this particular dream and wonder if i should be agressive in getting treatment for this obviously oppressed anger?
What have you done in this situation, and did it help?
Is your son seeing a doctor or therapist, and has he been diagnosed at all?
My son reports some disturbing dreams and thoughts too, and I know it can be frightening (I'm sure it must be to him too). I tend to not analyze the specific content, partly because I think that his illness leads to some incoherent thinking so I'm not sure that the meaning of the dreams is anything other than random thoughts about fears and lack of safety (in his mind). I have read that thoughts or dreams of harm coming to loved ones is just a general feeling of extreme anxiety because the world doesn't feel safe... So I'm not sure there is any reason to connect it to jealousy or anger over sharing you with a younger sibling.
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Chris Stanley- DS 11 ADHD ( ?) ODD, Bipolar NOS
currently taking Lithium, Risperidone, Melatonin
Here is a section from The Bipolar Child Newsletter Volume 4 on nightmares in children and adolescents with bipolar:
Nightmares During REM Sleep
It may be the case that children with bipolar disorder are not only suffering night terrors, but also terribly disturbing nightmares during their REM stages of sleep. Over 10 years ago, Dr. Charles Popper of Harvard Medical School wrote one of the few discussions in the child psychiatric literature about these nightmares. In an article titled "On Diagnostic Gore in Child's Nightmares" he said:
As bipolar children talk about these dreams, they report the explicit appearance of blood (not just imagined or inferred, but actually visualized blood) and descriptions of mutilations of bodies, dismemberment, and the insides of body parts. Their dreams are considerably more affectively intense than regular nightmares.
Dreams of fighting are quite common. In the fighting dreams of children or adults with mere anxiety, a knife may be pulled out and brought into attack, but the dreamer wakes up just before the knife enters the skin or rips the clothing. For bipolar children, the knife goes in, the blood is seen, and the dream may continue at considerable length and with explicit visualization of gore...where the "newsreel" of a dream story normally stops, the "newsreel" in the bipolar children keeps going. ...In these individuals, it is as though their unconscious sensors of painful affect are not working, even in their dreams."
This may explain why children with bipolar disorder seem fixated on blood and knives and always seem under threat. Something is overaroused in the amygdala--the part of the brain that governs "fight or flight." While researchers such as Jonathan Winson, author of Brain and Psyche: The Biology of the Unconscious have suggested that REM sleep preparations were for the formulation of strategies for dealing with local predators--to rehearse and ready the system--this primitive survival mechanism is overstimulated in these children and, trapped in transitory states from one stage of sleep to another, they are suffering horribly.
This emotionally charged imagery of these night mares and parasomnias are spilling over to the conscious mind during the day. Is it any wonder that these children are so often in combative and irritable modes and that they are terrified of going to sleep at night?
We are concerned about the effects such parasomnias are having on the psychological development of these children. The rate and frequency of night terrors and nightmares and the nature of the highly disturbing content which seems referable to fight-or-flight mechanisms seems coupled with many of the behavioral problems these children have. Many of the behaviors are congruent with "fight": oppositional, defiant, argumentative, defensive, behaviors; while other behaviors are more consonant with "fright": anxious, fearful, withdrawn, and phobic. The disturbances in sleep may be contributing to the disturbances within the psyche, or reinforcing them on a nightly basis.
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Brenda,51, TBMF Parent to Parent Volunteer
Mom to A, 17 1/2, BP, Tourette's, OCD, ADHD: Eskalith CR, Lamictal, Cytomel, Allegra
E, 16, BP,AS: Seroquel, Eskalith CR, inositol, Buspar
B, 14 1/2 & H, 11 1/2
Married 18 years to DH, 51
FROM TBMF: Do not start, stop, or change medications or other treatments for yourself or your child based on what you read on this Website or elsewhere on the Internet. Information presented here should not replace the considered judgement of a doctor who knows you or your child.