i used to have horrible recurrant nightmares, things like walking along a beach and suddenly stepping on something squishy and lukewarm and looking down and realizing that it was a rotting baby's corpse
they were so bad that i woke up screaming in the middle of the night and i'd flail and hit the wall... for me they were actually dream images which occurred during REM sleep, my body used to have a particular dysfunction where i'd remain slightly awake during my REM periods, into Beta Waves but i'd still be dreaming. the significance of this is that the dreams muddled with reality, i'd sometimes open my eyes and see my room and it would be a hallucinatory nightmare, i'd see the couch or the desk and then rotting corpses would fall onto them etc. etc. your beta waves are the brain waves that you experience when you're completely sober and awake, your normal daily consciousness. REM (rapid eye movement sleep) is similar in a way to Beta waves, except that your consciousness is not based on sensory experience, you are not usually conscious and you are in effect paralyzed. ever seen a dog sleep and watch them yelp and make little whimpers or jerk their legs about and make snorting noises while they're sleeping? humans sort of do the same thing during REM. it's a device used by the brain to stop us from getting out of bed and sleepwalking our dreams and injuring ourselves.
you need to distinguish between nightmares and night terrors, because there are different treatments for both. even though night terrors are affiliated with children much more, they can still happen in adults, though it's usually pretty rare. you need to record when the bad dreams are happening. night terrors happen during the first hour and sometimes hour and a half of your sleep cycle during the n-REM (non REM) cycle of Delta wave sleep -- which is the deepest level of sleep you can achieve, which is the state which replenishes your brain chemicals, etc. if your bad dreams occur during the first 1 1/2 hours of your sleep, or if you suddenly wake up out of the dream sweating all over, if you scream, or thrash around, that is a night terror, which is usually treated as a physical problem. nightmares which occur during REM and real dreamtime are usually associated with mental illness and may even be early onset signals of certain disorders and should be definately treated by a therapist. another way to tell nightmare from night terror is if you can remember vivid emotions other than fear directly associated with your dream. if you can remember jealousy, anger, rage, betrayal, embarassment, any of those, then you're likely having nightmares rather than night terrors. you usually can remember vivid details associated with nightmares as well, intricacies of the dream, detailed plot etc. you usually only remember the emotion of fear or horror and not much of the dream with a night terror.
if you're still unable to distinguish between the two, go to your general practicioner or shrink if you have one, tell them about it, and ask to go to a sleep lab. i had to do this, they put little electrodes which read your brain waves on your head during the night, and observe your breathing and pulse rate to determine what exactly is going on with your brain.
for me, they've gone away... what they did with me was try ALL sorts of different sleeping medications to knock me into a deeper sleep where i would dream less. benzodiazepines such as klonopin (6mg before bedtime) for about 3 1/2 years and i was okay... my brain just re-learned how to sleep i guess. i know for a fact that if you want to just stop remembering your dreams well take benzodiazepines about 45 minutes before you go to sleep - and long lasting ones, not short acting ones such as ativan or xanax. klonopin would be ideal. ambien didn't work for me, it only increased the vividness of my dreams... also, st. john's wort has been known to work for some people when taken everyday like an SSRI if you're shy of psych meds.
if you can let me know via here or pm whether they are in fact nightmares or night terrors, i'll be glad to give you more help. i've been through something similar and know a fair deal about this sort of thing.
oh and randycaver, writing your dreams down will help you to maybe see patterns such as frequency of familiar or friendly interactions, frequency of recurrant emotions, etc. but not much more than that. you can draw paralells to your daily life and try to pin them on dreams, but that only seems to correllate for people who aren't having nightmares. usually night terrors especially and nightmares come out of nowhere and have to be treated like a psychological disorder (they're actually both in the DSM - IV), and writing down your dreams ALWAYS makes you remember them more vividly, so i'd advise against doing that in this case unless the original poster's therapist or dr. thinks it's a good idea to do so, i know that i used to keep a dream journal to try and sort out what was going on, and it only made them more intense, vivid, and frequent so that i'd remember about 3 dreams/night instead of just 1.
anyway, here are some links that might help you:
http://www.nightterrors.org/
here's a page on medications used to treat night terrors, with klonopin at the top of the list.
http://www.nightterrors.org/med.html
FAQ regarding nightmares:
http://www.asdreams.org/nightma.htm
- good luck
p.s. don't ever believe any of those dream dictionary things, they're complete bullshit & they're laughed at by every reputable psychiatrist out there & will probably do more harm than good.