Anyone have seriously realistic dreams? I’ve had 2 in the past week and I’m really shaken up by them.

I have very troubling dreams all the time, often it wakes me up after only a couple of hours of sleep and I never feel quite rested. In waking hours, I feel like the bad things I have seen could have happened yesterday even though most of them were years ago. The best conclusion I can come to from a lot of talking with other people and trying to read the latest academic takes on the subject is that trauma affects the brain in a way that creates a permanent connection between past and present, and that seems to be why the realistic and disturbing dreams are so pervasive, it's like the event just happened instead of being something in the distant past that just fades away as a memory. I don't think that any psychologist or researcher really has a definitive anwser for why this is, or what to do to fix it. I don't take any sort of psychiatric medication. Personally, meds have never helped, and I'm skeptical of the motivations behind the drug companies, and it seems illogical that the meds are so widely prescribed to a variety of people with vastly divergent reasons for taking them. I had many deployments to combat with an infantry unit, so I have a lot of really bad memories and experiences that plague both waking and sleeping hours, but I know that there are a lot of other reasons that people who suffer from trauma are dealing with the same issues, and suffer from very similar symptoms. I hope that you can heal over time OP, and anyone else on this thread, the best outcome seems to be developing ways to be healthy day to day, and building relationships and habits that assist with at least getting by through life even if the underlying memories never go away.

/r/ptsd Thread