Stupid PTSD 2: Nightmares & Flashbacks
All Nightmare Long - both asleep and awake
A 2-PRONG CONVERGENCE OF TOPICS, CONTINUED FROM:
—BLAM: My Dance With a Drunk Driver
—THE PERFECT STORM: That Caused My Non-Epileptic Seizures
—STUPID PTSD - Every breath you take, every move you make…
In this round the details are less gory and bloody. Today it’s more…the interpersonal issues of PTSD and gross 1980s horror flick SFX. Woot.
January 28, 2001
Week 5 after being rammed by a drunk driver
Memory lost until I re-read my journals for the gazillionth time
28 years old
Joy-joy. My favorite thing.
🎶 On the road again…
But it’s Sunday and my boyfriend has to drive me back home before his rehearsal, so I have to ride in a motor vehicle. On the friggin’ freeway. Gah. I hate the freeway. I hate riding in a vehicle at all, but especially on the freeway.
That’s where it happened.
Being on I-25 slams flashbacks between my eyes. EVERY. FRIGGIN’. TIME.
Once we get out of town and the traffic becomes sparser, I can finally relax. My boyfriend is such a tailgater, such an aggressive driver, zipping in and out of traffic when it’s not even heavy. Scares the crap out of me, and I keep having to ask him not to do that while I’m with him.
I try to remind him nicely instead of freaking out. I’ve had to start asking with batting eyes and “please will you do me the hugest favor” voice so he doesn't get testy about it and yell at me that I just need to trust him, because this whole topic is becoming nothing but eggshells. Every drive with him is eggshells these days.1
But we’re out of town on an empty freeway, so now I can relax. Breathe. Curl up in the corner of the truck. My eyelids get heavier. I can’t ever stay awake once we hit the open road. When I was a baby and my parents couldn’t get me to sleep, they say that taking me for a drive into the back country roads would knock me out in a heartbeat.
Worse now when I have to sleep multiple times a day. Reboot the brain, over and over. Snag sleep any chance…I can get…to stop…and…power…
Down.
Zzzzzzzzzz—
My spine whips sideways.
The world is sideways!
My two left wheels slam down—
BLAM!
Head bashes the door frame—
I bolt upright with a gasp.
Daylight.
Freeway.
Boyfriend.
“What! What! What!” he yells. Frantic eyes. Head darting. Death-gripping the steering wheel.
My hand flies to my neck brace because I jerked awake so hard. Then I groan and growl, sliding back down the seat. “Nothing. Stupid nightmare.”
“Oh, my God! Don’t do that to me! You about scared me half to death!”
“I know. I am so sorry.”
He hunkers over the steering wheel, battling to catch his breath, trying get his mind back on driving normally. “Oh, my God, I thought you’d seen something I didn’t!”
I’d like to shake my head and go back to sleep but I can’t move amidst the neck-spasms so I grunt, “No. It’s just…when you shift lanes so fast like that, it moves my body in the same way as when I almost rolled my car.”
“What? I didn’t shift fast! You asked me not to, so I didn’t! All I did was switch lanes and then you’re on the ceiling.”
I growl even longer. “Great.” Eyes are heavy. They wanna close but I don’t wanna sleep again. Need to sleep. Especially after that. Don’t wanna. “So apparently all it takes now is a perfectly innocent shift of my weight. Awesome. Stupid PTSD.”
“Well, listen, just calm down, all right?” His leather-gloved fingers lift off the steering wheel, then grip again. “We’re all right. I’m not gonna kill us—unless you startle me so badly that I swerve for no reason.”
“Oh, I’m perfectly aware of that, just like I’m perfectly aware that if an airbag ever goes off off, I’m gonna snap myself in two because my feet automatically jerk up to brace against the dashboard whenever somebody roars up to a stop sign. It is my greatest wish that I could stop bolting upright and scaring the crap out of everybody around me. But when I’m out that hard, my body doesn’t know the difference. It just reacts to the nightmare like it’s real.”
“Well, I can’t tell the difference between you having a nightmare and you seeing something on the road that I’ve missed.”
“I know. Oh, I know! And I am super sorry about that. I wish I could stop it but I can’t.”
“Well, I need you to try.”
The low laugh that blasts up my throat is nothing but furnace. “I do try. Every second of every day. PTSD is completely involuntary. All it does, all day and all night long, is hammer me like that. Over and over. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.”
He says nothing.
Honestly? Good.
I don’t know how many fucking times I have to explain this to him. Over and over. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. It’s like he refuses to believe me. Refuses to remember that I’ve given him all the medical and scientific data.2 Doesn’t matter, so now I’m the one getting testy, which means this fight is gonna get blamed on me. Like always.
I don’t have the energy anymore to keep trying to convince him. I just sit up as tall as I can and watch the scenery go by. I try to stay awake long enough to make it out of this vehicle without startling my driver so badly that we really do wreck.
3/3/01
Journal
Week 10 after the car wreck
UGH! How fucked up! I dreamed that I had worms!
I had too much on my plate from all this crash crap and all the other nasty memories that have been coming up from years ago that I just can’t push down anymore.3 I was getting too overwhelmed and suddenly I felt this horrible, itchy rash on my arms. My skin broke out in weird bubbles that looked like a bunch of blisters. Some dude saw it and said, “Whoa, you have worms!” and after awhile, these little black heads started popping up and then worm heads came out. I pulled some out, some came on their own, some were stuck and I had to squeeze them like zits.
Later on, I was trying to save them as evidence to show a doctor and I got a small white one, then a big black one. The black one grew really fast and developed this huge head with jaws and pincers. It clamped down on my hand, biting me and I knew it was trying to inject me with larvae to start it all over again.
What a yucky dream!!! I know it’s part of the purging process. Trying to get rid of all this festering crap inside of me. But dang...yuck!
Still no lost wages since the beginning of Feb.
You know, I hate when I’m nice to someone and they take advantage of it. My car insurance adjustor was all stressed on the 15th cuz she was overloaded, so I told her she could hold off on my check until I sent her the timesheets in the mail, since our fax was down that day. Now we’re into March and still no check.
Ya know, people, my bills don’t go on hold for a month because you’re stressed, just like my injuries don’t go on hold for the Christmas Season and Hallmark-Hype Holidays.4
I really need to do laundry. Huge pile. And vacuum. I really need help with it, but I don’t dare ask anymore. I hate when people offer you things and then keep score on you, especially when you feel in debt already. You wanna help me? Help. Thank you. You don’t? DON’T. That’s fine. I’ll handle it my friggin’ self. But don’t help me with something and then hold it over my head!5
And this whole, “You don’t pay attention to me! You don’t call back! You don’t write back!” crap when I see people. Uh…yeah? Because I heard from my friends that, since it’s been before the crash that we’ve chitty-chatted, they said you’ve just “written me off and not to bother.”
Two flippin’ months of car wreck recovery and I shouldn’t bother?!?!
What is that? I don’t know how many times I can tell people how overwhelming it is for me to simply speak words and understand what they’re saying, especially on the phone where I can’t read their lips.
Let it be known: NO! That crappy TBI symptom is not “all better” yet. It might not ever be “all better.” I have to save my limited ability to do that for work, thanks, and I can’t keep up with all the emails. That’s why I have to just write these big group updates, but then everybody responds and I can’t keep up with answering because I only have about 4 hours a day where I’m truly functional—sometimes not even that—and I have to save those for work and battling the DA’s office, my insurance company, and half my own friggin’ team who are supposed to be helping me through this but don’t. They’re actually making it harder.
Yet they all still get paid.
Must be nice.
So now people are pissy with me and fuckin A! You know, I was only in a major car wreck, I feel like shit, my life is destroyed, I am constantly exhausted! I can’t pay my own bills, I can barely shove words out my mouth that aren’t swear-words, and now I’M being jumped for it by people who call themselves my “friends”???
WHAT THE HELL! I’M DOING THE BEST I CAN!
And anybody wonders why I’m dreaming what I do?
I don’t.
May 21, 2001
5 Month Anniversary of the Crash
Gotta go to work today but I can’t get myself to drive. I have no idea why.6 I just cannot do it. Got jolted awake by this nasty nightmare about eating an apple. Inside it wasn’t seeds. It was bugs. Ugh. At least I’ll have time to catch that stupid bus, because I can’t find anybody to give me a ride.
I just have to figure out how to force myself out of this bed.
I hate busses. And it’s not just that it’s a two hour, brain-melting, whiplashing ride to get six miles.7 That’s bad enough. But EVERY. SINGLE. FRIGGIN’. TIME I have to ride one, I always get slammed between the eyes with the memory of that homeless guy that cornered me when I was twelve when I went to Duluth on the bus. At first, I felt super bad for him and wondered if he would be offended if I came up and offered him the little bit of extra money I didn’t need for my trip.
Maybe that’s why he cornered me. Because our eyes met. Too often that’s all it takes with people who enjoy being nasty to other people, so now every time I ride a bus, all I can see is him.
His rotting teeth, scraggly hair, that pale green jacket like they wear in M*A*S*H, ripped and dirty. The various stinks of him. Especially his breath on my face. And the dirt under his broken nails when he grabbed me. One particularly long toenail poking out of his shoe. I saw that when I ducked my head and winced at the ground, hoping and wishing and praying that he would go away, would just leave me alone.
He didn’t.
The way he touched me. Got in my face. Tried to lick my cheek. Finally, the bus driver came around the corner, telling us it was time to take our seats, so I was able to escape.
With all my injuries right now, I wouldn’t be able to fend anybody off if I got cornered again. Okay, so it’s really the bus STOPS that I hate.
Okay, fine. Except when there are harassers on the bus itself. Then it all comes stalking back—the hours and hours trapped in those big seats with The Pack of crap-throwing, crap-talking, hair-pulling, head-shoving, seat-kicking, ear-flicking, leg-tripping jerks, and one adult who can’t do anything about it except bark because there are more important things to do: drive.
I hate driving. I hate the bus worse. But somedays I just cannot force myself to get behind that wheel and start the car. I wind up shaking and hyperventilating. Stupid PTSD. I miss my gorgeous Mazda and its sunroof and power-everything. Yet I love my new little Saturn. Not because it’s fancy. Because it’s mine.
Okay, it’ll be mine in a few years.
That car is my freedom. Yet I hate the sight of it. I have nightmares about driving. Night after night after nap after night…
These are the ones I was cognizant enough to write down:
5/01 - A week straight of car wreck death-dreams.
5/12 - Dreamed one of my friends died and everybody blamed it on me.
5/14 - Dreamed people were plotting to kill me and frame me for nasty stuff. Fisticuffs with a high school enemy. Then can't keep up with mountains of paperwork at work. Trying to catch flights that took off 5 minutes ago. (Think I was trying to schedule a trip back to MN for my high school reunion? Nawww…)
6/4 - Dreamed The Predator was trying to kill me.
6/7 - Dreamed my sabotaging former “best friend” was driving me somewhere, gave me this evil grin, and purposely slammed on the brakes so we’d get rammed from behind.
6/14 - Dreamed that my car rolled backwards off a cliff and I died.
6/22 - Dreamed about getting knocked out of a boat in a river and scrambling-drowning-scrambling, trying to make it to a show on time. Didn’t.
6/29 - Dreamed my uterus rotted after having sex with my boyfriend. Gross.
7/9 - Annnnd the bogeyman who has black holes for eyes and a too big, soul-sucking mouth is back, looming right outside my boyfriend’s window, cutting the glass and the screen with its 5-inch claws. The “he’s gonna kill me” nightmares have started catapulting me out of bed, screaming bloody-murder again. So have the spiders-over-my-head dreams. I “wake up” in the dream, only to see them dangling down toward me as I fall asleep. Over and over and over...night after night after night…8
7/19 - Dreamed I almost drowned in the ocean. My lover drowned and I had to go on alone. Got taken in by a family in a drug ring gang. Searching and searching for a safe, quiet place to sleep. Never found one.
7/21 - Dreamed my best friend and roommate got murdered, and I was frantically packing up because I was next. The murderer had a key to my apartment. When I heard someone at the door, I stood behind it, ready to stab a pen into his throat. After bolting awake, I crept all through my apartment to make sure it was empty, that the windows were shut and everything was locked. Now I start sleeping with an unsheathed dagger next to me every night…
So there ya have it. A taste of the night-terrors and flashbacks that contributed to my sleep deprivation and constant hyper-vigilance in the months right before I had my first seizures.
All day. And all nightmare long.
And yet, three days later…
7/15/01
Journal
…things that go bump in the night. All it takes is one beam of light to penetrate the dark, whereas every beam of light must be blocked out for darkness to prevail. William calls me a beacon of light. And I am light. I was not gifted with 108 Names to sit on my can or to flaunt it for ego gratification.
UP NEXT: My Wiccan friends convince me to come join them in THE LABYRINTH. They think maybe it’ll help me find my way back onto the path. It doesn’t. It gives me something even better.
OR: If you’re just really wanting to binge all the PTSD-specific stuff - CATS, DOGS, & TANGLED THREADS - the mess that is Complex PTSD on TBI steroids.
© 2025 Hartebeast
Why I could never relax with my boyfriend and just trust him to keep me safe: because with him, I was not safe. The next time this would happen—in 12 days—he would get so angry with me about this that he would purposely injure me for it. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t remember it for 3 years because my damaged brain kept dungeoning the memories overnight.
Medical Neglect - A silent form of abuse
Minimization - A key manipulative strategy used by abusers
It took two oversized posts just to enumerate the bullet lists of “the crash crap” and all the old memories I could no longer compartmentalize and push aside once my frontal lobe was damaged. This combination is what caused my PTSD induced seizures:
Holiday Hell - that time the world shut down for the holidays right when I needed immediate medical treatment
A manipulation tactic I grew up with and fell prey to over and over until I learned what it was and how to inoculate myself, setting boundaries against it: The Guilt Trip.
The “he’s gonna kill me!” nightmares that woke up all my college roommates (but not me) while I had repressed memories from Martin Flippin’ Burns. In the decades living with these night terrors, I have learned that this particular bogeyman and the spiders descending on my head while I’m sleeping always indicate that I am in bed next to someone my body and psyche really wish I would stop sleeping next to.
I can’t even imagine trying to navigate life while all these different flashbacks and nightmares take over your consciousness without warning and without any way of stopping them. It makes me think about how hard it must be for so many people with PTSD to just move through the world.
Thanks Alexx :)