1. "(When a human being) perceives a threat, it can trigger a body-wide emergency response within milliseconds. (Hormones produced by stress) direct the body's resources to fighting or fleeing. The heart pounds, the lungs pump and the muscles get an energizing blast of glucose."
   
   This same sort of reaction occurred when I had Titanic nightmares. I'd awake to a pounding heart, heavy breathing...and a body drenched in sweat. The flight-or-fight response also galvanized my muscles to cry out or jerk awake, upon which I'd automatically assume a defensive posture in bed.
   
   
2. "The stress hormones also act on the brain creating a state of heightened alertness..."
   
   Physiological arousal accompanies the growing emotional terror. Which is why those nightmares woke me up.
   
   
3. "...and supercharging the circuitry involved in memory formation."
   
   The dream memory was so strong, it was etched onto my consciousness. It became a rut for nightmares to travel, repeatedly, for 38 years.
   
   
4. "...a strong correlation is made between the significance of an event and the remembrance of it."
   
   I think Titanic nightmares are significant, in fact any continuous negative affects like angst are significant, because they are red warning lights signaling that something is very, very wrong, you're stuck in a rut and that you have to do something about it, pronto. However, my struggle to resolve the situation in-dream met with failure. In many cases, there was no opportunity for struggle. I didn't even get to experience flight-or-flight while I slept. I was trapped in the freeze mode.
   
   
5. "Prolonged stress has physiological consequences."
   
   My brothers and I always had to have our guards up at home. We never knew when my father's temper would erupt. That, plus emotional manipulation by both parents, resulted in tears every day, whether or not there was actual physical violence. Someone in tears is under so much stress, it overflows.
   
   
6. "...when a susceptible child experiences too much fear, the consequences can extend beyond general anxiety to include phobias and post traumatic stress disorder - conditions in which the amygdala hijacks the rest of the brain every time it encounters some cue. Like a rat in a conditioning experiment, the sufferer reacts as violently to a harmless stimulus as she would to a life-threatening emergency."
   
   I can't begin to tell you how vulnerable I was to the world, long after I left home. The littlest thing would set me crying or make me blush beet red. Some of my nightmares have most definitely been traced to these daytime incidents.
   
   
7. "...prolonged stress also shrinks the hippocampus, a brain structure that plays critical roles in processing and storing information."
   
   Hmm, is that why I had so many intrusive thoughts? I'm referring to negative thoughts that have nothing whatsoever to do with the current situation, but "drop in out of nowhere." I had lots of them, but they were especially troublesome when I was a teenager. I now consider them to be a waking state equivalent of repeating nightmares. Either it was some repressed memory that would rise like a cork to the top of consciousness when my guard was down...as it is in sleep and when I'm relaxed. (Another reason not to put my guard down...another reason for continued stress.) Or it was a mental hiccup caused by a glitch in the neural pathways due to the lack of appropriate chemicals.
   
   
8. "...the pituitary and adrenal glands flood the bloodstream with epinephrine (adrenaline), norepinephrine and cortisol ...Norepinephrine is toxic to tissues ...in particular the heart ...Continuous exposure to cortisol can dampen the immune system, leaving stressed people more vulnerable to infections and possibly even cancer."
   
   I'm not particularly at risk for heart disease, and few people in my family have had cancer. But the sort of environment my siblings and I endured does make us likely candidates for post-traumatic stress disorder. Although, for the life of me, I don't know how you can call it "post" traumatic if the trauma is still going on! There just doesn't seem to be an decent terminology to apply to the nightmares of children who are concurrently suffering in the waking world. Or to those of adults, either.
   
   
9. "Stress hormones can harm the brain, too, severing connections among neurons...Genes and temperament make some kids (more) vulnerable than others."
   
   Genes are definitely a factor. They have built me a weaker constitution than the average Joe. A sizable number of my blood relatives have been diagnosed with mental disorders, and more should be. I can be aware of and make allowances for this, but there's nothing I can do to change it. Unless we figure out a way to manipulate our genes while we're alive, the genetic contribution is going to continue to be a unyielding fact.
   
   For an individual with genetic vulnerability, a mental disorder can be activated by certain life stress events. This is the stress-diathesis model: triggering occurs because of the interaction between experience (stress) and inborn predisposition (diathesis). The system that manages the body's response to stress is called the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Activate the HPA axis too much, and you lay the groundwork for a particular mental disorder - depression.
   
   Biochemical depression stems from a deficiency of neurotransmitter molecules, called norepinephrine, in certain brain circuits. The molecules travel from one neuron, across a small gap, and are attached to receptor molecules on the surface of the second neuron. Anxiety causes neurons to discharge regularly and continually. The excessive transmission of norepinephrine demands excessive reception of norepinephrine when the molecules jump neurons. Over time, a cell's ability to continually accept molecules becomes exhausted. When repeatedly stressed, the HPA axis is pushed too far.
   
   The chronic sufferer, whose neurons are functioning inadequately, is really stuck. He has no way to cure transmitter depletion, no way to recover from the strain. Ever. The best coping measure, so far, is prescription medication. But it must be taken every day.
   
   There are some benefits to antidepressants. After patients are treated with them, hostility and anxiety decrease in dreams. Unfortunately, so does dream recall. Depressed dreamers tend to remember fewer dreams than the average. Depressed dreamers on antidepressants recall even less.
   
   But suppose you have the opportunity to waylay nightmares induced by chronic stress before it damages your brain. How would you do that? Well, it's taken me twenty years to come to my conclusions, and I did it through trial and error. The school of hard knocks is something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. In addition to trying to handle the depression, I had to concurrently battle its lesser brother: anxiety.
   
   I've concluded that to de-stabilize knee-jerk reactions to fear, to update my unconscious with more mature automatic responses to the fight-or-flight instinct, requires action. The techniques that work are exactly what the Newsweek article mentioned: behavior therapy, cognitive therapy and preventative medicine.
   
   
10. "...advances in science are showing (these techniques) can reduce the hormones associated with anxiety and even affect brain activity."
    
    Behavior Therapy
    
    Some researchers contend that dreaming is, by nature, a psychological means of coping with significant events. However, Titanic nightmares fail in that capacity. In extreme depression, there is little "emotional work" in-dream and the ability to adapt to unsettling life events is thereby compromised. Even normative dreams of the depressed individual may only restate an issue or have the dream ego wandering aimlessly thither and yon.
    
    Increased intentionality will tend to produce active involvement of the dream ego in controlling dream content. It converts the dream ego from a helpless, hopeless victim to an active, questing locus of control. Only a directed dream ego can adapt effectively and resolve troublesome issues in-dream.
    
    When he is lucid and flying in his dreams, researcher J. Allan Hobson tells himself to flap his arms. By engaging in volition, he starts a motor program. His theory is that he is engaging his brain to call for chemical help and his brain stem responds by sending up some norepinephrine. It's just enough to place him on the edge between sleeping and waking. Lucidity is great - if you have the strength to go lucid. But if there's one thing that characterizes depression, it's fatigue. Most nights I don't have the energy to recall dreams, let alone lucid ones.
    
    Instead, the answer is - teach the nonlucid dream ego to move! When my energy is up, I visualize new endings to old dreams, practice facing fear in my imagination and incubate flying dreams. The more familiar we are with a task while awake, the better its execution during sleep. By practicing them in physical reality, healthy attitudes and activities are made habitual. It's like learning the maneuvers to drive a car. First, you must be vigilant, and move all controls while you have the focused attention of your conscious mind. Eventually, you can relax and let your automatic nervous system take over.
    
    The added bonus to behavior therapy is that dreams of succesful achievements stimulate feelings of success in waking life, which stimulate feelings of success in dreams, as part of a self-affirming cycle.
    
    Cognitive Therapy
    
    Counterproductive beliefs that have been programmed by culture - parental, educational and religious - require re-believing what you have been taught to be true about yourself and the universe. Silence the inner critics and thundering voices of false conscience. Disable those notions that say you must surrender and sacrifice, that claim you're a horrible sinner or humongous egotist and that command you to save the world. You have the right to stand up and say no to the authorities that have been embedded in your mind. Have they ever walked in your shoes? I think not. Tell them to take a hike.
    
    If the consequences weren't so tragic, I'd have to laugh regarding the psychoanalytic theory that all you have to do is acknowledge a problem, talk about it and it'll go away. The dreamwork techniques that "make space" for distress, emotions, thoughts or internal experiences to express themselves are not for you. Leave talk therapy to those who are experiencing minimal stress infrequently. You've already got enough chronic distress to deal with, thank you very much.
    
    I wish every psychologist had to take course in human anatomy and biochemistry. And keep up to date with medical breakthroughs, too. It would save their clients so much time, money, pain and suffering to be able to say, this is not psychological. Or, I can't help you (I've actually had one psychologist say that to me. But only one.) However, it takes vivid awareness and the guts to admit one's profession might be using concepts and techniques that are incomplete, out of date or just plain ineffective. Why are we still listening to Jung and Freud? These old men created dream theories and practices based on what we knew about human nature last century! It's past time to update our knowledge. Not just for ourselves. The next generation depends on it.
    
    Intense dream problems require intense solutions. Titanic dream wrestling is not for wimps or those people who refuse to move out of their comfort zones. Chronic sufferers need something with real muscles. Mental affirmations alone won't do.
    
    In my own case, I confronted fear in lucid dreams (standing up to dream characters) and in the waking state (taking flying lessons in a Piper Tomahawk). I divorced my parents (if it were possible, I'd have done it legally; instead, I had to do it symbolically). I left the religion of my youth. Because my ideas about the universe changed, my behavior changed. Because I practiced the changed behavior to make it habitual, instances of paranoia and false guilt went down dramatically. I woke up one morning and the "yuckiness" that had been with me all my life was suddenly gone. I didn't even know I had it, until it went away.
    
    When I started to take medication, yet another layer of fog lifted. For me, it's not a case of paying attention to either physiology or psychology. It's both.
    
    
11. "The best remedy may be to turn off the TV set, venture into the world and come home alive to remember it."
    
    Emotions are body and brain based! You need to energize your body to shift away from the disaster channel that's running in your head. After the Loma Prieta earthquake, I went on the bridge walk with hundreds of other people. While traffic was at a standstill, I walked to the location where the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge had separated in two and looked directly down into the water between the collapsed chunks of highway. Fears have to be faced. There's no other way.
    
    But this is just a first step in a long journey towards health. There's also - accurate diagnosis, effective treatment, preventative measures against recurrence, discovery of what went missing while you had to spend time battling the problem and enhancement beyond the survival level of dreaming. Start today. Get out of bed and go live life.
    
    

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