Week 4 -- insomnia, nightmares, mood swings

Got woken up from a grisly nightmare at 9:45 AM by a confirmation call from Dr. M's office. My next appointment is on Monday.

In the nightmare, a woman was burning a man with a blowtorch. The man was hanging upside down, and he was screaming. There was a smell of burning flesh, and I could hear the whoosh of the blowtorch and see the pain on his face, but I couldn't do anything to stop what was happening. Vivid nightmares like this have become a regular part of my sleep. When I have them I wake up physically and emotionally exhausted. So now, I have insomnia, which keeps me from going to sleep; I wake frequently with pain; and I have grisly awful nightmares that seem to go on forever and from which it is difficult or impossible to wake.

Two weekends ago, I also had the second of two episodes of severe mood swings. Both times, it was like a switch had flipped in my brain and suddenly, instead of being extremely depressed, I was...like a combination of happy and Eveready battery bunny. This time I made a word list to try to describe it:

sudden
mood swing
down to up
giddy
fizzy
anxious
<<< impulse control
jiggling knee -- hard to stop
itchy
headache

Both mood swings lasted for a little over two days, and ended as suddenly as they started. They happened 29 days apart. Both times, I had an initial sense of relief from the depression, but after a few minutes I realized that the new feeling (my therapist calls it "manicky") wasn't any easier to cope with.