Saturday night it was about catching trains, last night it was about exams... I still have high-anxiety nightmares

I have to catch a specific train but everything is preventing me from doing so: I'm at the wrong station, I haven't bought my ticket, there's a queue for tickets that's moving at a snail's pace, there's no information on platforms and no platform numbers, I'm waiting for people to catch me up... and so on and so forth... Or, like last night, I'm about to sit the most important exam of my life yet I haven't done any revision. I haven't even been to lessons. I know zero about the subject. There are other variations on the high-anxiety nightmare, but these are the two most common nightmares I've been having for the past eight years or so.


In my diary app on 3rd September 2015 I wrote: Sleep: Quality has been bad ever since. Forgotten what a proper night's sleep is. Dread going to bed. Lack of sleep contributes to the inability to do stuff. Too darn tired. Just so very very tired. To the core. Fatigue. Burnout.

Sleep evaded me throughout my son's eating disorder. Often I'd be sitting on the sofa at some unearthly hour with a mug of Ovaltine, in some kind of shock and despair.

But, as my son recovered from anorexia, my sleep went the other way and the 2015 diary app entry was written some six years after my son's anorexia first emerged.

For a while my GP prescribed sleeping pills, but I was only permitted to take these as a short-term solution. I now have a load of other sleep-inducing prescription medications. But the Good News is that, these days, I can get to sleep quite easily with the very minimum of medication, something that was unheard of in the Bad Old Days.

So that's a definite improvement.

I also wake up at a decent time.

So that's an improvement, too.

But I still have anxiety nightmares which may or may not be linked to the Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder which I was battling with for so many years following my son's anorexia.

However the Overall Good News is that I've improved a heck of a lot since I wrote that diary app note in 2015.

And I no longer feel as if I'm burned out.

I love it when I can see improvements like this!