I have rarely had nightmares during my life. But when I'm on the worse end of the health spectrum, I tend to have an occasional very bad dream. I wake up really upset by what I was dreaming, and sometimes am scared to go back to bed. I have trouble talking and it's difficult to explain to family members what is going on.
It seems to me that there is a huge physical component to this. What is it about this illness that makes this happen? Sometimes these occur when I'm more stressed, but not always. Sometimes it's just out of the blue.
It would help if I could tell my family that this isn't all in my head.
I don't think it's a common symptom, at least. Still, I've been there, and it's awful.
Before ME/CFS (or perhaps it was the very early stages -- before we could diagnose), I had a very long stretch -- years -- of horrifying nightmares that had no connection to my life. I was genuinely afraid to sleep. I also had pre-sleep hallucinations. There's a name for it, but I can't remember, when you "see" something in that stage where you're just falling asleep, but are not quite all the way asleep. They were not really bad, just a little scary, like a plate-sized spider falling from the ceiling onto my bed. I'd leap out of bed and yell for a minute or two until I woke up enough to realize that a plate-sized spider was unlikely in my part of the world.
Poor hubby!
The nightmares were much worse. I'd wake up in tears nearly every day. It was awful. My doc finally prescribed ADs, which did seem to help. Either the nightmares weren't so bad, or I didn't remember them. It wasn't perfect. I didn't have good or normal dreams or long and refreshing sleep, but at least I wasn't afraid to go to sleep.
The best thing, though, came many years later when I was prescribed trazodone for ME/CFS sleep dysfunction. What a huge difference! Finally, I was sleeping normally -- a normal length of time with normal dreams. It was heaven.
My guess is that nightmares not associated with something in the waking life (trauma, stress) is something neurochemical, so ADs helped to some extent. While also an AD, trazodone is an effective sleep enhancer at lower doses. That may be because it increases stage 3 and 4 sleep, which I suspect was a major issue for me.
See
this article on trazodone here at PR.