I used to dread the moment the sun slipped below the horizon. It was not because I feared the dark. I feared what the dark would bring. The nights were never quiet—not in my mind. There were no gentle lullabies, no cozy surrender. For years, my pillow was a battlefield, my bed an interrogation room, and my dreams a cruel director, replaying the worst chapters of my life on loop. Some people long for dreams. I prayed for dreamless sleep. Or no sleep at all.

This is not metaphor.

When individuals speak of trauma, they often focus on flashbacks, hypervigilance, or emotional dysregulation. Rarely do they mention what trauma does to sleep. Yet what happens when the mind itself becomes hostile the moment one closes their eyes? When the past refuses to remain past and begins haunting the body during its most vulnerable hours?

Nightmares are not merely unpleasant dreams. They are time machines. Traps. Torture chambers disguised by the soft linens of rest. They taught me to stay awake until my body collapsed from exhaustion. I became reliant on numbness, caffeine, overactivity, and adrenaline just to avoid REM sleep. Even years after release from incarceration, I still feared quiet rooms. Still feared silence. Still feared sleep.

My trauma stems from many roots. Incarceration is a major one—an experience that stripped me of safety, silence, and agency. But it was not limited to that. The violence before incarceration and the alienation that followed built an architecture of trauma in my nervous system that no amount of freedom could erase. I have since learned that I am not alone.

According to the National Center for PTSD (2022), between 70 and 90 percent of individuals diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder report some form of sleep disturbance, most commonly nightmares, insomnia, or both. In Canada, the Canadian Community Health Survey found that 25 percent of adults report symptoms of insomnia, with trauma being a leading risk factor (Statistics Canada, 2021). Despite these alarming numbers, trauma-related sleep disturbances remain under-addressed in both clinical and reentry settings.

Let me tell you what it feels like. Let me tell you what is helping. And let me tell you what I wish someone had told me before I convinced myself that sleep was simply not worth the risk.

Some nights I stared at the ceiling for hours. My body screamed for sleep, but my brain would not release me. I replayed the sound of screaming. The snap of handcuffs. Cell doors slamming shut. The smell of bleach and blood. The feeling that violence was about to erupt. It was not just one memory—it was a cacophony of trauma echoing through my skull like a remixed track curated by my worst fears.

When I finally slept, I often woke gasping, soaked in sweat, heart pounding as if I had run miles. Sometimes I woke mid-sprint, confused and terrified. In halfway houses, I startled others. In relationships, I triggered fear. In solitary confinement, I terrified myself.

I believed the only answer was to avoid sleep entirely. Stay awake. Keep moving. Smoke cigarettes. Scroll endlessly. Swallow stimulants. Distract myself into unconsciousness. I saw sleep as an enemy. But what I did not understand was that sleep deprivation only worsens trauma symptoms. According to Germain (2013), disrupted sleep contributes to the maintenance and exacerbation of PTSD symptoms by weakening emotional regulation and memory consolidation mechanisms.

One night, I came across a Reddit post that read, “Prazosin changed my life. I still have trauma, but now I can sleep without being chased.” I asked my doctor about it. She hesitated. Eventually, as the nightmares worsened—accompanied by night sweats so severe I would change my sheets twice per night—she agreed to try it.

Prazosin, originally developed to treat hypertension, has been shown to reduce trauma-related nightmares by blocking norepinephrine receptors in the brain (Raskind et al., 2018). The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs includes it in clinical guidelines for PTSD-related sleep disturbance (VA/DoD, 2017). It did not erase my nightmares, but it dulled their edge. It gave me back a few hours of rest that did not feel like combat.

But no medication alone can rewire trauma. Therapy was essential. Specifically, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) helped me interrupt and reprocess trauma memories. Lucid dreaming—something I practiced with guidance—taught me to engage with nightmares rather than escape them. I remember the first time I said in a dream, “You do not get to keep me anymore.” I woke up crying. Not from fear—but from release.

Incarceration builds a specific trauma infrastructure. It is not merely about the loss of freedom. It is the perpetual surveillance, the threat of violence, the strip searches, the fluorescent lights that never dim, the clang of metal, the yelling. Your nervous system never stands down. That is not something that ends the day you are released. The trauma follows you. It travels into your home, your bed, and your dreams.

A 2021 report by the Prison Policy Initiative found that formerly incarcerated individuals are up to 10 times more likely to suffer from chronic insomnia and sleep-related disorders compared to the general public (Sawyer & Wagner, 2021). Yet sleep health is rarely addressed in reentry programs. Support is offered for employment, sobriety, housing—but few ask, “Are you sleeping?” That silence is deadly. Because without sleep, no other area of healing can truly take root.

Sleep avoidance is not limited to formerly incarcerated people. Across racial and cultural lines, sleep itself has become a site of struggle. Black, Indigenous, and immigrant communities in the United States and Canada often experience sleep deprivation as a symptom of systemic inequality. Rest becomes secondary to survival. As Hersey (2022), founder of The Nap Ministry, writes, “Rest is a form of resistance.” But for many, rest is also dangerous. Because rest invites vulnerability. And vulnerability, to a trauma survivor, can feel like a trap.

Nightmares, insomnia, and fragmented sleep are not simply clinical problems. They are forms of protest. They are the body’s refusal to let go of what it has not been allowed to heal. And when the systems built to help us ignore that pain, they deepen it.

This must change.

Trauma-informed care must expand to include sleep health. That means more than pamphlets about “sleep hygiene” or advice to avoid screens. It means access to therapeutic tools and medical treatments tailored to those living with PTSD and complex trauma. It means funding for EMDR and lucid dreaming support groups. It means that crisis lines must be staffed at 3 a.m., not just between 9 and 5. Because trauma does not keep business hours.

We do not only need therapists—we need dream doulas.

We need sleep-informed peer counselors. We need reentry programs that consider sleep as essential to healing. We need primary care providers who understand nightmares are not melodrama—they are trauma’s language. We need correctional health systems that treat sleep loss as a warning sign of deeper pain, not a behavior to medicate into submission.

I have made peace with the fact that I may never love sleep. But I no longer fear it. I no longer fight it. I prepare for it. I create rituals—weighted blankets, playlists, low lights, open doors—that tell my body, “You are safe.” And when the nightmares return, I write them down. I confront them. I learn from them. I reclaim my nights, one dream at a time.

These are dreams I never wanted. But I refuse to let them define me.

Sleep is not a luxury. It is not optional. It is a biological requirement, a spiritual release, a psychological sanctuary. It must be treated with the same urgency and compassion as any other mental health priority.

If we are serious about trauma recovery, we must stop asking who is awake at 2 a.m. and start asking who is suffering—and why have we allowed them to suffer in silence for so long?

References

Germain, A. (2013). Sleep disturbances as the hallmark of PTSD: Where are we now? American Journal of Psychiatry, 170(4), 372–382. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2012.12040432

Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.

National Center for PTSD. (2022). PTSD and sleep. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/treat/cooccurring/sleep_problems.asp

Raskind, M. A., Peskind, E. R., Chow, B., Harris, C., Davis-Karim, A., Holmes, H. A., … & Rosenheck, R. A. (2018). Trial of prazosin for post-traumatic stress disorder in military veterans. New England Journal of Medicine, 378(6), 507–517. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa1507598

Sawyer, W., & Wagner, P. (2021). Mass incarceration: The whole pie 2021. Prison Policy Initiative. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2021.html

Statistics Canada. (2021). Sleep duration and sleep difficulties among Canadian adults. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/211013/dq211013a-eng.htm

VA/DoD Clinical Practice Guideline Working Group. (2017). VA/DoD clinical practice guideline for the management of posttraumatic stress disorder and acute stress disorder. https://www.healthquality.va.gov/guidelines/MH/ptsd/VADoDPTSDCPGFinal012418.pdf