I’m 8 years post-surgery for UC. I never had an ileostomy. The entire procedure was done in one operation in April of 2001.

I can relate, however, to the dreams. A few times a week, I will dream about not being able to find a bathroom in time, or if I do, the toilets in the bathrooms aren’t working, or people are watching, or something along the lines of not being able to get to a safe place to empty the j-pouch. I always have a j-pouch in the dreams though and am very aware of my situation. This still happens routinely and has not subsided, even eight years on.

The way I manage it is to not eat before bedtime. I cut my eating to no later than 8-9pm, so by midnight-1am (my typical bedtime), I will have emptied the pouch as much as possible, therefore eliminating the need to go during the night. By morning, I do have to empty the pouch, but I don’t have the urges during the night while sleeping.

What I’ve done, though, is intentionally attempt to talk myself out of the dream state when this occurs. I’ve made myself very very aware that while sleeping, anything relating to the jPouch is a bad thing. I think about this during the day, and right before bed, especially if I know the pouch isn’t empty (late meal, etc). I constantly bombard my conscious thoughts with this message, all day, every day. I have created such a negative image of the jPouch in my head that during the night, that still continues.

Lucid dreaming is possible. In my case, roughly half the time I’d say, I’m able to wake myself out of the dream by telling myself inside the dream, “This isn’t real. I know this isn’t real because it happens too frequently. The same thing happened yesterday, and that was a dream.” And soon enough, the dream ends and I wake up. I can’t do this every time I start to dream of the jPouch and my inability to empty it, but roughly half of the time it’s successful.

There’s nothing more frustrating that to not get up in time. I’ve done everything I can think of to eliminate that possibility, including repetitive bombardment of negativity towards the pouch during the day. Over the course of these eight years, accidents still occur. However, very few of them are due to not having the dream wake me up. Whenever I dream about it, I nearly always wake up. Mostly though, accidents happen because I *don’t* dream about it at all and never even get a hint that the pouch is full.