Looking For a Bloke Like Joseph

I've had three horrible dreams in the past four weeks, two on the same night.  The dreams were all different though two were related.  In each dream, I had an overwhelming sense of dread.  I could feel that dread spread up my legs, pinning me in my place.  In each dream, I knew that I needed help and tried to yell for it but could not get the sound out.  During each of these dreams, my sweet husband, still recovering from back surgery had to try and wake me.  The first dream was just days after his surgery.  The other two dreams came during the week of my own bout of diverticulitis.  It would make sense that all these dreams were in response to the stress I was under.   I did my due diligence and sleep paralysis was my internet diagnosis.  Turns out that I may have been in an in between of sleep and awake and that is why I so clearly remember the physical and visual experience.  I now try to not sleep on my back, which is one cause.  There didn't seem to be much in the way of other solutions other than reduce stress.
Aside from these dreams, I am constantly having dreams about people that I used to know.  I wake up from these sad or frustrated or, usually, pissed.  So my question to a dream decipherer is this, how do I shut off my mind when I shut off the lights?
I don't buy the stressful life theory aside from the two aforementioned episodes.  My life is pretty easy, pretty stress free.  Roof over my head, food on my table, gas in my car.  Anything else is stress I am making up.  So with that in mind, I would expect the sleep paralysis to be done. 
These other dreams though, where I am an this place of really ugly energy, they reek of unfinished business.  And what does one do when the business cannot be finished.  What does one do when (I am metaphoring this som bitch up) the bridge is torn down, the wood has floated down river and all that is left are some rusted old pipes that once served as make shift hand rails?  What does one do when a mountain has, in fact, been made of a mole hill?  Too big to get over and too big to smooth out.
I understand why doctors say "he's lucky, it was a clean break."  It is so easy to heal from something that gave way smoothly.  My own literal break was not clean and there is a tiny chip of bone loose in my ankle.  It used to bother me and then I think it burrowed itself into the fat of my calf and is now completely forgotten.  And my figurative break is not clean either.  Ten years ago, it would have been before social media wormed its way into my life and I probably read more into comments (or the lack of them) then I do of actually reading comments. 
So I ask you, self help gurus, life coaches, people that have removed the toxic or stopped being the toxic, how is it done.  How do get my clean break?  How do I stop caring and hurting and trying?