What are Night Terrors?

1. 95

   ChaplinSpeaksposted 12 years ago

   What are Night Terrors?

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2. 64

   Lisa HWposted 12 years ago

   Night terrors are when a person seems to wake from sleep, absolutely terrified; but when, in fact, the person isn't awake and only appears to be (sort of).  Night terrors are different from nightmares, which can be terrifying but are a different thing from night terrors.
   
   When children have night terrors they may outgrow them.  My son had them, and he outgrew them a little at a time (they got less and less severe as he got past being a baby and lower grade-school-aged child.
   
   When a child has night terrors his state of terror is obvious, but since he's not really awake there really isn't any talking him out of them.  It's as he seems to "come out of them" (wake up a little at a time) that he calms down.  He may go on to wake up all the way, or else he may never really seem to wake up completely and just go back to sleep.  Night terrors are more likely to happen at a certain stage in sleep, and they're more likely to happen if the child/person has had a lot of stress (but in the case of a child, that "stress" can be as benign as a very happy and busy day in which there hasn't been much chance to spend a lot of time being calm).
   
   This is NOT a scientific explanation for the cause of night terrors, but my personal theory about my son's experience with them is that there is at least the chance a stay in a hospital when he was an infant could have had some impact (maybe even terrorized him) when he was too young to remember it.  I couldn't help but wonder if that feeling (that he didn't recall and couldn't process the way someone older could) may have returned when he'd reach that certain stage in sleep if I let him go to bed too early.  If I didn't let him go to bed too early he wouldn't have a night terror.  It always seemed as if when he was sufficiently tired out before sleeping he may have gotten past whatever "stage" it was that resulted in night terrors.  As he got to be school aged, his terrors decreased in severity until they first turned into "mild confusion and anxiety" and eventually resulted in a few "spaced out sleep-walking" incidents.

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3. 76

   bridalletterposted 12 years ago

   http://www.nightterrors.org/
   I was a sleep tech for 18 months. The Night Terrors seem to come from a lot of stress, some it is hereditary and others it is related to the medication like prednisone. You can experience sleep paralysis when you wake up suddenly out of the stage 4 sleep state; which is when the terrors occur.
   
   Very active minds tend to have them too. Would be a very interesting subject to write about. I would include the fact that it can be difficult to find a good source of information because it has so many names for the same sleep disorder.

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      bridalletterposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      If you are on a spiritual level and beleive in past lives. Maybe it is a carryover from something terrifying that happened in the past life. How do you resolve it now? Tell yourself, release and let it go. This No longer affects me in my new life.

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      Lisa HWposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      I've read that if an infant is made to feel too insecure too often his "brain wiring" could result in an stress response system that gets "triggered" at a lower threshold. I think that was my son's problem.  "Ordinary busy" felt stressful to him.

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   jenniferlynn78posted 12 years ago

   Night Tares are similar to nightmares except they are real terror in the mind and a person is actually awake but they do not have a clue of what's going on as it started as a nightmare, it's very vivid and pure terror. It cripples the person and it crosses the boundaries of the wake and sleep cycle. Sometimes a person will only have glimpeses of it and barely remember it.They actually run in terror and thats all that person sees and they run!

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   CharlieNikholeposted 12 years ago

   Night Terrors are awful, I suffer from night terrors.
   I have had night terrors since I was young until now, at the age of 21. I used to get them every night. My boyfriend and I have noticed they are not as bad when I am not sleeping alone. I scream, I cry, I shake, I hit, I kick, and its very hard to calm me down. I feel terrible because I beat the crap out of my lad on a weekly basis due to my night terrors. I wish I knew what caused them.

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