Definition of Night Terrors: A state of intense fear and agitation sometimes experienced, especially by children, on awakening from a stage of sleep not associated with dreaming but characterized by extremely vivid hallucinations.
Description of Night terrors: Night Terrors are not a dream or typical nightmare. They occur in non-REM, slow-wave sleep. The panicked screaming, kicking, thrashing, and flailing is alarming in its intensity. Sleepwalking, another parasomnia disorder, may also occur in as many as one third of children with night terrors. While experiencing the night terror the child is extremely disoriented and may stare straight ahead, eyes wide open, with the dark centers (pupils) enlarged. There is profuse sweating, the heartbeat is rapid, the breathing fast, and the blood pressure is elevated. As the child is not fully awake, she is unable to see or recognize her parent or caretaker and cannot be easily awakened. The night terror may last from one to 15 minutes or more and is usually followed by a return to deep sleep. Afterwards the child may have no memory of the experience.
Both explanations taken from: Answers.com
The above explanations/definitions are precisely what happened to ME last night!! WTH??
My Story so Far:
I’m NOT a child……..well not according to my age. I HAVE suffered with insomnia my entire life, to be honest I am not sure if it is insomnia or my inability to make my brain ‘turn off’, either way, I don’t always sleep. I get tired, I get exhausted, but when I lay down that’s all I seem to do……..lay there……..I try closing my eyes, but that almost makes it worse as my mind really wonders off then. I think about anything and everything….things to blog about, things that are ‘bugging’ me subconsciously, things that are so far removed from anything I should be worrying about, and the list goes on. These thoughts, ideas, concerns, only get worse when I am stressed out, especially when I do not realize how stressed out I am, as I said subconsciously.
I have been on prescription Ambien for some time, at first I didn’t take them every night, just when I’d gone a few nights with no sleep, so I could ‘catch up’, although that isn’t really possibly, but you know what I mean. But as I got busier and busier, doing more and more, I started to take the pills more often.
However, a couple months ago a good friend of mine, who also took Ambien, had a bad experience, she had to get going to go help out a different friend and wasn’t able to function properly due to the effect of the pills. Granted she took more then I did, but I thought to myself what happened if there was an emergency and I needed to get somewhere, to help someone and I couldn’t? So my extremely intelligent solution to this……STOP taking the Ambien. Smart, RIGHT??????
I started taking Melatonin, and sure it does help the sleepy feeling happen quicker, and helped me fall asleep. But with that came dreams, crazy dreams. Which in the long run results in me not always getting enough rest.
So that’s the background story, which leads up to last night!!
I had a reffing seminar to go to, have to go to one every year. Got home at like 10pm, then showered. I needed my computer catch up time, checking stats, social media sites, others blog posts, etc. My way of unwinding after a long day. Jeanna fell asleep around 1130pm, and I put down my computer around 1145pm and, yup you guessed it, lay there!! Lately there are times I’ll feel as if my body is asleep, but my mind is NOT!! I really don’t know how to explain this, but its like I cannot move my body, but my mind keeps going, and going!! I don’t always know what it goes on about, but at times I’ll be scared, and I’ll somehow know its not real, but I cannot actively move my body to sit up, roll over, hold Jeanna or have her hold me to make the fear subside……it lasts for a while, then, somehow, I am able to move, rearrange myself and for the most part have always fallen back asleep…….
Last night this was NOT the case!!!! I rolled over and I was laying with Jeanna, her arm was under my neck, after a while I grew uncomfortable, my neck was hurting, but I couldn’t do anything about it, my body would not move!! I had horrible, horrific thoughts running through my head, I was petrified. I couldn’t tell you what these thoughts were, all I know is that I was scared, extremely scared!! Eventually I was physically jolted awake, I heard, as if someone was standing next to my bed, say my name DEBBIE!!!!!! I was so beyond any form of scared I’d EVER experienced…….my heart started to beat so hard I thought it’d explode, I was convinced my rapid heart beat alone would wake Jeanna up, never mind the fact that I felt that I was on FIRE!!!!!!! Like I had a fever of 110!!!
Well ok I thought……bad dream??? Right?? I’d get comfortable, hold Jeanna or have Jeanna hold me and all would be fine I’d fall asleep and wake up tomorrow!!! Yeah I was HORRIBLY mistaken!!! This process continued the entire night, the dreams/hallucinations/whatever the hell they were got more and more graphic, again I can not explain them, I just know that every time I was able to startle myself out of the ‘zone’ I’d enter I was more and more scared, my body on fire, convinced I’d soon be slaughtered or something in the most horrific way!!!
My question is this………WTF???? Has this happened to you, or anyone you know? What do I do about this? I cannot function like this, I am in a daze today, I’m exhausted, still feel sort of ‘zoned out’, my body feels weak and I’m so confused as to what is going on!! 🙁 I am going to take Ambien tonight and I’m GOING to sleep!! I can’t have a repeat of last night!!
My darling I wish i could help but honestly dont know what to say. I know what you mean as I have had that sort of experience a few times, but not half as bad as yours was. I know Ouma has had it as well now and again. But it is nothing to be to scared of you do wake out of it eventually but it is not very nice when it happens. Try and speak to someone a doctor or something and find out what they think of it please. Love you so much angel. God bless. Mommy. PS. make sure you have a good nights sleep tonight ok.
Oh i’ll sleep tonight!!! For sure!!!! That’s weird it said they were hereditary?!? Did I have em as a kid?? I know I sleep walked…..
Nope love you did not have it as a kid at all nor did I. Only once I was grown up.
I had a night terror once, I’ll type it out here since I am interested in making a blogpost and it will copy paste nice 🙂
One late summer night, I decided to go to sleep at around 3:30 AM since I had a long, interesting night, and hey, no school right? As I drift off into dreamland, I had a really obscure dream, here’s how it went. I walked through what I believe to be a Boston Tea Party era time. I see George Washington with a metal USA flag that, for some reason, had 51 stars. I walk into a wooden cabin type of building after waving to my friends, who were all naked and sitting on the docks.
I walk in, put an iPhone in my pocket in a metal bowl, my keys, and I lay down on what appears to be a very modern dentists chair. I am soon confronted by a doctor in those plague time beak masks and robes. He laid me down in the chair, and grabbed wire cutters. He put them in my mouth, and cut my front 2 teeth in half, exposing my nerves. It doesn’t hurt at all until I close my mouth so the dangling nerves lightly touch my lower teeth. It is the most incredibly vivid pain I have ever experienced in a dream. He sees my pain, and jabs me in the wrist with a thick needle and pumps the liquid into me. I go into a hazy state. I look out the window and see Thom Yorke and Lady Gaga kissing. In this brief period, I look down, and the beak doctor has made a large incision in my chest, with the chest and abdominal cavity exposed. I could see dirt all over my insides, with brown mushrooms growing out of my organs. I also see lampreys in my intestines.
I start to do a weird fading thing, and I am now in my room, laying in my bed. This is when I was awake, and paralyzed. I see the beaked doctor standing besides me, holding the scalpel, and I look down, and I notice the brown mushrooms now growing on the skin of my chest. I try to squirm, I cannot move. I try to yell, scream, my throat is bone dry and I cannot scream. I am so sweaty there was an outline of my body in sweat on the sheets. Maybe 3 minutes later, the scene disapeared, and I drank a bunch of water and didn’t sleep through the night, and just stayed up.
I should note, my fears involve mushrooms and lampreys and beak masked people, so it made it scarier for me.
I hope you enjoyed reading this, if you did please check out my website, Jessekunze.com and comment. I will be posting my experiance with night terrors soon.
Jesse
Jessekunze.com
@jessekunze
I have experienced Sleep Paralysis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis) and it is really scary. I was clearly awake, eyes open, looking around and brain awake, but my body would not respond to anything my brain was telling it to do. I stayed that way for what felt like an eternity, but eventually I jolted violently awake and man, it’s scary as hell!
Well holy shit!!!! I need this to NOT happen often!!!!!!! OMG!!! It was terrible!!!!!!!!
Okay, the first thing you need to do is stop giving this so much credence. Your a numbers girl, just think about it. Out of all the times that you slept, how may times has this happened? Whats the percentage? .000001% ? Because “it’s” happened once, does mean “it” will happen again.
Second, I found out that curtain foods, eaten before you go to bed, make you dream like crazy. Mine is pizza. Really! I would sneak a piece or two of pizza before I went to bed (that’s when I weighed 205) and the dreams, some good some really bad.
Third, sleep aids. We can scare ourself into not taking the thing by “what if’ing” What if I dream? What if I can’t get up? You know. Here we are back to the percentage again! Really what are the chances? You have been through this before I can tell. You need to find a sleep aid that works best for “YOU”. I worried about being able to wake when I needed to also, but then it happened one night. I won’t go into details, but just know, I did wake, and I was tired the next day, but I would have been even if I hadn’t taken a sleep aid.
Forth, A racing mind is a sign of a tired mind. Knowing “that” is haft the battle. Learn to meditate. Just 15 minutes, twice a day works wonders. Fine a quit place, a bathroom stall, a closet, your car, you get the picture. Close your eyes, take slow deep breathes, let your chin fall slowly to your chest, and RELAX! DAMN IT! LOL
The meditation thing takes practice, practice, practice. Please give it a try. Remember because it doesn’t help the first time doesn’t mean it not going to!
Hope this helps.
Jim
Dear Africa18. I’d endorse everything everybody else said above but with a grain of salt. The reason being is that perhaps you’ll need to search for something inside you; your inner, subconscious life is in turmoil, and you may need to search to recognize and become aware of these ‘strange’ feelings or other sensations and/or experiences that seem to be coming through you and freeze your body (I absolutely don’t mean ‘spirits’ or anything like that.) Of course, you should definitely check first to see whether this is a medical condition, or a side effect from the meds you’ve been taking (or not) and you may need to go through a trial period to find the right combination to you.
But what I referred above is that you may need to read and meditate. Read some philosophy, if you have access to it, read C.G.Jung, Nietzche, even the ‘existentialists’ so you have a wider repertoire to deal with these things. Even horror literature, Lovecraft, some Borges and others, may help acquaint yourself with the shock of the “raw” and the “new” that sometimes visit us at night. None of these books have ‘the’ answer; but they can be useful to help you cope with stuff we’re not taught along our normal lives. And again, I don’t mean to completely rationalize your experiences. Meditation and some kind of physical regime also may be useful. It’d be great if you could “train” your body to relax or wake up on your command. It may take time and involve a lot of self control, but anyone can master that.
You should know that what we know as insomnia is a multitude of symptoms caused by a variety of reasons by themselves or in combination. But since you’re bound to spend almost half of your life laying down, you may as well learn how to get some sleep when you need it.
I’m a proponent of self-discovery, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should undertake your search alone.
There may be people that may tell you that you have some kind of gift, which is possible but be careful; don’t believe in anything but in your gut feeling, your intuition. Not many people are out there to help you. But I do hope you get some rest, calm your nerve system and master your inner world. No one else can do it for you. All the best. W.
Thank you for your advice I’ll definitely look into it!!!!