a midwinter night's dream
When I was little, probably somewhere between 5 and 7, I had some huge screaming nightmare that brought my mom running--my bedroom was in the basement then, and my parents were upstairs. I don't remember now what the nightmare was, and I don't think I remembered then either: all I knew was that I was awake at the wrong time and everything was wrong and I flipped out. I screamed and cried and said I wanted breakfast, and when my mom said it was 4 in the morning I cried harder. She took me into the rec room and wrapped me in a blanket on the couch, and sat with me while we watched television, even though the only thing that was on was a blue test screen displaying the time and the temperature. It took me about twenty minutes of staring at the TV to realise that maybe my mom was telling the truth and it really was the middle of the night. Finally I let her put me back to bed.
This is the only incident I remember, but later my mom told me that I used to do this all the time. I didn't remember those nightmares and fits, so this came as a big surprise.
More recently over the last few months, and a couple of times this week, I've started having more events like that. I wake up abruptly in full-on panic mode, screaming, and scramble as fast as I can out of bed and across the room, through the door and into the hallway. The light is always on in our upstairs hall, which helps to clue me in that everything's fine, and usually someone's noticed my heroic escape from my own bedroom and asks, "Did you have a bad dream?"
GOOD QUESTION. I can't remember whatever dream I was having, but I just bolted out of bed for no reason, so obviously that's what happened. "Uh...yes." Now I'm embarrassed, so I stumble back to my room and go back to sleep.
And I do fall back asleep right away--it's not like really awful dreams that fill your head with hideous images and make your skin crawl and you have to turn on all the lights in the house and look at kitten pictures for the next two hours before venturing back to bed. I have nightmares of varying intensity a few times a week, which may be a high statistic--how would I know? Once at the instant I woke up I saw a hypnopompic hallucination that looked exactly like the illustration on the wiki page for Shadow People, which scared the piss out of me until I woke up enough to know it wasn't real, and then I was fine again. In other words, screaming and bolting from bed looks incredibly scary and terrible, but of all the sleep weirdnesses I've had, it's probably the least unpleasant.
The biggest danger in all this seems to be that I could trip and break my ankle while I'm escaping--I've already pulled a muscle in my shoulder while hurling my weight against the wall scrabbling for a lightswitch (my brain had forgotten the layout of my room, I think). When I talked about this with my mom she mentioned that she had this problem too when she was younger and had just assumed it was normal.
Internet research reveals that this fits the profile of sleep terrors pretty well, but I'm kind of iffy about going to the doctor for it, since internet research also suggests that there's not much treatment for it other than avoiding stress etc. I may go anyway just to see if he gives me more anxiety drugs.
(Extra data points: I do talk in my sleep, although not on the level of Dion McGregor ("Friday, it must be Friday because it's the fuck wagon. Saturday is the suck wagon..."). There's a disorder with the wonderful name of Ondine's Curse that it's just as well I don't have, and I had sleep paralysis exactly once and it was unnerving. But I don't fucking snore so there's that.)
This is the only incident I remember, but later my mom told me that I used to do this all the time. I didn't remember those nightmares and fits, so this came as a big surprise.
More recently over the last few months, and a couple of times this week, I've started having more events like that. I wake up abruptly in full-on panic mode, screaming, and scramble as fast as I can out of bed and across the room, through the door and into the hallway. The light is always on in our upstairs hall, which helps to clue me in that everything's fine, and usually someone's noticed my heroic escape from my own bedroom and asks, "Did you have a bad dream?"
GOOD QUESTION. I can't remember whatever dream I was having, but I just bolted out of bed for no reason, so obviously that's what happened. "Uh...yes." Now I'm embarrassed, so I stumble back to my room and go back to sleep.
And I do fall back asleep right away--it's not like really awful dreams that fill your head with hideous images and make your skin crawl and you have to turn on all the lights in the house and look at kitten pictures for the next two hours before venturing back to bed. I have nightmares of varying intensity a few times a week, which may be a high statistic--how would I know? Once at the instant I woke up I saw a hypnopompic hallucination that looked exactly like the illustration on the wiki page for Shadow People, which scared the piss out of me until I woke up enough to know it wasn't real, and then I was fine again. In other words, screaming and bolting from bed looks incredibly scary and terrible, but of all the sleep weirdnesses I've had, it's probably the least unpleasant.
The biggest danger in all this seems to be that I could trip and break my ankle while I'm escaping--I've already pulled a muscle in my shoulder while hurling my weight against the wall scrabbling for a lightswitch (my brain had forgotten the layout of my room, I think). When I talked about this with my mom she mentioned that she had this problem too when she was younger and had just assumed it was normal.
Internet research reveals that this fits the profile of sleep terrors pretty well, but I'm kind of iffy about going to the doctor for it, since internet research also suggests that there's not much treatment for it other than avoiding stress etc. I may go anyway just to see if he gives me more anxiety drugs.
(Extra data points: I do talk in my sleep, although not on the level of Dion McGregor ("Friday, it must be Friday because it's the fuck wagon. Saturday is the suck wagon..."). There's a disorder with the wonderful name of Ondine's Curse that it's just as well I don't have, and I had sleep paralysis exactly once and it was unnerving. But I don't fucking snore so there's that.)