On Night Terrors
This Geek Girl Chicago post reminded me of my own experience with night terrors. Fortunately rare and all when I was young, but I still remember some of them very vividly.
In the one I remember the best, I was standing on a bridge over a lake. It was somewhere in the Pacific Northwest--no surprise, since we were visiting my grandparents at the time--with the pine forested hills all around. The bridge was made of metal, or at least had metal supporting post. I remember because there was a small crab crawling along one of the bridge posts, and in the dream I watched it for a while, then picked it up and dropped it down the open entrance to one of the poles. I waited a moment, then I had an overpowering sensation that something vast and terrible was coming up the supporting pole, and I ran screaming off into the forest.
When I woke up(?), there was a crab perched on the ceiling, a meter across and slowly waving its claws at me. I just sat there petrified, staring up at it, until my father noticed I was awake when he was walking past my room. He asked what was wrong and I told him, still not taking my eyes off the crab, and after a moment, he said, "Well, tell it to go away." And it sounds ridiculous and I thought it was ridiculous at the time, but I guess it helped because I was able to close my eyes and eventually fall back to sleep.
The second one I remember, I don't actually remember the dream. I just remember suddenly waking up standing in the bathroom, with both my parents awake and having thrown my clothes in the toilet. My parents were asking me to pick my clothes out (since I had, after all, thrown them in there), but I just kept screaming "NO! NOOOO!" and running away, filled with some kind of nameless fear that I wasn't capable of expressing. And even at the time, there was a small part of my brain that wondered why I was doing this, and why I wasn't just grabbing the clothes so I could go back to sleep...but not enough to overpower the rest of my brain. I think after a long time, my parents eventually gave up, but I don't remember that.
Nowadays, I barely remember my dreams at all, which is why the dreams (夢) tag is so sparsely populated, and I haven't had a night terror in years. A lot of the vivid dreams I had when I was younger are much stronger in my memory than the dreams I have now, like the repeated dream of the house on the edge of the cliff and falling into the sea, or all of my friends being vampires. Remembering my dreams is so rare that when I woke up from a nightmare a few months ago with my heart racing and the sheets damp with sweat, the thing I was most surprised about was that I had been affected by the dream strongly enough to react to it. Maybe it's true what they say about your dreams dying as you get older--or maybe it's just my memory that's going.
In the one I remember the best, I was standing on a bridge over a lake. It was somewhere in the Pacific Northwest--no surprise, since we were visiting my grandparents at the time--with the pine forested hills all around. The bridge was made of metal, or at least had metal supporting post. I remember because there was a small crab crawling along one of the bridge posts, and in the dream I watched it for a while, then picked it up and dropped it down the open entrance to one of the poles. I waited a moment, then I had an overpowering sensation that something vast and terrible was coming up the supporting pole, and I ran screaming off into the forest.
When I woke up(?), there was a crab perched on the ceiling, a meter across and slowly waving its claws at me. I just sat there petrified, staring up at it, until my father noticed I was awake when he was walking past my room. He asked what was wrong and I told him, still not taking my eyes off the crab, and after a moment, he said, "Well, tell it to go away." And it sounds ridiculous and I thought it was ridiculous at the time, but I guess it helped because I was able to close my eyes and eventually fall back to sleep.
The second one I remember, I don't actually remember the dream. I just remember suddenly waking up standing in the bathroom, with both my parents awake and having thrown my clothes in the toilet. My parents were asking me to pick my clothes out (since I had, after all, thrown them in there), but I just kept screaming "NO! NOOOO!" and running away, filled with some kind of nameless fear that I wasn't capable of expressing. And even at the time, there was a small part of my brain that wondered why I was doing this, and why I wasn't just grabbing the clothes so I could go back to sleep...but not enough to overpower the rest of my brain. I think after a long time, my parents eventually gave up, but I don't remember that.
Nowadays, I barely remember my dreams at all, which is why the dreams (夢) tag is so sparsely populated, and I haven't had a night terror in years. A lot of the vivid dreams I had when I was younger are much stronger in my memory than the dreams I have now, like the repeated dream of the house on the edge of the cliff and falling into the sea, or all of my friends being vampires. Remembering my dreams is so rare that when I woke up from a nightmare a few months ago with my heart racing and the sheets damp with sweat, the thing I was most surprised about was that I had been affected by the dream strongly enough to react to it. Maybe it's true what they say about your dreams dying as you get older--or maybe it's just my memory that's going.