Night Terrors In Children
Sep 7th, 2008 by zania
Or Why Counting Sheep Is Not Always A Good Thing!
When I was a kid, around the age of about 5 or 6, I used to suffer from Night Terrors. If anyone has suffered from night terrors themselves, they will know just how awful they can be. I literally used to think I was going mad… and I reckon my parents may have wondered about that too.
In actual fact, night terrors are not that unusual in children. Most of the time they occur when the child has a raised temperature and the sufferer usually ‘grows out of it’ in time.
If anyone is interested, this is a link to an article on Night Terrors on Wikepedia (it describes them in adults as well). It relates a little to how I felt, but, as with most intense emotional experiences, these are subjective, as the experience of a night terrors will be somewhat different in any individual.
I was going through some old notes on my pc recently and found a description I had written of my childhood night terrors. I thought it might be useful to share, if anyone out there has kids who are going through these at the moment and finding them terrifying and confusing.
Your child’s night terrors will of course be different to mine - different images, sounds, etc, but you can get some idea of what the child is feeling from these notes:
My Childhood Night Terrors
I used to wake up, covered in sweat from head to toe, and I would see sheep (yes, sheep!), and people and nameless creatures and things coming in the door, in through the window, out of the walls, pouring out of corners, covering the ceiling, crowding me, suffocating me. There was noise - a sort of buzz of words and odd sounds (and lots of ‘baaaing’), and colours all mixed up, and the whiteness of the sheep’s coats, turning dingy grey, and then greyness and blackness as all these ‘things’ cut out the light and tried to suffocate me.
I would scream and scream for my parents to save me. I was told that my eyes were almost popping out of my head and I used to gesture at the ’sheep’ and say “get them away, please get them away!” And I would cling tight to my bemused and worried parents and they would try to bring me out of it, and I would try and try to wake up…
But I was already awake… but the ‘things’ were still coming to get me. It was no good trying to wake myself up if I was awake already and that made the fear even worse. I would eventually calm down, and the images and sounds would slowly fade. But it seemed to take forever.
The night terrors slowly tailed off. I had my adenoids and tonsils removed and had less ‘childhood infections’, and that seemed to help. But occasionally in the daytime I would get a fleeting glimpse of the terror - the feeling of being overwhelmed and that my head was exploding with images and thoughts and sounds.
Sometimes in maths lessons, when we had a problem to solve which led to infinity, that feeling would return. Or if I looked at the sky at night, or thought about time and space for too long, that feeling of overwhelming pressure would sometimes appear again (and still does).
Luckily nowadays I can always ’shake off’ the feeling, by concentrating on something else.
For me, I think the feeling of being overwhelmed probably continued because of the type of person I am (I let myself get overwhelmed a lot 
) And the sheep? Well, I guess someone told me to ‘count sheep’ when I couldn’t get to sleep one night. Seems the night terrors took the counting a little too far…
But anyway, that is how Childhood Night Terrors felt to me at the age of about 5 or 6.
Oh yes, and I don’t mind sheep at all now!
