Pavor Nocturnus

There’s a certain eeriness about the Latin name for night terror. Pavor Nocturnus…Say it three times aloud and you’ll wake up screaming.Well, let’s hope not.

Night terrors make ordinary nightmares seem well, ordinary. These experiences typically involve  a sudden false awakening from sleep and persistent fear or terror. Your heart hammers in your chest. You probably scream, sweat profusely, and feel disoriented. It sounds like a bad acid trip, but these experiences are typically drug-free terror and can happen to anyone from infants to the elderly. But the most common age group is 3-7.

Usually the person has no recollection of the incident, only a vague sense of frightening images. Researchers say that many people experiencing night terrors see spiders, snakes, animals, or strange people in the room.

It’s tempting to link night terror with alien abductions, but I think they’re two distinct experiences. One of the reasons is that people who experience night terror often wake up the entire household and are observed during the experience. Alien abduction experiences, on the other hand, are quite the opposite. Typically, no one wakes up except the abductee.  The experience is closer to sleep paralysis, another experience confused with alien abductions. In the Middle Ages, a succubus – a small creature – was said to sit on the chest of the sleeper causing the paralysis.

The two sleep experiences are explanations of choice for skeptics who don’t accept the reality of alien abductions. The problem with that explanation, though, is that alien abductions are also reported by people who are awake, sometimes driving cars, as in the famouse case of Barney and Betty Hill.

I write about night terrors in my book Dream Power for Teens, which is just coming out as an e-book to accompany the print edition.

While nightmares take place during REM sleep, night terrors occur at a deeper level of sleep, when the brain produces slow delta waves and no REM sleep. The night terror experience might last from five to twenty minutes. During that time the person is asleep and unable to wake up, even if his or her eyes are open.

While it isn’t considered dangerous, what you do during the night terror episode can lead to dangerous situations. Some people who experience night terror walk into walls or fall down stairs, which is certainly hazardous.

Here’s a description of night terrors from my book that was provided by a nineteen-year-old named Heather.

One of my most frightening experiences was when I was six years old. I was having the worst night terror of my life. I was sitting in my room, everyone still sleeping, and the walls were falling in around me. The books were all falling off the shelves, walls crashing. I was so scared, but I couldn’t do anything. I was in a trance, a haze. My head throbbed and buzzed, and I was sure I would die.

From what I’m told, I walked into the living room and turned up the stereo as loud as it could go, and woke up the entire family. I told them about the book shelves falling in my room, and I ranted and raved for about twenty minutes. Some things I said made no sense at all. I was in my own world, more like my own hell. Finally, my mother put me in a cold bath and I “sobered up “ That was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life and one that I will never be able to forget. Even now when I think about it, I get shivers down my spine.

Heather reported her experience on the online Night Terror Resource Center, at www.nightterrors.org. She said that her night terrors stopped when she turned twelve, and she considers herself very lucky.