Night terror: attacks that shock you!

It's evening and you're relaxing on your couch, when you suddenly hear a lot of hard noises coming out of the child's bedroom. When you open the door, your breath stops for a second. Your daughter or son, running circles in their room while they are screaming and crying, with their eyes wide open. Big chance that you just saw a night terror attack.

Pavor nocturnus

Night terror, or Pavor nocturnus as it is called in Latin, is a shocking show that may scare the viewer deeply. Most of the times it is kids that suffer from this, but in rare cases the attacks keep coming back until older age.

Not a nightmare

The attacks are different from nightmares, because the person going through the attack has their eyes open, cannot be waked, will not stay in bed, but runs circles and even fights instead. The biggest difference is that they do not remember anything about it the next morning. This is comforting for parents to know. The terror a child feels during an attack is definitely real, but there will not be any more damage to the child, because they simply cannot remember it after it occured. When the child does wake up during the attack, she or he will not remember having a nightmare at all.

Early in the evening

The attacks take place in the first 2 hours of sleep. This is called the non-REM phase. The children are deeply asleep, but get disturbed because, for example, they have to go to the toilet. That disturbance can be the reason of the attack. The children coping with these problems are physically healthy. It is thought that it has something to do with the developing brains of a child. It is said that stress (caused by tensions or exhaustion) is a factor that may lead to these sort of attacks.

The process

The child looks full of fear, can run around, yell, cry, talk (mostly non-talk) and they sometimes even fight. Do not try to wake the child, because they will get even more hysterical. Stay in the room, try to calm them down by talking softly to them and most importantly: do not get too scared. The attacks mostly take a few minutes. After that, the child will go back to bed and will sleep as if nothing ever happened.

What to do?

Usually, there will be no medical prescriptions against pavor nocturnus, because that is not really necessary. As said before: the child will not be damaged physically or mentally. Sometimes it would help to wake the child just before an attack usually starts. In periods of tension, you can count on attacks at approximately the same times every day. In that case, wake the child about 15 minutes before the attack to interrupt the sleeping rythm. But even when nothing is done against it, the attacks will vanish most of the times when a child is 12 years old. A brother or sister of a child with night terror has a higher chance of getting night terror as well. It is likely to occur in a family with more sleeping problems, like sleepwalking.

Sources: www.todio.nl