>Night Fright

In the early days of Bruiser’s babyhood, he woke crying several times a night. Generally, it took only a few minutes of feeding him to lull him back to sleep. Once he got a little older, simply popping a pacifier in his mouth would suffice. But sometimes, it was different.

Occasionally, he’d wake and nothing I’d do could calm him. His crying sounded foreign and more frantic. His eyes were open, but he seemed to see nothing around him. He would gasp and choke and eventually settle down on his own. In fact, picking him up and rocking him seemed only to make it worse. He’d arch his back over and over again, a terrified look on his face, until I put him back in his crib and rubbed his back. Eventually, he would fall back asleep.

You’d think I’d be worried sick about these episodes. I wasn’t. Call it a mother’s instinct, but I knew exactly what he was experiencing. Night terrors.

I first heard about night terrors when I was in Junior High and my best friend’s little sister was having them.

“She wakes screaming,” she reported dramatically, “Screaming her head off, and she can’t see any of us. They say you’re not supposed to try to wake someone having a night terror, because it won’t work. So we just try to keep her from hurting herself until she goes back to sleep.”

I was fascinated. And dubious. My friend had a habit of embellishing, to put it nicely. But when I heard something about night terrors later in life, I looked it up on the web and it appeared that, regarding her sister, anyway, my friend was telling the truth.

Bruiser’s night terrors lasted only a couple of minutes at a time, so I didn’t think much of them until about a month ago, when he had one that lasted about thirty minutes. I’ll admit I contributed to it, picking up out of the crib and trying to wake him, since it was impossible for me to believe that a person couldn’t be woken from a night terror. It only made it worse. I took Bruiser into our bedroom and laid him on our bed while Hubs and I stared at him. It was freaky, to say the least. His cries and his facial expression were totally different from anything he displays in his waking hours, and nothing we did seemed to have any impact on him.

Finally, he fell back into a deep sleep. The next morning, as usual, he showed no signs of what had happened the night before. But I was rattled, so I looked up night terrors once again. Yep. He had all the classic symptoms. Strange cries. A “possessed” look on his face. We couldn’t wake him up. Etc, etc, etc.

According to the experts, night terrors are not uncommon in infants, and are generally triggered by some change in his sleeping habit (the night of the bad one was the night of the tornadoes, when I woke him and brought him in the bathroom for half an hour). Night terrors are described as a “neural storm,” in which the dreamer is stuck between sleep cycles. The dreamer is feeling extreme fight or flight instinct, hence the, you know, terror. The best thing I could do, I read, was to leave him in his crib while he had it, rub his back, and speak soothingly. For Bruiser, I’ve found the pacifier works wonders, too, if I can get his attention enough for him to know it’s in his mouth.

I was glad to know that night terrors subside in most kids by the time they’re eight, but then he had one a couple of nights ago, while my husband’s parents were staying with us. I mentioned it to Dennis’s mom the next day and she told me another close family member on Dennis’s side has them, even as an adult.

It pains me to think of Bruiser having night terrors for the rest of his life. At least he won’t ever remember having had them, though. And if that’s the worst genetic trait that was passed down to him, I consider him to be a very lucky boy.

This post originally appeared on Parents.com.