“Every town has an Elm Street.”
— Freddie Krueger
There are these things called night terrors. They mostly happen in little kids under the age of 12 and that doesn’t seem fair to me. Little kids don’t deserve anything like that.
What happens (on the surface of things) is that the kid is asleep but then suddenly they are also talking excitedly or screaming or calling for help. They might be understandable or they might be incomprehensible. And apparently they don’t have any indication that what’s happening is actually happening to them either. Unlike nightmares (which something like 89% of the human population experiences) people experience night terrors at a much, much lower rate of frequency. Try something like 5-7% of children. Those that have night terrors (also known as sleep terrors since apparently they are not limited to night time) have no conscious memory of what happened, although they eventually wake up to a pounding heart and hyper state of panic or distress. But again: night terror people have zero recollection of what they just went through.
More fun facts?
Night terrors typically last anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes but they can go on as long as 20-30 minutes in some cases.
Most people who witness their kid in the throes of one of these report that it’s almost impossible to wake the child up during it. But I don’t have any solid proof on that one way or the other.
Also, these children frequently have their eyes wide open but are sound asleep. Just in case you needed a higher level of WTF-ness for any of this.
In addition, night terror people frequently get up out of bed and walk around. This can be very dangerous (duh) as well as God-awful freaky to stumble upon for the poor parents. Think ‘The Shining’ but instead of those twins it’s your kid down at the end of the hall bumping into the wall or standing at the top of the goddamn steps.
Strangely, modern science knows next to nothing about night terrors. It kind of seems as though very little research has been done either. I have no idea why. It might be because they’re so mysteriously creepy. Or it might be because they are too random or unusual. I get it either way; I mean, no one can imagine having to watch their beautiful child being dragged through some kind of an impenetrable state of terror-fueled parallel dimension.
Is it a deep dark triggering shot up out of the extreme subconscious?
That seems logical.
Is it the mind trying to tell the body something very, very critical?
That also makes a lot of sense to me.
Is it related to trauma?
That would ring true but if so… why are the kids so young? And are they the known victims of what we define as trauma/PTSD or cPTSD? Or is there more to the notion of trauma than any of us realize? Obviously, I have no idea but that all seems plausible as well in my opinion.
It’s all just too much. Our brains, our nervous systems, our incredibly complex existence in this light pageant called living/ it’s just all too much more than any of us will ever wrap our peanut brains around. Even the best and brightest of us stand nimble and foolish in the face of what really happens out beyond the university parking lot. We’re all being groomed, it might seem at times, by the crooked fingers of demons we dare not address let alone try to fathom.
Dumbass human beings. All we do is bitch about stuff and break things. No wonder there are certain enlightened souls who see into the abyss. And no wonder they are so young and innocent and pure and afraid.
Without any hardcore studies to draw from on night terrors, it’s impossible to say just how many actual adults experience them, but various searches online seem to indicate that it’s a very small number indeed. Something like 2% of the world’s mature human beings experience night terrors. That’s the number my unscientific ass comes up with anyhow.
I guess that right there might be the reason no one takes the time to delve into these things, huh? You can’t make big money coming up with drugs for something hardly anyone has ever even heard of, you know? Night terrors? Pfff. Please. No way. Make weight loss miracle drugs. Get so rich you can’t even feel your feet anymore.
So, yeah. I have these night terrors. I never wrote about it before because, frankly, I didn’t even know what they were. I’d never heard of such a thing. I only knew that for years now, at varying intervals of varying intensities, people who sleep near me would talk of times deep in the night when I would begin to scream/freak out/ curse/ beg for help/ and struggle to make my voice heard in ways that seemed as if I was in a nightmare.
So how do I know that’s not what I experience, right? How the hell do I know that I’m having night terrors and not plain old nightmares?
It’s easy. I don’t remember anything after they happen except this bizarre miasma of some sort of essence. But it’s only like these ripped shreds of some long ago life. Like memories of being raped by vikings or fighting with weird monkeys or some bonkers other life thing. I can’t even begin to explain it. I’ve always known that something was occurring sometimes in my night. But it always remained far from reality, distantly inexplicable, like the bizarre stench of cigarette in my shirt but I haven’t been anywhere near a smoker in a long time. Something is there. Something was here. But what? And how? And like… why?
How often?, I mumble to Arle.
“At least once a week now,” she whispers.
Her hand is in my hair, where it’s been since she used her long fingers to cut through the night and guide me out from this strange place I was. She puts here nails into my scalp and it feels so good; I have a breathless feeling, some sort of sense of a sense of something, but that’s all.
What woke you up?, I say, perplexed.
Her palm in the blackness presses smooth on my forehead. I gather that she is calming me. As if I’m a kid, you know? As if she’d woken a kid from some bad thing and the world rushes back in and there is the fear from before giving way to the relief of the now.
“You were screaming,” she responds. Her words are gentle in the dark. Her voice is warm on my skin. “You were having another bad dream.”
I was? But I wasn’t dreaming. She says nothing. I mean, I don’t remember anything. Her feet find mine. Down in our night ocean. I feel calm and mortified/ somehow safe and in harm’s way. What happened? I want to ask. But how could she know? Oh, how could my poor love know?
• • •
Area Resident is an Ottawa-based journalist, recording artist, music collector and re-seller. Hear (and buy) his music on Bandcamp, email him HERE, follow him on Instagram and check him out on Discogs.
