Two sleep disorders that occur in children are nightmares and night terrors. Most children experience nightmares which are considered part of the normal developmental process. Nightmares can occur as soon as age two. They are most common in children between three and twelve years old. Very few children experience night terrors, as little as 3 percent have them. These sleep disorders can be very frightening to a child and may leave them in tears.

Nightmares

Several hours after you go to sleep you enter the REM stage of sleep, during this stage of sleep is when nightmares occur. During REM there is a general body paralysis and active dreaming. Although most dreams are good dreams there are some dreams that may be so frightening that they wake the child up.

Children most often can remember the dream when they awake in the morning. This nightmare sleep disorder only becomes a problem if the child has a problem going to sleep, is scared to go to sleep or is becoming sleep deprived. Remember to stay calm and be reassuring at all times if your child has a nightmare, if you become worried or frightened your child will react the same way.

Believe it or not there are ways to prevent nightmares. Keep a relaxed bed time routine. Find something comforting to do with your child before putting them to bed, weather its reading to them or telling them a story. Avoid letting your child watch a scary or violent movie hours before they go to bed. These often cause nightmares as well. Your child may have a severe emotional problem that you don’t know about, these nightmares may indicate that.

Night Terrors

During the first few hours of sleep in the deep non- REM sleep is when night terrors usually occur. Most often they occur at the same time every night. If your child wakes up screaming, crying or moaning they may be having a night terror. They may also sit straight up and scream, and although their eyes may be open they are still asleep. Unlike night mares, there will be no memory of this night terror or what happened during the night. Night terrors can last from 10 minutes to over an hour. Their heart rate will increase and they experience rapid breathing.

If your child is having a night terror do not try to wake them or comfort them. The best thing you can do is make sure they are safe and no harm is being done while they are having this night terror. There are several things that can contribute to night terrors including staying up extremely late, being overly tired, eating a heavy meal before bed time and some medications may also contribute to night terrors. Night mares and night terrors may seem very scary to the child and parent but they are not harmful and they are not a sign of any sort of mental illness. Children outgrow these sleeping disorders within a few months or years.

Sleep terror disorder can be a particularly scary experience, both for the person who is experiencing it and those who see it happening. It is even more particularly disturbing because it happens mostly to children. They may suddenly scream and cry in the middle of the night, and as all this happens they remain asleep. If you have a child that constantly suffers from this sleep terror disorder, it is only understandable that you would want an immediate cure to the situation. While there are some medications that claim to help stop night terrors, there is unfortunately no instant solution to this sleeping disorder.

Furthermore, some of these medications may cause adverse side effects in the future, which may lead to even more serious health problems. A better approach for dealing with sleep terrors is to go through counseling or participate in relaxation courses that help relieve the tension that typically causes this condition.

What Goes on During an Episode

If you have never seen someone going through an episode of sleep terror disorder, the first time can be very frightening. The bouts usually happen about a couple of hours after the child has fallen asleep. During this time, the child will commence crying and screaming, and sometimes the spell even comes with some violent thrashing about in bed. Although it would appear that the child is wide awake as this happens, he is actually very much asleep throughout the whole episode. As soon as the terrors subside, he will calm down and fall asleep once again. Most bouts of sleep terror last for just a minute or two but in the more serious cases, they can continue for up to 30 minutes at a time and may happen several times during the night.

The strange thing about sleep terror disorder is that the child who is suffering from it rarely remembers what happened when they wake up in the morning. No matter how loud the crying or how violent the thrashing may have been, they will have absolutely no recollection of the experience. Fortunately, children who experience sleep terrors eventually grow out of them after some time without needing any special medication or treatment. If you have a child who is currently going through a sleep terror disorder, the best thing that you can do as a parent is to show support and always be there to comfort them each night when the nightmares happen.

Night terrors are a sleep disorder that can extremely disturbing for people to deal with. Some people suffer from them for years starting when they are a very young. They can start as the result of a traumatic experience but most individuals have no idea why they are experiencing them. There has been plenty of research on the subject but a great deal about it still remains a mystery.

In various night terror studies at sleep clinics, it has been noted that there is an increase in brain activity during the night terror episodes. Most people only suffer from one of them per night and they can last for short periods of time. Some people suffer from night terrors several times a week, nightly, or only a couple of times a year. In most instances it is the same or very similar experience each time. Some individuals never do remember what the night terror was about though. They simply wake up terribly afraid but don’t understand why.

This brain activity has led many in the area of sleep disorders to believe that there is a chemical imbalance to be dealt with. Others continue to argue that it is a sign of suppressed trauma or anxiety. Parents of children with night terrors are often given disturbing information by medical professionals. It can be assumed that they are the victim of sexual abuse which is later found to be untrue.

Sometimes night terrors are the result of something terrible that has happened to someone. For example sexual abuse, rape, and even post traumatic stress disorder can lead to night terrors. In these types of cases counseling and therapy can help the person to overcome their night terrors. The more support they have the more then can gain control over the situation. As a result the night terrors may eventually go away on their own.

For most people with night terrors, they suffer in many ways. Their body isn’t allowing them to adequately rest while they are sleeping due to the episodes. They often wake from the night terrors with an overwhelming sense of fear. This makes it very difficult to go back to sleep. Their anxiety also increases at bed time because they are afraid that they will experience an episode.

Whether a child or adult, a person with sleep terror disorder has symptoms that are distressing to anyone seeing them. They will usually awake in the night, generally within a few hours of falling asleep, with a feeling of sheer terror. They are waking abruptly from stage 3 or 4 of non-rapid eye movement sleep cycle, and it would seem to the onlooker that they are stuck between sleep and wake. When they wake, they’ll usually scream, or gasp, or moan, and they have a very hard time awaking. It is much more effective to gently help the person fall back into a deep sleep, which they usually do within fifteen minutes. With a child, this role is usually performed by a parent. For an adult, if their spouse or roommate can help them back to sleep, it is ideal.

Other symptoms are physical ones that are to be expected when the person is feeling terror. They will tend to be sweating, with large pupils. Their pulse will usually be racing, and they are likely to be breathing very fast and have a look of fear or panic on their face. They can also look very confused. Reassurance by a person near them can help them relax and fall back into a deep sleep more easily.

Adults And Sleep Terror Disorder

Sleep Terror Disorder usually occurs only in children between the ages of two and eight although occasionally older children can too. When adults have sleep terror disorder, look for other causes. There are many avenues to check and methods to try to alleviate the symptoms, since (unlike children) they are unlikely to get better within a few weeks time, without helping the causes.

Things for adults with sleep terror disorder to check include: getting a proper diet and enough sleep, and managing stressful events in life. Sometimes adults with sleep terror disorder have additional triggering factors, like trauma-based situations (post tramatic stress syndrome, for example) and genetic or chronic factors. If this is the case, the adult with sleep terror disorder should be in therapy. Psychotherapy and antidepressant medicine can often help immensely.

The adult with sleep terror disorder should also be checked for other physical factors, as there is some evidence that adults with hypoglycemia can have night terrors, as well as other symptoms.

If you have woken up to the screams of your child in the night, you probably assumed your child was having a nightmare, but maybe they weren’t. There is another condition known as Sleep Terror Disorder (or Night Terrors or pavor nocturnes). Maybe that is what you child was experiencing. These are different things, and different treatments are appropriate for sleep terror disorder episodes.

What A Night Terror Looks And Sounds Like

A night terror, or sleep terror disorder episode, can happen to adults as well as children, but it primarily affects children between ages 2 and 6. This event usually occurs from half an hour to three and a half hours after the child goes to sleep. The chilling screams or crying would lead a parent to believe they’ve had a bad dream, so the parent may go in to comfort the child. The strange thing is, a child in the midst of a night terror is not easily awakened. In fact, if he is awakened he will be more upset and disoriented. Left alone, the child will usually just go back to sleep and not even remember the episode at all.

During the event, there is usually intense anxiety, confusion, unresponsiveness, unusual movements, disorientation, and agitation. In the morning, they may vaguely remember something was terrifying, but remember little else about it.

What About Nightmares

Nightmares, on the other hand, are different. With a sleep terror disorder, the person doesn’t fully wake up as they will from a nightmare. Also, sleep terror disorder are not about a dream at all. There’s usually no specific situation or event that is dreamed, but the emotion of fear is intense. Though there is no certain scenario that triggers a sleep terror disorder episode, they can be based on a triggering emotion that some children remember as it is repeated over time.

What Should Be Done?

If your child is having a nightmare, waking them up can help a lot. Getting them to think about things other than things in the nightmare will help them relax and be able to fall asleep again.

If, on the other hand, it was a sleep terror disorder episode, the best thing is to hold or rock the child or comfort the child in other ways, but not try to wake the child up. Usually, after a short period of screaming or crying, they will settle back into normal sleep mode. Children generally outgrow night terrors within a few weeks or month.