Why Nightmares Occur and How to Stop Them
Few things are scarier than watching someone you love get uncontrollably nervous at night, even if they don’t remember it. It’s even scarier to hear that someone was you from a loved one or roommate. These are nightmares, and they are not ordinary nightmares. This is why and when they happen, and how to stop them.
Night terrors are not nightmares
A nightmare is just a bad dream. But as horrible as this dream is, it is not the same as night horror. Nightmares are very vivid and disturbing, and you can remember them when you wake up. Some people get more of them than others. Nightmares can be triggered by stress, certain medications, and possibly even spicy foods . But these are still not nightmares.
Night terrors , also called sleep terrors, are a completely different experience. In the night terror, you can move and talk, but you don’t really wake up. Your eyes can be open. You are in a kind of limbo between sleep and wakefulness.
If you are experiencing nightmares as an adult, you may not even be aware of it. However, horrors can interfere with your sleep, making you wake up tired. And if you have roommates or family members in your house, they will definitely be able to tell you about it. One to two percent of adults have nightmares , compared with six percent of children. By some estimates, the number of children is as high as 15 percent .
Parents describe children with nighttime fears as screaming or talking, possibly fussy and completely inconsolable. You cannot easily wake someone up when they have a nightly horror, and if you do, they might just get even more frightened.
Night terrors are close relatives of sleepwalking : both are associated with the fact that a person behaves as if he is awake when he is really sleeping; and in both cases, the person usually does not remember this in the morning.
Night terrors are scary to watch, but harmless in most cases
We do not fully understand why nightmares occur. Some of the triggers are illness, lack of sleep, and any stressful situations in a person’s life. Caffeine and other stimulants can cause them. Children with sleep apnea are also more likely to experience nightmares.
There is little you can do to prevent nightmares, but a good bedtime routine is just the beginning. Getting into your deepest sleep phase as quickly as possible can help prevent nightmares, according to the American Sleep Association. This is because horrors happen during slow wave sleep , the stage of deep sleep without dreaming. Going to bed on time and in a relaxing environment helps your body go through the stages more smoothly.
If you are a witness to the night terror, you do not need to do anything special. Just keep the person safe (for example, keep any sharp or fragile objects out of the way) and stay away if the person is behaving aggressively. If the terrified person is your child, you will naturally want to comfort him, but the night terrified person usually cannot be reassured or even awakened. They do sleep even when their eyes are open. After 10-20 minutes, a person usually falls asleep in a peaceful sleep, as if nothing had happened.
If someone you know has nightmares, wake them up before they get nervous.
If your child, partner, or roommate has frequent nightmares, there is a method that can stop them. According to sleep professionals such as Christopher Winter, this seems pretty reliable. His son had nightmares. “We waited about 30 minutes, walked in and woke him up, rubbed his back, and as soon as he moved, we just walked away, and that pretty much stopped them.”
The fanciful name for this technique is planned awakenings . When this was first described in the BMJ medical journal in 1988 , parents were asked to wake their child about 15 minutes before they expected the nighttime horror to happen. Nightmares tend to happen every night at a predictable time, often an hour or two after going to bed. Parents who were unable to tell the time were asked to wake their child up when they noticed any activity, such as sweating or small movements, that usually occur just before the nightmare.
All nine children stopped experiencing nightmares after just a week of awakening. Other successful studies have been published since then, but none of them are large randomized controlled trials, so there is no clear evidence base to say how effective it is for the general population.
However, a lot of people report that it works and it doesn’t hurt to give it a try. If you live alone, you will need someone to help you figure out how long after bedtime you tend to be afraid. Once you know this, you can set an alarm to wake you up a little earlier than this time. When the alarm goes off, just turn it off and go to bed again.
There’s also a gadget under the mattress, the Lully Sleep Guardian ($ 200), which claims it can tell you when you’re about to experience a nightly horror and wake you up. The company advertises an 80 percent success rate, but this comes from a company study in which parents hummed their child’s device as part of a scheduled awakening protocol. They did not publish any data regarding the automatic function.
Scheduled (or automatic) awakenings may not be a magic bullet for everyone suffering from night terrors, but they seem to be quite effective for many people. As always, if you are having trouble solving your sleep problems on your own or want to discuss your options, talk to your doctor or even a sleep therapist .
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