SelfhelpMagazine

by Richard Wilkerson, Dream Educator

To give you a more detailed and definitive response, I would have to know more about when the dreams occurred, and when you jumped out of bed. From the information you have given , I would tend to to believe that this was a nightmare, and not night terrors.

Night terrors & nightmares are quite different. Nightmares tend to occur after several hours of sleep. Usually the dream is complex and intense.

What's really important is that the dreamer realizes upon wakening, or soon after, that they had an intense dream. While it may get you right up out of bed, there is rarely any thrashing around or bodily movement besides whimpers or groans.

Night terrors, on the other hand, occur during the first hour or two of sleep, loud screaming and thrashing about are common, the sleeper is hard to awaken and usually remembers no more than an overwhelming feeling or a single scene, if anything.

Nightmares and night terrors arise from different physiological stages of sleep. Children who have night terrors also may have a tendency to sleepwalk and/or urinate in bed.

The causes of night terrors are not well understood. Children usually stop having them by puberty. They may be associated with stress in adults. A consultation with a physician may be useful if the night terrors are frequent or especially disturbing.

About the Author:

Richard Wilkerson is general editor for The Internet Dream E-zine, Electric Dreams, and director of DreamGate, the Internet Communications and Dream Education Center. He writes the Cyberphile column for the Association for the Study of Dreams Newsletter.