I had a rather odd experience about a week ago, and I honestly don’t know what might have been causing it. From what I’ve researched on medical websites, it sounds closest to night terrors, but night terrors usually only affect young children and they happen repeatedly. This is an isolated incident, so I don’t know what to make of it.
At about 4 am, when everyone in my apartment was asleep, I began panicking. According to my SO and my roommate, who both were sleeping in the same room as me, I started hyperventilating and screaming. I, however, don’t remember this at all; the first thing I remember was when my SO was saying, “meli, meli, it’s alright, it’s alright!” and my first thought was “Oh my God, my arm is gone!” My arm had gone completely numb, as it often does if I sleep on it wrong; usually if I wake up and notice it, I just poke it, adjust it and go back to sleep. No screaming involved.
This is the first time I’ve ever screamed while asleep like this; I never had night terrors while in my childhood, and my roommate (with whom I share a room) would have told me if she’d heard anything else. I have absolutely no memory of a dream connected to this, nor do I even remember screaming at all. However, I have woken up very startled and gasping a bit once before, and I had the same reaction at that time: “I can’t feel my arm!”
Does anyone know if this might be an example of night terrors, or some other medical condition? Could it be just an effect of stress (it was during finals week, so I was under quite a bit of it) or some psychological cause? Was my body simply aware that I was cutting off circulation and sending some sort of “distress signal” to stop?
If anyone could clarify this issue or direct me to a good source, I would much appreciate it.
I found this site a while ago looking into my own sleep problems (sleep apnea). I can’t really tell ya how good it is but, they do have they’re own message board!
From the bottom of my heart, I thank you for those links. For several years now my youngest daughter has been waking up, yeah, about an hour after she goes to sleep, screaming with terror, but she can never remember why. And we go in there and ask hesitantly, “Um, are you okay?”
And we thought it was the All Buffy All The Time DVD regimen she’s been undergoing for a long time now. But apparently it’s not vampire movies, it’s just something called night terrors.
I feel so much better now. My daughter isn’t having mental problems, she isn’t overstressed with school/work/looming-college stuff after all. She’s just dreaming.
When I was 18, I awoke one morning to find my right arm had turned purple. And it was completely limp. I jumped out of bed, and grabbed it with my left hand trying to get some feeling. There was none. However, within seconds, the color started returning, then the “needles,” then it was back to normal. Apparently I had just slept on it the wrong way. In the many years since then, it’s happened numerous times, and I think there’s some weird physiological thing that does tell you to wake up, because something’s wrong. Any time it’s happened since, I knew exactly what was happening as soon as I woke up. I just shifted around and went back to sleep. But I don’t know if any of that qualifies as a night terror.
I do crazy things in my sleep. Last week there was one night where THREE TIMES I leapt up and frantically started taking the tops of the bedposts off because, according to my boyfriend, “The liquor will fall out! Help me, goddamn it, they’re coming!” And he asks what the hell is going on, and I tell him to shut up and go to sleep (I think I start to wake up and don’t know what’s going on, so I get defensive.) I don’t remember a thing when I wake up, usually.
He thinks I have an alternate personality who he calls Rabbit. He thinks she’s a child soldier from the future, possibly from South America. And he calls me crazy.
Mr. Athena does stuff like this when he’s stressed. When we first started dating, he was going through a bad divorce and his father had very unexpectedly died, and he used to jump out of a deep sleep and start bracing the bed so it didn’t fall off a cliff/slip into the sea/whatever with startling regularity.
He never quite remembers just what is causing the problem, but it almost always involves him having to save us by keeping the bed where it is. He does remember that it’s not really the bed in his dreams - it’s a car that’s going to slip off a cliff, or a building he needs to hold up, or something along those lines.
It used to really freak me out. It doesn’t happen much at all anymore, but when it does I just wake up, see him pushing the bed around, and yell at him to get his ass back in bed and quit with the drama.
I suspect that you had a positional compression neuropathy resulting from the way you were holding the arm while asleep. This is common, as you know. As your mind became aware of the loss of sensation (but before you were awake enough to fully process that the etiology was benign) you had a panic attack. This might be similar to a dream in which you think you are drowning and wake up in a panic only to find the precipitant of that part of the dream was a leaky ceiling soaking your pillow.
This is not a night terror. It’s a nightmare with a trigger based on an external event.
Not a night terror. Could be a combination of the physical sensation, plus hypnopompic (dreamlike just-waking-up) thinking. Also, some people experience panic in their sleep sometimes. This might be related to dream content, or to waking enough to realize you have normal sleep paralysis, or to a surge of adrenalin for whatever reason.
Although I don’t have night terrors, I do have frequent hypnagogic hallucinations (they occur during the period between wakefulness and sleep just before you fall asleep). One of the most common ones is that just as I’m falling asleep, I will suddenly panic and feel that there’s something wrong with a part of my body. Most often it’s my arm, but occasionally it will be my leg or even part of my face. I’ll wake up screaming, unable to feel my arm, etc. and certain that something horrible has happened to me, but then realize that I’m O.K. Because these hallucinations happen within 15 minutes of me getting into bed, I know that they’re not caused by any actual loss of circulation, they’re just some kind of short circuit in my brain. They used to completely freak me out, but now it only takes me a second or two to think, “Oh yeah, hypnagogic hallucination” and fall back to sleep. Amusingly, one of the things I tend to scream out is “Mommy!” although I’ve been an adult for a long time and my mother lives thousands of miles away.
I also have the more fun kind of hypnagogic hallucinations where I see things that aren’t there. Sometimes I see ghosts (little girls dressed in white with an ethereal glow around them), and most recently I saw a vase of beautiful fresh flowers floating beside my bed.
No shit!, I used to get that when I was little. For some reason, I want to say they were the American Gothic people. But not only was it on the second floor, it was also through the shades. Never figured out how they pulled that off.
I have panic attacks sometimes, and what you describe sounds like one to me. I have had them while sleeping, due to stress or a nightmare or maybe nothing at all(I dunno, I was asleep). If it happens again, I’d say make an appointment with your doctor.
AFAIK, a true Night Terror is when you think you are awake (but are actually dreaming) and you feel like you can’t move. Smetimes there is a threat looming nearby, which is why you need to get up and out of bed but can’t.
It seems I get a vague, unreasoning sense of dread and hopelessness whenever I fall asleep late now. It passes in about fifteen to twenty minutes but I can’t really explain it.
Also, I’ve gotten those stupid cramps in bed where your leg seizes up and you have to hobble around in the morning. But that’s different.
Hmm. Here’s what wiki sez:
*A night terror, also known as pavor nocturnus, is a parasomnia sleep disorder characterized by extreme terror and a temporary inability to regain full consciousness. The subject wakes abruptly from slow-wave sleep, with waking usually accompanied by gasping, moaning, or screaming. It is often impossible to fully awaken the person, and after the episode the subject normally settles back to sleep without waking. A night terror can occasionally be recalled by the subject. They typically occur during non-rapid eye movement sleep.
…
Sleep paralysisis a condition characterized by temporary paralysis of the body shortly after waking up (known as hypnopompic paralysis) or, less often, shortly before falling asleep (known as hypnagogic paralysis).[1]
Physiologically, it is closely related to the paralysis that occurs as a natural part of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, which is known as REM atonia. Sleep paralysis occurs when the brain awakes from a REM state, but the bodily paralysis persists. This leaves the person fully aware, but unable to move. In addition, the state may be accompanied by hypnagogic hallucinations.
More often than not, sleep paralysis is believed by the person affected by it to be no more than a dream.[citation needed] This explains many dream recountings which describe the person lying frozen and unable to move. The hallucinatory element to sleep paralysis makes it even more likely that someone will interpret the experience as a dream, since completely fanciful, or dream-like, objects may appear in the room alongside one’s normal vision. Some scientists have proposed this condition as a theory for alien abductions and ghostly encounters.[citation needed].
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