I occasionally suffer a real ding-buster of a nightmare – you know what I’m talking about, the sort of dream one wakes from rigid with horror or fright and then is wary of falling asleep again for hours afterward. I also have it on good authority – namely most of the people I’ve ever shared sleeping quarters with for any length of time --that I sometimes start to thrash around and moan most unhappily while fast asleep, and on rare occasions will start to yell or scream; more than one a well-meaning companion has roused me trying to ease whatever terror or torment I seem to be reacting to.
Here’s the thing though – the two phenomena have nothing to do with each other. My scariest or most painful dreams don’t appear to effect my slumbering stillness; whenever I’ve been woke up from a screamer or had someone comment on my drowsing dramatics, I’ve not been dreaming at all, at least as far as i can recall anyway.
From reading about dreams, and talking to other active sleepers, I get the idea that this is the usual scenario; people tend not to remember the things that cause them to act out in their sleep. Why would this be the case, especially for those of us with fairly good dream recall otherwise? Any ideas, wild guesses or shots in the dark?
The things that make you moan and thrash are usually called “night terrors,” which occur during non-REM sleep. So they aren’t actually dreams; when you wake up from non-REM sleep, you don’t remember anything because you weren’t dreaming.
At least, that’s what I recall from reading a book about sleep a while ago. The Wikipedia article on night terrors is quite interesting.
From time to time I experience something night-terror-like in which I wake up suddenly, sit up, and gasp for air. The only time this has caused a problem is when I was sleeping on a lower bunk without much clearance :eek: Usually I’m awake just long enough to remember that it happened, and then I fall asleep again fairly easily.
I almost never remember dreaming before this happens, certainly nothing frightening nor involving any sort of drowning or suffocation or anything that would explain why I do this. The one time I clearly remember dreaming just before I woke up, the dream was pleasant, though a little bizarre. My husband tells me I look like I’ve seen a ghost, but it doesn’t bother me.
For some reason these episodes seem to come in clusters when they happen every few nights, and then suddenly disappear for months or years at a time. Just another way I’m one odd flodnak, I guess.
I’ve woken up from those dreams before and remembered the dream. On a couple occasions I even wrote down the dream in detail, I’m going to turn them in to short stories (eventually).