Journal of Night Terrors
I have many times over the years had night terrors (
https://goo.gl/98LD5) - or at least something resembling night terrors a lot. I'm not worried about these episodes, but rather find them quite interesting, primarily due to one aspect being significantly different from most people's night terrors: I can remember them afterwards (or perhaps just some of them) - with my feelings, hallucinations, and actions during them. Other than the fact that I can remember the episodes, all other signs fit with the general description of night terrors: I wake up less than 2 hours after I've gone to bed - feeling angst, frightened, hallucinating, sweating, confused, and with my heart beating fast. The feelings of fear and angst go away little by little while the hallucinations are quite vivid for several minutes until I either directly confront them or they fade away by themselves.
While I considerably quickly am able to calm myself down, I still sometimes believe the hallucinations are real for a little while after I'm calmed down. The whole thing is over in 3-12 minutes and I am then able to go right back to sleep, but sometimes I stay up to think about what just happened.
I'm planning on writing down and posting everything I can remember about my night terrors as I experience them in the future, but there's no saying when or if I will experience them again. For now I'll go through the night terrors I most vividly can remember in these sections.
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@Halfdan@mastodon.online(December, 2011 or January, 2012)
I woke up with a feeling of fear and panic, with my heart beating very fast. I realized that there was a bomb on my nightstand which made me quickly jump out of my bed and run towards the door. For some reason, instead of going out the door, I turned around and stood for little while, frozen with fear, staring at the bomb. I, little by little, began gathering myself and after a minute or two I for some reason decided to take a closer look at the bomb with its red blinking light. As I slowly made my way towards the bomb, step by step, the red blinking light stopped blinking and it began to dawn upon me that my trimmer was lying on my nightstand charging with its red LED light shining (not blinking). When I reached the nightstand I unplugged the trimmer and began wondering why I at all could have thought it was a bomb. After a minute or two of calming down I plugged the trimmer back into its charger and went back to sleep.
(February, 2012)
I woke with a strong feeling that something was in my room; something which scared me. I sat up and began to vaguely be able to see a small dark-brown creature with six legs making its way towards my bed. I began getting even more scared and as the creature began walking towards me on top of my comforter, I could see that it to some degree resembled a facehugger (from the Alien movies) but still with clear differences, like it being dark-brown and having some sort of scattered thick hairs. All of a sudden my fear turned into panic and rage. I lifted up my comforter as a net a threw it along with creature across my room. I then jumped out of my bed and ran towards the comforter lying on the floor with a bump of where the creature was underneath it. I turned on the lights in my room and stood on top of my comforter with the creature trapped underneath. All of sudden the bump in the comforter disappeared. I very carefully lifted the comforter to make sure the creature really was gone, which it was. The episode was over and I realized that I was standing in the middle of my room, with the lights on, on top of my comforter lying on the floor. I shook what just had happened off me and went back to bed, quickly falling back to sleep.
(Early March, 2012)
I woke up scared, feeling a presence in my room. I sat up and as looked around my room I noticed a handful of scary, blurry, shadowy figures; some big as a person, standing on the floor in front of my bed, others small and crawling around on my walls and ceiling. As I sat in fear looking at them, I had the feeling that they were looking back at me. Because the shadowy creatures appeared black and blurry to me, I began trying to focus on them. One by one they began to disappear right in front of my eyes. The biggest shadowy creature at the end of my bed was the first to disappear. Most of the others followed while I was still sitting in my bed. With only a few left, the ones in the ceiling corners furthest from my bed, I got up and began going towards them. As I got closer to them in an attempt to see them in more detail (or perhaps scare them away), despite my fear of them, they suddenly disappeared like the rest. I found myself standing in the middle of my room, wondering how the room could have felt so much darker a few seconds ago, and why I had been so convinced that there were creatures crawling around on my walls. I went back to bed, still puzzled by what had just happened, and quickly fell back to sleep.
(March 11th, 2012, around 23:07)
I woke up with an angsty feeling that I either had to do something or remember something; what exactly, I can't remember now. I saw a blurry message glowing in the dark on my wall right besides my bed. The message at the same time scared me and made me feel that I didn't need to worry about the thing I had to do or remember despite me being unable to read the message. I looked closer at the message but still couldn't read it. I then tried using the light from my phone's display to read it, however it was still too blurry. Then I remembered that my phone has a flashlight, which I then turned on. Within a few seconds the message was completely gone and I was fully awake. No sign of the message at all and I began wondered how I could have believed it were there in the first place. I took a drink of water and then went right back to sleep.
(July 31st, 2014, around 23:30)
I woke up a bit annoyed, as I thought it was someone outside my window who had been noisy as usual and woken me up. I kept lying still for a little bit, listening without hearing any noises from outside my window. I turned over, trying to fall asleep again - and in that moment I noticed the shadowy figure standing at the end of my bed. After staring at the figure for a for little bit, (seconds or minutes, I'm not quite sure), I sat up a bit, keeping staring at the figure - it was still there. I was very aware of what was going on, but I kept staring at the shadowy figure nonetheless. It looked like a skinny person, a bit taller than me, standing at the end of my bed and staring at me. I moved a bit from side to side in my bed, looking at the shadowy figure from different angles, but it still didn't move or disappear. After what felt like minutes had gone by, I finally decided I had had enough, so I yelled out "GO AWAY!" at the shadowy figure; well, that didn't help. I finally put my feet on the floor and walked to the end of my bed, where the shadowy figure suddenly were no more. I looked out my window to see if I could see anything out there, and then went back to bed - falling asleep after a little while.
(March 31st, 2015, around 23:30)
I woke up suddenly and in a panic. I knew the ceiling was once again falling (like if it was something that had happened before). I had to take cover. I grabbed the comforter and threw myself onto the floor from my bed. There were no time to get to safety, so I simply curled up on the floor with the comforter covering me. I braced for impact of the falling ceiling. Nothing happened.
After lying on the floor for a little while, I decide to make a run for it instead - so I got up and ran to my kitchen with my heart pounding. As I looked back, I saw the comforter on the floor and a perfectly still and stable ceiling.
Apparently it was a false alarm and the ceiling was, in fact, not falling. I went back to bed - but not before turning off the priority-only notifications on my phone, in case I would get an alert later about the ceiling. I quickly fell back to sleep.
About 1-2 hours later, I got woken by a work email (since I had turned priority-only notifications off) and I realized what had happened earlier in the night. I turned priority-only notifications back on and fell asleep again.