How to Stop a Nightmare

I'm going to share something really personal in this post... I have nightmares.  Well, really night terrors is a better way to describe them.  I will literally wake up screaming, heart racing, jump out of bed, flip the light switch on kind of night terrors.  The weird thing is that in these night terrors I always know where I am (laying in my bed at home, laying in my bed on the cruise ship, laying on by bed at the Maughan's apartment in Ghana)... and the night terrors always involve me laying there (i.e. there is a poisonous snake slithering across from me while I'm laying on my bed, there are giant spiders falling from my bedroom ceiling that will land on me as I'm laying on my bed, or the worst one - there is a strange/scary man standing next to my bed).  Sometimes they are stupid and unrealistic (i.e. the giant spiders) but in my "dream" they are so real.  And SO scary.

I haven't had them my whole life... they started probably around 2005.  They got so bad (happening several times a week) that a couple years ago I went to see a sleep doctor.  He suggested that I might have narcolepsy - and that these were really hallucinations.  Another doctor I've talked to since then suggested that my brain doesn't have enough time to shut down before I fall asleep (I usually fall asleep in less than a minute from laying down, and these night terrors are almost always around 30-40 minutes after I've gone to bed).

Regardless of what might be happening in my brain, this is something that I have just learned how to live with.  I still find them incredibly embarrassing though.  I remember having one in 2009 on my cruise with Jen and Brooke.  Jen will still talk about how scared she was to hear my screaming.  I tell her to imagine how scared I must have been!  I try to warn people that it might happen... When we first got married, Matt was "excited" to see what this might be like, but then admitted that my screaming scared him a little as he would come running from another room to try and comfort me. Note of clarification: he had to come from another room because he is awake at night and sleeps during the day because of his work schedule, not because we sleep in different rooms!

And that has been one nice thing (among many!) about having Matt around (at least when he's not working!) - that he can comfort me and calm me down a little faster than I sometimes can on my own.  He has mentioned that a couple times I am starting to have one but that he's able to calm me down before I actually even wake up (and therefore I don't remember them).  I appreciate his love and his patience... so when my mom forwarded this short video, I could totally relate!