They started happening when Jonah was about two. Shortly before we would go to bed, my peaceful sleeping infant would transmogrify into a zombie of horror movie proportions, combined with drug-dilated pupils, screams of fear and random acts of violence.
When they first started, we really didn’t know what to make of them. Perhaps they were a harbinger of his later Asperger’s diagnosis, a precursor to an over active mind that sometimes troubles him before bed, although he struggles to articulate the form these nightmares take; perhaps they were testament to the poor sleep routine into which he had settled since his birth; perhaps they were a reaction to my increasingly poor mental health, perhaps, a genetic link that sees my husband Tom sleep babble and occasional walk, asleep to the loo.
Whatever they were, Jonah’s night terrors were terrifying, especially given my own, unravelling mental health, and we mentioned them to his school, who immediately sat up and took note. But they weren’t to last: a better routine, which involved waking him gently before he reached this stage of sleep to take him to the loo, helped matters. And the only reminder of them is the occasional pre-bed reference to Jonah’s current nightmares – which may or may not be delaying tactics, and a video clip I once took, of my zombie toddler in full throws of a sleeping fit of epic proportions characterised by anger and fear in equal measure.
As this link states, night terrors are not always apopos of nothing, and have been found to be the precursor of later psychosis, and so should always be taken seriously, and reported to a healthcare provider, even if in the meantime the general advice is to improve your child’s sleep hygiene on the proviso that they will likely grow out of them.
Reading this today jolted me from my apathy since his diagnosis. Short of dealing with minor bouts of bullying at school we’ve done nothing about arranging child psychology intervention that may help improve Jonah’s waking social interactions, and perhaps, may have a positive affect on his developing unconscious too. I am a believer in prevention, rather than cure for mental health problems and I feel, given my own history of depression, that early intervention may well be more beneficial than walking headlong into his teenage years with our eyes wide shut.
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