NO BAD IDEAS 02
OF BAD DREAMS AND SLEEP DEPRIVATION
Welcome back to a somber and slightly depressing NO BAD IDEAS!
This month has been a rough one. My five year old son has spent the better part of November dealing with respiratory illnesses, much like nearly every other kindergartener recently. What may set him apart from other kids is what has manifested in this strange and already sleepless time.
Early in the month of November my son developed a pretty nasty cough. My wife and I went into this with confidence. Our son is five so this definitely wasn’t our first rodeo. This bravado was thoroughly destroyed the first proper night of his illness.
After my son goes to bed my wife and I like to catch up on TV or watch a movie. It’s our only time to do “adult” things and we capitalize whenever we have the energy. That night we were jolted from dozingly imbibing one of our shows by a shrill cry coming from our son’s upstairs bedroom. It did not take us long to fly up the stairs to see what exactly was going on.
We found our son sitting bolt upright in his bed coughing and screaming because something was coming after him. His eyes were wide open but they were completely vacant. We tried to comfort him and see what was going on but he didn’t recognize us and everything we tried to do only proved to add to his fear.
This was the first time my son experienced what is knows as a NIGHT TERROR and it is one the single most frightening things I have ever experienced.
A night terror is what happens when someone is stirred from a very deep REM cycle. It is a state between awake and dreaming, where a person can seem fully cognizant but are still very much living in a more phantasmagoric mindset. Night terrors are a cousin to both sleep walking and sleep paralysis.
My son has always been a vivid dreamer and his respiratory issues were striking out at that already active part of his sleep cycle. He was living in a nightmare realm where he saw us as nothing more than another part of his bad dream, one that was reaching out and touching him in an unknown and visceral way.
This happened nearly every night for over a week.
Our son would wake up screaming and there was nearly nothing we could do about it. Some nights it stayed mild and we were able to calm it down with something as simple as slowly counting to one hundred to him in a soothing voice. Other nights it got so bad that he lost control of his bladder out of abject fear or screamed until he threw up.
It was desperate times for my wife and I. We were completely demoralized and felt like the worst parents in the world.
How could we not help him?
How could we not figure out how to get him out of these states he was getting into?
I spun out and did what I always do when I find myself faced with a situation I can’t control: a metric shit-ton of research.
I found out that night terrors were far more common than I had originally thought. I also found out that we were managing it about as well as anyone can. You can’t do anything but try to sooth someone suffering from a night terror. You can’t wake them up and you certainly can’t move them. You can just try your best to get the person back into the realm of actual SLEEP.
If you want to go down the worst possible rabbit hole just search NIGHT TERROR CHILDREN on YouTube. I’ll save you the time and let you know that it is terrifying and depressing. You’ll find a lot of kids suffering and a lot of parents in states of complete and total panic.
Luckily, my son has moved on from these as he got better from his sickness. We’ve had a solid two weeks since the last one but my wife and I still have trouble sleeping. We find ourselves sleeping with one eye open, wondering when next we will hear that scream in the darkness.
What I wonder about now is how many children had to truly suffer because of these things. How many children were thought to be troubled or possessed because of these things? How many were tortured by priests in the performance of exorcisms or suffered through unnecessary psychiatric treatments over what could be described as the dark side of sleepwalking?
There wasn’t a number that I could find in all of my research, just vague descriptions of the possibilities. My son is fortunate that my wife and I are skeptics and that I have an obsession with looking at as many angles as I can find. Other kids aren’t so lucky.
Now onto something far lighter: this month’s FLIGHT INTERPRETATIONS. I was able to keep up with my weekly schedule for the entire month and it still kind of surprises me with all that was going on. Next month might get a bit spottier because my bank of finished comics was depleted pretty bad because I was nursing a nasty sinus infection while my son was suffering through his nasty situation.
These can be found every Wednesday at We The Hallowed.
That’s it for this installment of NO BAD IDEAS. Hopefully the next one will have a much happier tone to it.
Take care of each other and I hope to see you back again next month!
-EJM