by XEC

Created on: February 28, 2009

Night terrors have been a problem in humans throughout our entire existence. Romans had called this disorder Pavor Nocturnus, roughly meaning "horror of the night." Many researches and scientists believe that night terrors occur because of certain imbalances in chemical levels of the brain and endocrine system. Another problem doctor fear may cause night terrors is an increase in brain activity, and most scientists and researchers agree that while this increase in brain activity is occurring, the brain "misfires", or sends the wrong chemicals to the wrong system, causing a chain reaction of sorts. This chain reaction will eventually lead to the person waking up, out of breath, and sweating.

Researches agree that the symptoms of night terrors are the following: sudden awakening from sleep, persistent fear or terror that occurs at night, screaming, sweating, confusion, rapid heart rate, and inability to explain what happened, usually no recall of "bad dreams" or nightmares, may have a vague sense of frightening images. Many people see spiders, snakes, animals or people in the room, are unable to fully awake, difficult to comfort, with no memory of the event on awakening the next day, there are more but these are more mainstream.

Many people who experience night terrors are misdiagnosed as only having a bad dream. From the personal opinion of sufferers, however, anyone distressing from a night terror says there is no way either of these can be compared. Nightmares usually occur during REM sleep, and they are "bad dreams" that leave the person with almost full recount of the actions of their dream and the person may sweat or even speak in their sleep. Night terrors occur during stage four sleep about an hour after the person falls asleep, and usually leave the person with no memory of the dream that woke them up. Most people wake up and have no idea where they are,

and cannot remember anything except having a profound sense of fear. The subject is not fully asleep during a night terror, compared to a deep REM sleep the subject may experience a nightmare in.

Children are the most prone to this problem, almost six percent of all children suffer from this nighttime disorder. Oddly enough, there is no correlation to amount of night terrors and gender or age. Children from as young as three to as old as thirteen have reported suffering from night terrors. Researchers believe that the perception of night terrors can be passed genetically between parents and offspring.

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