Parents who have children that suffer from night terrors are living every parent’s nightmare. You have a child in obvious distress, with no way to reach them, and no ability to calm them. Which of course goes against the parental imperative: to help your child in any way possible.
So what makes a night terror different from a nightmare? Well, with a nightmare, you wake up. You are shaken, you might be crying, you may need to walk around or seek comfort to remind yourself that you are ok and safe, that it was just a dream. In a night terror, the person experiencing it seems to be awake. They are moving around, either talking or shouting and are always very distressed. There is no way to wake them from the state they are in or to engage them in any meaningful way, and for those around (parents, children or partners because yes, adults have night terrors too) it is very traumatizing.
What I have found is that night terrors are an expression of our remembrance of our past lives. We come into this life with a wealth of experiences and knowledge from lives we’ve lived before, and historically speaking, life is violent. In past lives, many of us have experienced wars, torture, famine, plagues, drowning and on and on the list goes. When we sleep, we go to wild and varied places, and sometimes, we stumble into our memories of life before this one.
I treated a man who had been an unremarkable sleeper his whole life. And then, when his daughter was born, he was suddenly leaping out of bed – sometimes 4 nights a week – kicking down doors and yelling incoherently. As you can well imagine, his partner was deeply unsettled by this. In another case, a 2.5 year-old-boy would get out of bed in the middle of the night, looking for his sword and crying because “they are coming” and without his sword, he couldn’t protect anyone.
So what do you do, as the awake person in these circumstances? The dreamer is not capable of talking about anything that’s not happening in their dream, and perhaps more unsettling is that they will not remember this event in the morning.
Energy medicine helps – Reiki, BEAM, any form of energetic healing – because it soothes the remembered trauma from the psyche. Of course, this isn’t always practical. I tell my clients that when the terror is happening, the best thing to do is to say this, until the episode ends: “That is not this life.” “You are here now, and we are safe.”
This technique has also worked with an infant. The child was 6 months old, and every time the washing machine went into it’s spin cycle, the baby would become terrified screaming and crying in such a desperate manner that the parents were overcome with fear and emotion themselves. With my encouragement they told the child over and over, “That is not this life, you are here now, and we are safe,” and in moments of the eruption, the baby settled. After a few instances of this, the terror was released.
Night terrors do eventually go away. In many cases, it takes years for the conditioning of this planet to take affect, but eventually we forget what we were, and live solely in this life. If you would like to speed up this process, try the technique discussed here. Or call me! It is my life’s work to serve your health and vitality.
May you be blessed,
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