Spooky October and My Night Terrors

Halloween is Coming Soon...

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Spooky Stories of Real Night Terror

Here in Florida, it's hard to tell that Autumn has arrived because the average temperature is still pushing ninety degrees. I had the chance to experience some true Fall weather on a trip to visit my in-laws who live in another state, and I enjoyed having a break from the heat. (Flights are cheap right now! There are some positives in 2020).

Still, October feels like the right month to talk about things that are a little bit spooky.

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I'd like to share some personal stories about my Night Terrors.

I'm calling them Night Terrors because I honestly don't know what else to call them. The fact is, I'm basically a sleepwalker, and over the years, it's gotten a little bit worse.

I don't write much non-fiction. Typically, I write science fiction, fantasy, and inspirational stories, although I have written two horror stories. See my Books & Stories link on my website if you're interested (scroll down, stories are organized by genre). These are psychological horror stories with no gore.

But the stories I'm about to share almost fit somewhere in between, to me at least because I'm usually half-asleep and in a dream when the Night Terrors take place. I recently had a Night Terror episode that left me bruised.

That is my bruised right hip. I'll explain what happened shortly.

The bruising looked way worse in person. Much darker and more purple. The spot in the center was scraped and a little raw. I'd never had a Night Terror before where I woke up injured. Sure, it was a minor injury, but it was a little painful.

The First Night Terror

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It was dark, but not stormy the night of the first incident. My husband and I had probably been married a year or two at this point. I'd entered a kind of sleep state where I thought I was awake. I could see that I was in bed, and I could see the bedroom.

Someone sat at the foot of our bed. I glanced at my husband, who slept beside me. That ruled him out, so another person had come into our room.

Creepy!

I said to my husband, "There's someone at the foot of the bed."

Here's what he heard: "muywa blah heh kuul waaa." In other words, the perfect clarity with which I spoke in my dream state didn't translate. All my husband heard were words of gibberish.

The figure stood up and entered our bathroom. I told my husband. He couldn't understand me. But soon, I woke up and spoke clearly.

"There's a guy in the bathroom," I said.

My husband leapt out of bed to tackle the intruder. But when he turned on the light, I snapped out of my dream state. By the time he peeked out of the bathroom with one eyebrow raised at me, I knew I'd been dreaming. Oops.

"There's no one here," he assured me. And then he proceeded to clear the entire house. No surprise, we were home alone.

There Was a Moose

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Since that first incident, I've had about 70 or 80 Night Terrors in a ten-year period. Many times, I'll sit up and my husband will grab me before I have a chance to climb out of bed. Several times he has held me to keep me from running off, and I've apparently gotten quite bratty with him, whining that he needs to let me go. But in my mind, I'm speaking normally to him, so we have entertaining discussions the next morning.

I haven't kept track of them all, but I wrote down a few Night Terrors in a journal. Here are some snippets.

• A giant moose head loomed over me. I started climbing over my sleeping husband to get away from it. When he shook me awake, I said, "There was a moose."
• Sprinkler pipes were laid out all over our bed. That didn't scare me, but I talked in my sleep and my husband heard me say: "There are tubes everywhere." I don't remember saying that.
• I started climbing out of bed and my husband grabbed my arm, asking what I was doing. "I need to shower," I said. I have a vague memory of this but I'm not sure what I was dreaming about. He told me it was 3:30 in the morning and I didn't need to shower. When I woke up the next morning, there was a pair of shorts laid out on top of my covers. I realized I had pulled them out of the drawer by my bed and set them there. I guess I thought I needed them after my shower. 
• A noir-like villain (he looked like a comic cartoon) stood over me with a gun in his hand. It scared me and I jumped onto my husband.
• In a dream state, I got up out of bed and went to the door. I don't recall what I was dreaming about, but I was trying to get out of the room. My husband, who wasn't in bed yet, heard me messing with the door handle from the living room. He wasn't sure what was going on, and I finally got the door open. Then I immediately shut it. All of this is a vague memory to me, and I just climbed back into bed. I believe that was the farthest I had traveled out of bed at the time.
• After bingeing on too much of The Walking Dead TV show, a group of zombies came charging into our bedroom. I jumped up and ran into the hallway. When I saw my cat, Ringo, sitting in the hallway, I woke up. This was the first time I had ever left the bedroom (as far as we know).

The Night Terror That Bruised Me

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My most recent Night Terror was just a couple of months ago. I dreamed that I was crawling through a dark forest with a lot of big trees and roots. It wasn't scary, surprisingly. In my dream, I had to get from a higher point in the forest to a lower point. Because I was crawling, the logical thing to do (in my non-logical dream state) was to push off from my knees and thrust my arms forward in a dive to get to the lower level.

And that's what I did. I literally dove off the bed.

In the dream, I landed on the soft dirt of this dark forest floor. Soon, a bright light interrupted the dream, and I had a vision of my husband flashing a light on me from above as he peered over the edge of the bed. But even then I didn't fully wake up. While asleep, I crawled back into bed.

Suddenly, I felt a throbbing pain in my right hip. That's what woke me up.

I asked my husband this important question: "Was I just on the floor?"

"Yes," he answered.

My throbbing hip kept me awake for about thirty minutes. In the morning, I checked and sure enough, the bruising had started. I realized that my laundry basket to the right of my bed had an edge that my hip must've landed on when I dove out of bed and onto the floor. My husband explained that I had been crawling on top of him (just like I was crawling in the dream). So, I'd been on hands and knees in the bed, poised to dive. It all added up, and I had finally injured myself because of a Night Terror.

Spiritually Speaking

I scare easily. When we used to go to Howl-O-Scream at Busch Gardens, anything that jumped out at us caused me to scream. Usually, I was the only one with the knee-jerk reactions while everyone else just thought it was funny. Generally, I try not to watch too much scary stuff, but I also enjoy a certain level of horror. Especially human stories and human reactions to scary situations, but more psychological. I don't like gore (I have to close my eyes a lot in The Walking Dead).

Because I'm a follower of Jesus Christ, my head knows I have nothing to fear. But I obviously struggle with fear, at least in my dreams. In Scripture, we are told not to fear (in some form) hundreds of times. I must not be the only one who struggles.

What About You?

I'm going to ask my doctor about my Night Terrors at my next yearly visit. I understand that sleepwalking is fairly common. The whole waking dream thing, I'm not so sure. And maybe I should do a sleep study? Except I don't have Night Terrors every night, so I'm not sure that would help.

What about you? Do you sleepwalk? Have you ever had an experience like what I'm describing? Do share!