I’m not in danger; I’m standing halfway down the stairs in the middle of the night, the cats circling my feet, confused and yet hopeful that it might already be food time, my son sleepily calling from his room, “You okay?” I’m shaking, my breath ragged with adrenaline, my mind still half-convinced the terror was real, that it really might be real, while another part of me knows it couldn’t be. “Sorry,” I say. “Nightmare.” I take a few more breaths and return to my bedroom. The lights are on somehow, I must have slapped the wall switch in my panicked run out of the room, and I sink down onto the bed, still shaky, still confused, and finally see the note I left for myself next to my bed before I fell asleep, a message in all caps, written in ballpoint pen thickened to readable status by retracing many times the outline of the letters: “IT’S. NOT. REAL.”
I see it, I read it, I recognize it as a letter from my waking self to my panicked dreaming self; and yet it seems possible that it’s wrong. Perhaps this is still part of the nightmare. I sit holding the note, reading those three words, trying to convince myself that they’re true, that it was a dream, that none of it was real, until finally it feels believable enough to turn off the lights and lie down again. My pulse races, even while I lie still and try to calm my breathing, but eventually I’m able to fall asleep.
Leaving myself a note was one of the many things I tried in my attempts to thwart the night terrors. I wrote one that said: “Remember, this is only a dream.” I wrote another that said: “You’re dreaming.” And of course there was the frantic but direct “IT’S. NOT. REAL.” I placed these in various spots near my bed before going to sleep, in the hope that reading them in the midst of a nightmare would help me cut through the panic and bewilderment; but usually I would discover them only after fully waking, the screaming and running and occasionally ankle-twisting midnight anxiety attack already over.
I tried reciting calming affirmations before going to sleep for the night, lying still and doing the kind of breathing I’d learned years before in ashtanga yoga class, each inhalation and exhalation an audible, strong force in my throat. Everything is fine, I’d tell myself. You’ll go to sleep and sleep all night, you’ll wake up in the morning after a peaceful rest. I tried listening to soothing binaural soundtracks, supposedly calibrated to send your brain into relaxed states through sounds that triggered delta waves, gamma waves, electrical currents designed to induce tranquility. Still, despite my preparations, I would find myself again fending off the inevitable attack, waking up my children, startling the cats, scaring myself as I’d wake up in the process of running out of my room, down the stairs, trying to escape.
These nighttime episodes are terrifying as they happen, but in retrospect almost embarrassingly obvious. There’s no clever symbolism to my nightmares, no mystery to solve or truth to decode, just the panic and terror of having forgotten something crucial. It’s the panic of things left undone, the terror that my own forgetful, foggy brain has doomed us. The creeping worry that I have damaged my children beyond repair with my divorcing their father, with my malfunctioning brain, with my inability to do the things I have always done for them.
“Have you experienced this sort of thing before?” my neurologist asked when I’d finally told her about the night terrors, seven months into my CSF leak, before getting patched up at Duke. “Not like this,” I’d said. It’s true that years before, when I’d been on a punishing deadline with a difficult co-worker, I’d had stressful dreams, nightmares about the walls literally closing in—but this is how all my dreams are, even the non-scary ones: overly obvious, no interpretive skills necessary, no insight required. “Huh,” she’d said. “Maybe it could be stress? Are you stressed about something?” For a moment, I’d thought she was joking. “I mean . . .” I’d begun, gesturing at myself, sitting in a neurologist’s office in a headache center at a brain hospital, slumped down in a chair not made for slumping, in an attempt to be as flat as I could possibly be to mitigate the effects of my own brain fluid leaking out of my head. Yes???
Emi had night terrors when she was three, a moment in time after Nate was born, but before she was able to connect the dots between that event and the stress she felt because of it. Night terrors are common in children, according to the parenting books I read at the time, especially in toddlers. The advice for parents is to stay calm and not try to wake them; to put yourself between them and anything dangerous, but to not attempt to restrain them or hold them, as this may agitate them more. It was unsettling and distressing to have to merely watch her suffer through these episodes, trying to soothe her and reassure her without physically interfering, unable to snap her out of her panic and back to reality. Often, even though her eyes would be open, she would in fact be asleep the whole time. She never had any memory of these nightmares upon waking.
I did, though; her cries haunted me. Every time she had one of these night terrors, it was the same anguish: She was calling out for her mommy, panicked that she couldn’t find her mommy, that she had lost her mommy. And yet when I would go to her, telling her “Shh, shh, it’s Mommy, I’m here, I’m right here, you didn’t lose me, I’m right here with you,” that would make it worse. Her eyes—wide open, but unseeing—would flash with panic and she would scream, “You’re not my mommy, I need my real mommy.”
