Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Symptoms
By Mayo Clinic staffNight terrors differ from nightmares. Whereas the dreamer of a nightmare wakes up from the dream and remembers details, people with night terrors remain asleep. Children usually don't remember anything about their night terrors in the morning. Adults may recall a dream fragment they had during the night terrors.
Like sleepwalking and nightmares, night terrors are a parasomnia — an undesired occurrence during sleep. Night terrors usually occur during the first third of the sleep period for children. For adults, night terrors can happen anytime during the night.
During a night terror episode, a person might:
- Sit up in bed
- Scream or shout
- Kick and thrash
- Sweat, breathe heavily and have a racing pulse
- Be hard to awaken
- Get out of bed and run around the house (more common in adults)
- Engage in violent behavior (more common in adults)
- Stare wide-eyed
When to see a doctor
Occasional night terrors aren't usually a cause for concern. If your child has night terrors, you can simply mention them at a routine well-child exam.
Consult your doctor if your or your child's night terrors:
- Become more frequent
- Routinely disrupt sleep
- Cause you or your child to fear going to sleep
- Lead to dangerous behavior or injury
- Appear to follow the same pattern each time
- Parasomnias. The Merck Manuals: The Merck Manual for Healthcare Professionals. http://www.merck.com/mmpe/print/sec16/ch215/ch215f.html. Accessed June 3, 2009.
- Nguyen BH, et al. Sleep terrors in children: A prospective study of twins. Pediatrics. 2008;122:e1164.
- Sleep terrors. American Academy of Sleep Medicine. http://www.sleepeducation.com/Disorder.aspx?id=13. Accessed June 8, 2009.
- National sleep disorders research plan. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/prof/sleep/res_plan/section5/section5a.html. Accessed May 27, 2009.
- Stores G. Dramatic parasomnias. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 2001;94:173.
- Sleepiness diary. National Sleep Foundation. Accessed June 8, 2009.
