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Article:
A New Look at Night Terrors
I've written about "night terrors" before (see my archived blog on the Psychology Today website: http://tinyurl.com/yzbytcq) and recently, in response to a student's query, I've taken a fresh look at the question. 
What Are Night Terrors?
In my experience, night terrors are understudied, and often ignored and mis-
understood by the mental health establishment. I am not aware of any studies, other than various reports of doctors searching for behavior altering medication (none of which appear to work very well), and for that reason I have been forced to deal with the individual instances of night terror behavior that have been brought to me (usually by distraught and increasingly frustrated parents) on a case-by-case basis.
From my experience I have become convinced that night terrors should be categorized as a special case of "parasomnia." All parasomnias, such as sleep-talking, sleep-walking, bed-wetting, etc., involved some kind of "involuntary theater." During an episode of parasomnia we physically act out our dreams while still remaining fully asleep.
It seems to me that these "unconscious theatrical performances" are acted out primarily to attract the conscious attention of the people who are awake to observe them. "Regular dreams" are a private affair, and address the dreamer alone. When dreams are remembered, it is a very reliable indicator that the meanings and implications of the dreams address the dreamer's waking mind and his/her ability to respond more creatively and productively to his/her waking life challenges and opportunities.
Why Do We Have Night Terrors?
When the dreamer acts out his/her dreams without awakening or remembering any dreams, it is in my experience a very reliable indication that the symbolic content of the dreams address issues and problems in the dreamer's waking life that he/she feels unable to frame in words, let alone alter or influence through any conscious choices or actions.
In all parasomnias, the dreamer is most often deeply asleep, very difficult to awaken, and seldom remembers anything even when/i they are finally brought to consciousness. Thie "high threshold of conscious arousal" is one of the primary attributes of al parasomnias, and also marks the primary difference between night terrors and really bad nightmares, which still tend to be remembered - often quite vividly - upon awakening. I believe that this primary characteristic marks night terrors as a special case of sleep-walking.
In my experience the one attribute that appears to be shared by all the parasomniacs I have known and worked with is a paralyzing, somewhat conscious self-definition as being relatively powerless in waking life.
This, I believe, is the primary reason why all the parasomnias, including night terrors, are far more frequent in children than adults; children really are comparatively powerless, particularly in their early years. The fact that most children grow out of their parasomnia behaviors is, I believe, a result of actually acquiring more self-esteem and self-determination naturally as they grow older. Even in those relatively rare situations where any of the parasomnias, including night terrors, persist into adolescent and adult life, my experience suggests that these more mature dreamers still tend to feel relatively powerless, ignored, and helpless, or at least frustratingly "ineffective" in particular situations in waking life.
Easing Night Terrors
It is also my experience that the night terror behavior in children can be eased, or even eliminated in many cases, by the child's parents having a sincere conversation (not including the child) focused on their own evolving religious/spiritual/philosophical suspicions, tentative beliefs, and firm convictions....
Whenever I am asked to consult regarding night terrors, I always suggest such a conversation because, in my experience the single most frequent factor in the family circumstances of the child with night terrors is that his/her grandparents were (and sometimes continue to be) deeply opposed to the parents' relationship on the basis of the grandparents' deeply held religious, political, and racial beliefs and prejudices - the kind of opposition that leads to statements on the part of the grandparents like "no child of mine is going to marry a Moslem (Jew, Atheist, Christian, Catholic, Mormon, Communist, Capitalist, Gun Ehthusiast, Democrat, Republican, etc.).
The fact that such candid conversations between the parents about their current beliefs so often accompany, and even appear to be the occasion for a disappearance of the attacks of night terrors in the child leads me to think that night terrors are themselves a symbolic expression of the child's unconscious awareness of the unspoken, existential tension in the air of the family. This embedded opposition in the attitudes of the older generations (sometimes conscious expressed and often just implied) can lead to profound insecurity in the sensitive child, whose dreams then produce dramatic representations of the child's anxiety and existential insecurity in an unconscious effort to alert the parents, siblings, any anyone else around in the middle of the night, to the depth and profundity of the child's (consciously unacknowledged) fear and dread.
In this very important sense, night terrors are also connected to the inheritance of "unfinished psycho-spiritual business" from the ancestors - the parents, grandparents, and even generations long dead before the child's birth. In this sense, night terrors are connected to the grim, archetypal, Old Testament admonition that the "sins of the fathers" shall be "visited upon the children for three and four generations."
The good news is, once again, that even when they are not remembered, (as is generally the case in all the parasomnias), all dreams turn out to come in the service of health and wholeness and speak a universal language of metaphor and symbol.
Even when the individual dreamer believes that he/she cannot affect the worst situations around him/her, the dreams will step past the apparently powerless individual and address others through the involuntary theater of the parasomnias. In the case of night terrors, the dreams regularly address limiting patterns of belief and behavior that stretch over the generations, providing the motivation to look at and transform even the deepest unacknowledged religious and spiritual
problems of multiple generations of families.
ŠJeremy Taylor 2013
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