Scary nightmares/sensations, and they seem so real

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I keep having this recurring dream (I suppose it's more like a nightmare) where I feel the sensation that someone is shaking my shoulder, or touching my back, as if they are trying to wake me up.

The first time I had this dream was late last year, and I woke up immediately feeling really frightened, because it felt so realistic that I thought someone was really behind me shaking my shoulder. But of course, when I turned round, there was no-one there.

It happened again last night, but I wasn't quite so scared this time, because it's happened 4 or 5 times before. When it happened last night, the sensation was on the small of my back, rather than on my shoulder.

The reason it scares me is because:
1)it feels so realistic I think that someone is there in real life, shaking my shoulder. So I usually wake up all of a sudden, and turn round to see who's there.
2)I never get to see who it is that is shaking my shoulder.

I wonder why I have started having these dreams all of a sudden? It tends to happen most often when I'm in a half-dream, half-awake state, when I'm either drifting in or out of sleep.

I know there is no-one else in my room, as I always have my bedroom door shut when I'm sleeping, so the cat can't come in, and household noise can't wake me up.

I have seemed to have had similar experiences when I was a teenager, but these seemed to have disappeared for years now. It wasn't often, but I have had a few experiences where I would slightly doze off and awaken to a horrific nightmare setting. It was strange, because I have had a few really bizarre dreams that I believe would be frightening for NTs but not for me. There was this one setting that I remember quite vividly.

I once laid on my bed without intending to fall asleep, though I was quite tired at the time. I must have dozed off for none less than five to ten minutes, but I had an extremely intense dreamlike experience that was terrifying. I was roller skating, which is something I rarely ever do, down a road and fell into what appeared to be a manhole. The problem was that once I fell, there was no bottom. I awoke up with a very rapid heart rate and extremely terrified. It was an experience that seemed extremely real. I had to look around me to make sure I was where I was. Really intense.

- Ray M -

I'm not sure that there's a name for these weird tactile sensations that occur while you're falling asleep, but the phenomenon has been documented. They seem to happen most often to people in the years immediately following puberty, although there is no guarantee they will ever stop completely. (They aren't dreams; as you have noted, they usually happen while drifting off to sleep, or shortly after regaining consciousness.) I myself used to occasionally stop feeling my mattress against my back when I was about to go to sleep, and for a split second I would think I was falling. The sensation was very brief, but would make me panic wildly and clutch the sides of my bed; I wouldn't be able to get back to sleep for at least fifteen minutes after that occurred.

I took to sleeping on either my side or stomach after that happened a few times, and the sensations stopped. I gather, from your description of the phantom person touching you as being "behind" you, that you regularly sleep on your side. Trying to sleep in a different position may help you with this problem, then.

Due to its brevity and the fact that it sometimes happens as you are drifting off to sleep, I find it unlikely that you are describing something called a night terror, although I suppose it could be possible. You might want to Google the phrase (in quotes) or look for the other recent dream thread, where I examined that phenomenon in detail.

The roller skating dream just sounds like a plain old bad dream. I'm reminded of a dream I had as a very young child. I had fallen asleep wondering if a train would be able to jump a small gap in the tracks and continue on, if it had sufficient momentum. I dreamt of a small passenger train, sort of like the ones you find in large amusement parks, but barely big enough to seat one adult a row. I was seated towards the back of the train. and my father sat somewhere further up ahead. We were in a tent filled with glaring red and yellow lights; this was part of a circus act. "Ladies and gentlemen..." I heard the ringleader say, "...tonight we're going to find out if a train can jump a small hole in the tracks!" The train started moving counterclockwise along a large circular track on the floor of the tent. I looked to my left, and saw a six-foot section of track had been removed, and a deep hole had been dug in its place. I then tried looking forward, trying to see the engine jump the tracks (it was too far off in the distance to see, though). I then saw that the whole train was driving straight down the hole! As I rushed down into the darkness, the ringleader said "Aww... apparently not...."

I had a professor who specialized in sleep and dreaming when I took psychology in college. The first example does fit the description of a so called "night terror" in some sense. Lemme explain what is happening.

When you are asleep, your brain is still capable of perceiving your surroundings just as it would if you were awake (you just may not be consciously aware of this). Dreams can be imprinted over this perception -- which is why most "ghost sightings" occur shortly after waking or as a person is falling asleep (because the person may not actually be completely awake, although they think they are). This can also cause a heavily sleep deprived person to see things, because once you are so sleep deprived your brain can automaticly shutdown and go into a state of REM, even if just for a split second.

Your brain also does something else that's pretty neato. It's called sleep paralysis -- When you fall asleep, particularly when you get into the higher stages, your brain shuts out most voluntary functions to protect you from hurting yourself. This function going wrong is the core problem with sleep disorders like night terrors and sleep walking. For some people (and it's happened to most at one time or another) as you are waking up the sleep paralysis may not go away so fast, which is what often creates the inability to move, the sensation that something is on your torso making it hard to breathe (because you are still breathing as you would if you were asleep) and it can create the sensation that you are falling.

It can also have the opposite effect in some people, so that they don't always go into a state of sleep paralysis -- hence, sleepwalking. This is often blamed on a deficiency in some chemical or receptor that causes sleep paralysis in the first place.

I hope this helps explain a lot.

Hmm. Not a perfect explanation, but as free labor goes, I'm sold.

It does describe the reasons this could be a case of night terrors pretty well. Now, to recapitulate the reasons why this probably isn't a night terror:
They sometimes happen as the dreamer is falling asleep. This is very, very odd. Night terrors are waking phenomenon. I'm reluctant to say impossible, but statistically unlikely.
They end very quickly. Part of the reason we even have night terrors is because the brain isn't geared to switch instantly from a full sleeping mode to a wide-awake state. During night terrors, your brain is clattering back and forth like a manual-transmission car that has been mis-shifted between two gears. It can take perhaps a minute, perhaps twenty minutes or longer for the brain to properly shift back into the normal waking state. In the meantime, you're in the twilight zone, and it's usually a lot weirder than what's being described here.
There is no audio element. Strange noises are quite commonly heard during a night terror. Sinister, ominous voices speaking gibberish are especially common. This is not a defining feature of a night terror, but it is uncharacteristic for the dreamer not to hear anything.
There is no sleep paralysis as you mentioned. Once again, not necessarily proof in and of itself that this wasn't a night terror, but this combined with the points above certainly show that this is at best an extremely unusual night terror.

I suspect what is at work here is more like this: As part of shutting down the waking mind and moving towards a sleep state, the mind shuts out tactile input from the skin (to a degree). For whatever reason, the shutdown sometimes doesn't go completely perfect, and a patch of skin "switches back on." The sudden influx of nerve data gets interpreted as a touch, aborting the sleep attempt. Similarly, when waking up, one patch of skin might "wake up" faster than the rest, leading to a similar reaction. The waking-up process is then a normal one, as if the dreamer had actually been prodded awake, just caused by faulty data input, and not the jarringly crazy night terror state.

Well actually, the reason I put "night terrors" in quotation is because it has a tendency to be classified as something different altogether when it is actually just a combination of different functioning problems with sleep. It's really no more than a dream that occurs with some of these malfunctions (lack of, or poorly timed sleep paralysis, etc).

The stimulation of skin cells won't necessarily wake you up and they never actually shut down; As I pointed out, your brain still perceives everything going on around you including the sensation of touch, but blocks it all out (within the brain) from the conscious thought processes (which is why the sensastion sometimes seems to go away). This is why we commonly incorperate things that are going on around us into our dreams AND why we "see ghosts" or other things that aren't there when we think we are awake (or still awake).

Note that I also failed to fully explain that as your senses are shut off from your conscious mind, this produces a false feeling of weightlessness, which your conscious thought processes can sometimes mistake for falling if you start to panic (or vice versa).

The point was that often times, your brain doesn't get all the processes properly synchronized and it causes the vast majority of these sorts of sleeping problems, like "night terrors", sleepwalking, etc. I'm not theorizing myself here; this is how it is said to work, according to that expert.

(btw, I think he also suspected I had AS when I took his class.)

I see you have decided to dedicate a post to emphasizing all the parts of your previous post that had been wrong. Very well then; let's proceed.

Actually, night terrors are a distinct psychological phenomena, and are defined in a lot of ways besides merely being jumbles of sleep dysfunctions. For example, they are especially likely to occur following a period of mental fatigue. Unlike, say, narcolepsy, which can happen at any time

A night terror incorporates huge chunks of actual waking consciousness that very jarringly and unpredictably alternate with dream consciousness. Studies have been done on people who were prone to frequent night terrors where the were put to bed facing clocks, so that they could document their perception of time during the terrors. The studies documented quite well that the victims were, some of the time, actually seeing the clock in real time (while some of the time dream imagery was seen, and sometimes temporary states of total unconsciousness would occur, time passing with the dreamer unaware anything was transpiring at all...).


Mostly true, except there is in fact some actual signal loss in most people's normal sleeping state. True, lots of the information gets locked away in the subconscious mind, where it may or may not ever resurface again. But some measure of the input just plain gets lost. This lost signal data, combined with the subconsciously lost data which never gets properly retrieved again into waking consciousness, sum to make the partial (yes, it is not complete and total) loss of sensory input. In my hypothesis, this failure occurs normally, but then accidentally and explicably reverts in a small, localized area of the nerves of the skin. It probably wouldn't seem as if the nerves go from "off" to "on," sorry, but more like from "insensitive" to "sensitive." Where those nerves are concerned, it's like European current starts pouring into an American teevee. It certainly seems possible that a feeling of being touched could result from this. I'd say it could even feel like a vicious stab. I freely admit that all this is just a hypothesis of mine; say this is all just a bunch of hot air if you will, so be it: I don't feel like doing a bunch of research to support this point.

What's with you and the ghosts? Got a story to tell? Is this the real reason you're here? I will readily admit that ghostlike apparitions appear in dreams, but this mere fact in and of itself cannot function as definitive proof of the nonexistance of ghosts.

Yup; this has happened to me before, and I started to panic because I thought I was falling, not vice versa. Notice how similar the process in this hypothesis is to mine above--the explanation for the tactile sensations being discussed. Quite deliberate, mon toots.

Ah... so you're saying that these sleeping problems are all caused by "improperly sinchronized mental processes," then. Well, I would certainly have to agree with that. Because that is one humongous string of psychobabble your "expert" has assembled for you. It could be said to be true of the sleep disorders we discussed, other sleep disorders like narcolepsy and sleep apnea, non-sleep-related disorders like epilepsy and bipolar disorder, and probably with just a little creativity, we could use "improperly synchronized mental processes" to explain any psychological abnormality at all, down to and including preferring the flavor of broccoli over chocolate.

"Night terrors," "hypnagogic imagery," "sleepwalking," "narcolepsy" and so on are in fact scientifically discrete phenomena which are not all caused by a single common mental mechanism. Which is one of the reasons, for example, you never hear of someone having a night terror, immediately followed by a narcoleptic attack, which then progresses into sleepwalking. They are not one and the same; they aren't even particularly similar processes.

Kewl.

Note: Night terror isn't so much a specific sleep disorder (depending on which expert you talk to -- you seem to either not be aware or not realize there are different points of view within the science itself); it's part of parasomnia sleep disorder, *which is the set that I'm talking about* and how the family works overall... This includes "night terrors", teeth grinding, sleep talking and walking, etc. I'm talking more specific mechanics of how parasomnia works while you're talking about the kind of stuff you read in the diagnostic manuel and then theorizing on your own.

Parasomnia is itself a broad term meaning "sleep disorder." There is no such thing as "parasomnia sleep disorder," which is like saying "pizza pie." If you wanted to speak about two or more types of sleep disorder, proper usage would be to say "parasomnias," not "parasomnia sleep disorder."

Parasomnia is not a type of sleep disorder in and of itself. Furthermore, the term parasomnia does not say anything about how any specific sleep disorder works. All it demonstrates is that scientists can come up with a big pretentious word for "sleep disorder." It is totally misguided to claim that the creation of the term "parasomnia" means scientists now think that all sleep disorders share a single common root cause.

For me, every dream or nightmare I have seems like real life. I can recall several occasions, in fact, in which I have seen what happens the next day in a dream. Basically, I see a lifelike picture or brief movie of something in a dream, and the next day, it happens. For example, I saw myself falling down onto the pavement the night before I did. It's cool, but some of the time, it freaks me out.

But other than that, I've had dreams that feel completely real. For example, when the Gamecube was first released in America, I wanted one really badly. I had a dream in which we actually got a Gamecube with Super Smash Bros. and were playing it until we went to sleep. The next morning, I actually got up, went into my living room, and looked around for the Gamecube. To my dismay, it wasn't there, and I realized it was a dream. I didn't get a Gamecube until November of last year, in fact, when I had enough used games to buy a used GC.

You know, what. I'm not going to argue anymore if you can't back anything up. I offered an expert's opinion. You have yet to show one resource besides simply saying something is wrong when it differs with your point of view of how something works. Everything you have written is either laced with tautology through your own logic and you repeatedly claim something is wrong, but you simply haven't backed it up.

They are in the same family because they work off similar causes.

Do you even know what stage of the sleep cycle that "night terrors" occur? Do you even know the stages of the sleep cycle? These things I'm talking about are all well documented and known. It's elementary information to the topic, not just "psychobabble". You have real people doing huge sleep studies every day. They know a lot about how sleep works.

Your failing to recognize that a lot of problems or disorders DO stem from similar malfunctions. For example, a few weeks ago, a study came out that led some researchers to conclude that schizophrenia may not be anything more than a higher form of bipolar disorder, but more research is needed.

I'm talking in terms of hard, in the trenches, research about why things work the way they work. You're talking about how things are or aren't in the diagnostic manuel, which takes years to change, is sometimes too vague, and has often been proven wrong or inaccurate after the fact when new things are learned. Consider how AS has been poorly treated. It didn't appear in the diagnosic manuels until 1994 -- By the way you are arguing, it wouldn't have existed before 1994.

On another note:



You obviously have no grasp of latin:

para * partial
somnia * sleep

Hmm... Partial sleep. That sounds oddly familiar to the mechanics I was describing. Such a strange coincidence. (covers hand over mouth)

Anyone can have a night terror and it be a one time even. Nobody has a single episode of narcolepsy. Nobody has a single episode of bipolar disorder. Nobody has a moment of pdd. Some people can have a night terror without all the aspects. My professor made a very valid arguement about night terrors in this way. This crosses the line of what a disorder is. These are just hiccups -- minor day to day malfunctions of something higher up going wrong. So if a person has multiple night terrors, is the night terror the problem... or is it a symptom? He started looking at night terrors in this light as more of a symptom and less of a cause. The same thing could be said for sleep walking, sleep talking, seeing ghosts, and all the other things that fall under parasomnia.

The simplest of googling will prove that I am right about parasomnia and exerything else.

Here's a little help.

As you can see, a little latin does in fact tell us all about the word. Para- actually means "incorrect" or "abnormal" in this instance: abnormal sleep. It's a fancy-pants way of saying "abnormal sleep." Para never means "partial," at least according to dictionary.com.

As I have stated over and over again, night terrors almost never occur in presleep, like the phenomenon being described are in fact doing. This is not the stage of sleep that night terrors normally begin in. This is one of the reasons your insistence on this being a case of night terrors seems strange to me.

Look, as a quick overview of the subject, you did fine; that's why I didn't originally argue with you. But like your etymology for "parasomnia," the rest of your argument is just so much hot air that is easily disproved by anyone with basic net skills. I'm saying night terrors and sleepwalking have different causes, you say they're both symptoms of "parasomnia sleep disorder;" just google and find out, hypothetical reader who still cares about any of this.

Wow, dictionary.com and google. Those are some resources. You missed something:

There are several problems here.
1. You used english dictionary to find the meaning of latin word. Brilliant.
2. In your own dictionary, you cited definition #3 "incorrect" and "abnormal" but ignored #1 beside, near, alongside, #2 beyond, #4 similar to/ resembling, #5 subsidiary or assistant -- all of which come much closer to meaning "partial"

hmm... I wonder why you chose to ignore the other definitions?

Lets see... near sleep, beyond sleep, resembling sleep, similar to sleep, subsidiary of sleep -- all have the similar meaning as partial sleep. Interesting!

I'm not really sure why you would ignore four other definitions similar to the one I proposed (the two most like mine coming first, meaning more common usage) when you could pick the one that best suits your arguement.

Oh well, moving on to the next item, #3.



You are right, I was trying to trap you with the stage question. Well played. What is classically called "night terror" actually occurs in stage 4. I didn't say night terrors specifically appear in pre-sleep -- in that instance I was talking more about waking dreams and seeing ghosts, but it is a similar phenomenon, so I see how you would have gotten that mixed up. My point was that it's really no different then waking up on some level (a waking dream) in stage 4. The symptoms usually being similar. But something goes wrong with the brain's ability to regulate sleep at this point (sleep paralysis, overlay of perceptions, etc.) -- which is what causes a waking dream, sleep walking, sleep talking and other similar dysfunctions.

Now, item #4...



I have a better resource for you in further scientific discussions than dictionary.com (which you used short sightedly) or google which you never actually gave any citations for;

jellynail, meet Wikipedia... Wikipedia meet jellynail. Wikipedia is a good resource for information. Most of the articles (specifically science articles) are properly cited -- making it very good for scientific research. Vandalism occurs, but only at a minor rate and there are far more wikipedians working like ants to constantly update information and correct mistakes (It wouldn't suprise me if many were aspies). Check it out. Here are a few links:

Sleep
Parasomnia
Night Terrors

Many of these back up what I'm saying, but you are also going to notice a little bit of tug-a-war on things -- This is what I was talking about as far as science. You have different groups with different ideas on how things work (if you are interested in that, look up the different models of psychology). Check it out, as an aspie I think you'll lose your life to it as I have.

Sorry, but I'm just going to believe a Professor of Psychology (depending on model) and cited resources before I'm going to buy anything someone pulled off google. Might have something to do with that whole research methods class I took in college.