Nightmares
Imagine getting out of bed, drinking your daily cup of coffee and going about your day until you realize you are still asleep, and everything happening was unreal. This is called a false awakening, having one every so often is not something to fret about. Although the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell, claimed to have gone through around a hundred false awakenings when awakening from his slumber, which made it hard for him to indicate the difference between a dream or reality. There are many different types of nightmares and countless different ways humans react to them. Nightmares produce very discomforting and disturbing images causing a lack of sleep, high amounts of stress or anxiety and could provoke mental health problems.
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Night terrors will usually happen fifteen minutes to an hour after going to sleep during non-rapid eye movement, happening before the hours of REM sleep. The longer the person is in NREM before the night terror occurs the more scared a person will be when it strikes. Most people will wake up gasping, crying, breathing rapidly, and even screaming. Numerous people will sit up in bed with a wide eyed stare, a panic often lasting five to twenty minutes!!!. With nightmares, children can often remember the experience with much detail. On the other hand, with night terrors people usually have no remembrance of the experience the next morning. Also, night terrors can create a heart rate of 160 to 170 beats per minute!!!!. Amazingly, this is much faster than the normal heart rate, handled under most stressful circumstances. People can and have caused injury to themselves and others through their actions during night terrors. From my reading, “in 1943, Joan Kiger began fending off “shadowy figures” during a night terror, and while sleepwalking she shot and killed her father and her 6-year-old brother. William Pollard, a well-known sleepwalker, dreamed he was being attacked, only to awake and see that he had bludgeoned his daughter to death with a flashlight.” As you can see, these dark experiences can cause humans to do unspeakable