Poor John and his dreams and nightmares. It's been this way since I can remember. He talks in his sleep nearly every night. i.e. suddenly sitting up and shouting, "Where's Daniel?!" (Dan is our neighbor and John's good buddy.) Or, "Ester! Stop!" (Ester is our neighbor as well, but not so much a buddy but more like a bossy big sister.) Another one recently was, "Poo-poo diaper baby!" This is "potty-talk" while sleeping.
Last night, John had a really bad dream about bees and bugs. He woke up shouting that the "bees are getting me!" I tried reassuring him 100 times that he was just dreaming, there are no bugs, there are no bees, everything is fine, mommy is here, it's ok, lay down, go to sleep, bugs are outside, not in our house, and on and on and on and on for what seemed like forever. Then things got worse...
John started dodging invisible flying bugs and crying in terror. He hid under the covers and cried out that the bees were going to sting him. I kept trying to comfort him, to wake him, to reassure him that what he was seeing wasn't real. He begged me to hide with him and cried, "why are they doing this to me?" It broke my heart to see him so frightened. It seemed like he was wide awake and hallucinating. But I have to assume he was in a deep dream state. It was disturbing to watch him dodge flying bugs and cry and scream in terror.
I turned on the light and said, "See, Johnny, there are no bugs in here," and he said, "I can see them mom! Right there! " as he pointed at them. And then he begged me to move to the living room with him.
We sat in the chair in the living room and cuddled for about 15 minutes while he looked around the room. He seemed scared and paranoid. I asked him if we could go back to bed. He took my hand, and in a completely different tone of voice, a calm voice said, "OK mom, we can go back to bed now. The bugs are all gone."
Whew.
Then of course I didn't sleep well the rest of the night. It took me a couple hours to fall back to sleep. And when John woke at 7am, the very first words out of his mouth were, "Mom! The bugs are gone!" with a huge smile on his face. *yawn*
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