It’s time to get incredibly vulnerable. This is the kind of story I will only ever be sharing with my newsletter family. Something pretty scary happened to me the other night and I'm still processing it.
To backtrack a bit… over the past decade, I've had occasional “night terrors.” For those of you who don’t know, a night terror is not just a bad dream. These are episodes where you're stuck between sleeping and waking, having a terrifying dream, and you may even see things that aren’t really there, scream out loud, or physically get up from your bed and start moving. When you “wake up,” your heart is pounding and you are feeling pure panic.
In the past, these episodes (or “incidents,” as I’ve called them) were scary but mostly minor. Actually, when they first started happening (around 2015), they mainly involved me seeing things in my room that weren’t really there (bugs on the wall, animals on the bed, etc.). I once “saw” a mouse crawl up my wall, move across my ceiling, and then “drop” onto Michael’s head. You can imagine the panic I woke him up in (Michael is terrified of mice 😂).
Mostly these incidents involve me lying in bed (asleep, but with my eyes open), aware of where I am but not really conscious. Then I will “see” things and start screaming, only to have Michael shake me awake and for me to “come to” and realize that I’d actually been asleep the whole time. They are typically scary and, as I mentioned, my heart is racing when I wake up. However, I usually cuddle into Michael, calm down, and then can quite easily put myself back to sleep.
This year has been pretty good for me in that I haven’t had many of these incidents…but just last week, everything changed.