forgotten 'advice' about nightmare/night terrors

[squishy]

OK, I remember reading somewhere what to do with the LO has a nightmare or night terror (soothe but don't wake; wake etc), but can't find it anywhere - had horrible experience with my 3mo yesterday and she was traumatised.....so were we!

Also, what is the difference between a bad dream/nightmare and night terror?

TIA

There are sites on night terrors/nightmares here , here and here
They might be able to help answer your questions

DS used to have awful outbreaks of night terrors. If it's Night Terrors, it's hard to actually wake them, anyway. DS always seemed compeletely awake, and would scream the same thing over and over again - usually heart-rendingly distressing, and seem to be in awful distress. he would react a tiny bit to the real world - for e.g scream 'I want to go upstairs' if we carried himm down, and then the immediate opposite. Until we realised what it was, and that he wasn't actually in a waking state.

In the end we found that any intervention at all simply aggravated it, and if we did nothing at all, just sit v quietly in the room to make sure he didn't fall out of bed, it would subside much more quickly than if we made any intervention - even soothing.

He was never aware of it the folllowing morning.

My elder daughter (just turned 6) has been having the very rare night terror since she was about three. Recently they have been much more frequent (about 1/month).I think she has happy phases and not-so-happy phases at school (yr 1).

When she was little I used to sort of ask if she needed the toilet, thinking something like that had woke her up. She would give the kind of reaction you get with a terror- completely OTT and act like she was out of it. Somtimes I put her on the toilet and then I talked soothingly to her as she went back to sleep. Very scary when you haven't seen these things before.

Now she's having them again, I always ask if she needs the toilet but she just pleads "mummy, mummy" over and over. She is always aparently wide awake, crying and is really disturbed. The fact that Mummy is there doesn't register, and I've found the best thing to do is to gently wake her slightly, with cuddles, asking if she's had a bad dream and telling her it's over now and putting a new nice thought in her head of something else to dream about.

She never remembers in the morning and finds my rendition of the whole thing funny.
Kids, eh?

As an adult who has occasional night terrors, I find that if dh talks quietly to me and reassures me it works.
It feels as if I'm watching a film being played out, that I'm a part of. I'm living it, almost.
When he talks to me, it helps sort out for me reality from terror.
I very rarely remember a terror.