1 year old hysterical around 10:00pm, but not awake

[Shawnboo]

Our one year old has "woken" up 3 times in hysterics.

Some info:

• she's been sleeping in her own room since 2nd week
• she typically goes to sleep at 7:00pm and wakes at 9:00am
• shes on same meals as us, but has bottles in the morning and at night
• she doesn't wake, typically, in the night. Usually just sleeps 12 - 14 hours.
• she has two naps during the day, one usually around noon and sometimes another around 3:00pm.
• I had night terrors as a kid, for around 8 years from 8 - 16 years of age (but I had complete control of my limbs)
• we believe she might have a UTI (waiting on the culture to come back from the lab) and we THINK that she might possibly have had the uti back in mid October when she had her other two nightmares.

For conversation sake, I'm going to refer to her events as nightmares, because I can't think of another way to describe it.

In October she woke up twice, 2 weeks apart from each other (when she was 10 months old) screaming hysterically. Big tears, but the concerning part to us is that she doesn't actually seem to be awake. She has spaghetti noodle arms and legs, with no control at all, and when we pick her up out of the bed her head wobbles around with no strength. We try to wake her but her eyes are closed for the most part, occasionally opening her eyes, but not focusing on us, and just screaming, just to close her eyes again. She'll have no control of her limbs or head for around 5 - 10 minutes.

Tonight she had the same situation but this time it scared us because we couldn't get her to wake up for a good 25 minutes.

Everything we've read online suggests that babies don't have nightmares or night terrors until around 18 months.
Does anyone have any suggestions or comments to share?

DD did this from about 6 months. We found (horrible though it felt to do it) that if we left her be she calmed down really quickly (within two or three minutes). If we tried to wake her up/ comfort her, we'd have up to two hours of screaming. The only thing I could suppose was that if she was having a nightmare, external stimulus from us was making it worse.

She's just turned two now and seems to have stopped doing it - at least we haven't had an episode of it for months.

And I know the internet says they don't have nightmares at that age, but I'm convinced DD was having them.

sounds like night terrors. v common in toddlers and young children. One of mine "woke " each evening at the same time to do this for a few months She could never remember it the next day but seemed so terrified and inconsolable at the time.
they normally grow out of it in time.

It's just a night terror. Horrible for you, but they don't know. Instead of try to wake her, just sit next to her and shush, stroke her head type stuff and will be over in a couple of mins.

Thanks all. I'm very very familiar with night terrors. I had them nightly for years. I guess they can manifest themselves differently in different people. I always had control of my limbs. But I do remember my mom saying it was best to let me do my thing, not wake me, and let me tire myself out and go back to bed.