Sleep panic?

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Hi, long time reader first time posting

My daughter has some sort of sleep panic. If she isn't sleeping in the same room as her parents, she gets terrified and sits bolt upright in bed until she collapses into sleep around midnight... and if you try to tuck her in or turn off the light or even if she hears you walking around, she wakes up and screams and it starts all over.

Oddly enough, she's fine all day, has no trouble saying "I can sleep tonight" and such-- the panic only kicks in at the actual bedtime, and then she's basically irrational about it and reinforces her "I can't sleep" yelling.

Even when we let her sleep in our room, she sleep talks and sleep walks and seems to have night terrors, but at least she falls asleep (so we do that).

Anyone else run into this behavior, or have any advice? We're trying "sleep with us school nights, try to learn to sleep in your own room on Fri/Sat", but the terror and hassles are really bizarre and worrying me. I'm not sure if it's aspie-ness or a co-mingled condition or just her own private neurosis, but if anyone else has seen this, I'd love advice.

we've definitely had sleep problems here, but not any night terrors.....

How old is she?

Both my kids went through night terrors while really young, but seem to have outgrown them. My daughter, now 8 and NT, often wakes up from bad dreams and crawls into our bed, but no longer has night terrors where she has no concept what is going on.

Various sleep issues do seem to be common in AS children, mostly insomnia. My son takes a long time to fall asleep, and that by itself used to make bed time stressful, make him afraid to be left alone, until he found a successful routine for himself (he reads until his eyes are really droopy).

I tend to believe that if something is a normal phase, being patient and allowing them to outgrow it is the best course of action. If it is something more, it should be discussed with the doctor.

Experts say that parasomnias of just about all sorts are common in young children and tend to dissapear at about the same time they reach school-age.

Does she go to sleep and then get terrified and sit up, and then collapse asleep again? Or does she just sit up in bed, afraid to go to sleep until she collapses? Does she remember anything about the experience besides the feeling of fear?

Have you ever timed it to see if she's been asleep for the same amount of time when she has an episode?

It sounds like "sleep terror." They say that being over-tired contributes. Sleeping in your room on weeknights and in hers on weekends might not be the best answer because it breaks the routine of going to sleep. Maybe you will find things easier if you let her sleep where she can sleep for a few weeks and establish better sleep-patterns before trying again to move her to her own room.

I get hallucinatory sleep paralysis, which isn't the same thing as a proper night-terror, but isn't really inconsistant with your description. If she's having that you can make it go away pretty much entirely if you can get her to never, ever sleep on her back.

Lucid dreaming skill will take the pith out of regular old nightmares, and was easily learned by me as a child. I still have all sorts of dreams that, if I describe them, make people says, "God, what an awful nightmare," but I rather enjoy them.

Hi, thanks all, I should have been more detailed. She's 9 now, has sleepwalked since she was around 5, the sleep panic has been for over a year now. She shared a room with her younger brother until around age 6, then slept fine in her own room for about two years, then around age 8 this trouble leapt out. We tried moving her back in with her brother but she still has the panic. She also gets it on sleepovers with cousins, but not at girl scout summer camp.

So this has been going on for around 2 years. We tried just letting her sleep in our room for 2/3rd of a year, which she liked, but it didn't help us transition to her room. When we switched to the "try your own room on weekends" in the summer, well, it's been about 4 months of sleep hell with that plan.

>Does she go to sleep and then get terrified and sit up, and then collapse asleep again? Or does she just sit up in bed, afraid to go to sleep until she collapses?

The latter-- basically, falls asleep unwillingly due to exhaustion. If we let her read, falls asleep with the book on her lap.

> Does she remember anything about the experience besides the feeling of fear?

Mostly no, though she does sleep argue with us. I just remind her "you're asleep" and she stops arguing and goes back down, but fitfully.

> Have you ever timed it to see if she's been asleep for the same amount of time when she has an episode?

Well, there are no episodes, just straight out fear of falling asleep every night, followed by really light sleeping that easily wakes her. For the stuff I'm less worried about-- the sleep talking and sleep walking-- that happens erratically, different times on different night and only about 1 night out of 3.

I was an insomniac who loved sleep but dreaded the hassle of falling of asleep when I was young, so this isn't totally surprising, but the fear of sleeping is a surprise to us.

She also can't relax, as in vigorously resists any attempt to a) relax or b) be instructed how to deep breath, relax, etc. She consciously fights the idea that she needs to relax or still her body. Again, not too unlike me, alas. I'd love her to learn lucid dreaming but right now, she can't even do nighttime 'just daydream about something nice', but says she doesn't know what to think and lots of scary things come to mind (all being vague scary, stuff she can't articulate).

I like the hallucinatory sleep paralysis concept and will try the 'do not sleep on back' bit.

From my own experiences, and research, I would say that insomnia, night terrors, sleepwalking, and other sleep disorders are quite common in children on the spectrum. As for sleep paralysis, I still have occasional episodes of this - and have also experienced it when I haven't been sleeping on my back. The accompanying hallucinations are quite frankly absolutely terrifying. They are so real, that I actually do believe that they ARE real (an interdimensional experience).

I would strongly encourage you to allow your daughter to sleep in your room EVERY night until she is ready to sleep in a room on her own, even if this takes over a year!

I wish my parents had let me sleep in their room when I was a child. For years, I used to lie awake for hours and hours and hours every night - too terrified to sleep .

Nitelight? Music, small TV?

I would try to find out what she's afraid of first...I went through something like this, but before and during my early teens. I've always been an insomniac, but for awhile I was afraid of sleeping...it wasn't sleep that I really feared, but death...afraid if I did sleep I wouldn't wake up in the morning.

I slept for years with a small portable TV on with the volume set low...I used to turn it to those all-night talk shows, infomercials, or one of those shopping channels...the continuous drone of voices made me feel less alone and basically bored me to sleep afterawhile. Before that my mom used to set the radio on low for me. I did sleepwalk a great deal also. Since I loved to read, that seldom worked with me.

I have always slept with a light on, I cannot sleep in a totally dark room, never could. I still sleep with the tv on when I'm sick, I find it calms me down and makes me think less about how miserable I feel.

It sounds so ongoing and severe that I think you really ought to see an expert if it's possible.

With sleep terrors, the person will only seem to be awake and terrified but is inconsolable because still more asleep than awake, and eventually wakes still afraid but with no memory of any efforts to console him or whatever else happened. It'd probably look different to you than if she's waking up properly and then finds herself afraid because it's time to go to sleep again, possibly because of normal nightmares.

Sleep-talking, these same sleep-expert guys say, is normal for everybody.



My older brother told me, "As you are lying there, you whisper to yourself, 'I'm gonna take over my dreams tonight,' over and over until you fall asleep. Then, when your dreams get scary you can shout out, 'I have a machine gun!' and it will appear. But it will shoot bubble-gum or something stupid like that." I did this. It was true. I was eight or nine, he eleven. I don't remember how many nights I went to sleep whispering this mantra before I actually remembered about it while dreaming. Less than three months, anyway. The fact that your machine gun shoots bubble-gum at the werewolves doesn't really matter, because now it's a dream and you can do anything, including fly away, and if you get bored of fighting them you can challenge them to backgammon. Alas, I have no idea if this will work for your daughter.

If she can't daydream about something nice on her own, you could tell her something nice to daydream on? It takes me hours to fall asleep and I do it while replaying some little daydream on a continuous loop.



It's possible for it to happen when I'm not on my back, but this is extremely uncommon. They are indeed very vivid. I'm very used to it and I know what's going on, so I sort of enjoy the amazing level of detail in spite of the general unpleasantness of the experience. I can also tell you that I'm also seeing the room correctly, the time on the clock is correct, the position of the cat.

My daughter has just been diagnosed with Asperger's ( she is 11 ) and I am still learning about it. This discussion really hit home and I never thought about this being apart of her Asperger's.
Everynight at bed time she asks if she can sleep with me. So nights we camp out in the livingroom together because I feel for her ( it's so important to her and she cries when I say no ) My husband would tell me that she is just working me and that she's spoiled but I've always felt it wasn't that.
Thank you for the insight ... I will be handling bedtime differently from now on.