Tales From a Female Traveller

Night Terrors

I can't remember if I've blogged about this but it's been on my mind of late so I've decided to share it.

Definition of Night Terrors
Night terrors are a sleep disorder characterized by anxiety episodes with extreme panic, often accompanied by screaming, flailing, fast breathing, and sweating and that usually occur within a few hours after going to sleep. Night terrors occur most commonly in children between the ages of four and 12 but can also occur at all ages. Affected individuals usually suffer these episodes within a few hours after going to sleep. They appear to bolt up suddenly, and wake up screaming, sweating and panicked. The episode may last anywhere from five to 20 minutes.

In Siem Reap we decided to stay at a place the Lonely Planet had recommended called the Jasmine Lodge. It was our 4th or 5th night there and I struggled to get to sleep because our room was directly below the pool table in the restaurant above. B seemed to be out in no time and I put on my ipod to drown out the noise of the pool sticks smacking against the pool balls as each clumsy, drunken shot was made by the noisy Irish upstairs. Earlier, B had asked the guys to keep it down and it actually worked for about 10 Thai minutes, until once again, the clanging started and the thud of the end of the pool stick hitting the spot on the floor right above my head continued. The noise raged on.
I’m not sure of the time but the minutes seemed to drag on as my mind drifted between that half awake state of consciousness and full blown sleep. Every so often I would awaken with an uneasy feeling weighing heavy on my senses and it took my mind back to the hours previously where I had asked B to close the curtains on the window and shut the bathroom door, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched… and now that feeling was creeping back into my sleepy state of mind. As the music began to do its job of relaxing me I could feel my arms jolt softly with the throws of approaching sleep and the noisy Irishmen began to drift away.
I started to dream and at first it was just those random, strung together dreams made up of your last thoughts in the moment before real sleep envelopes you. Soon however, I wasn’t waking to the sound of pool balls clanging and drunken Irish accents, I was waking to the sound of screaming. It’s the kind of thing only kids go through, their over active imaginations running away with them and blurring the line between reality and dreams and I had personally not experienced such night terrors since I was a kid when I watched Alien with my Dad. My ex experienced night terrors frequently and it’s one thing to actually have them, but it’s another to be the person waking up to someone shrieking in terror in the middle of the night and because they say that night terrors are only really common in children and people with suppressed emotional problems, I was completely stunned.
Now, let me just set the background story for you. I am the type of person who doesn’t really scare all that easily and I can watch horror movie after horror movie and I rarely jump at those surprising scenes that everyone in theatres gasps at because they didn’t expect the guy to be behind the door… come on…. I can read scary stories and still have the guts to check out weird late night noises while I’m on my own in the house, granted, with a baseball bat in hand, but still, you get the picture. I’m pretty tough skinned, so nightmares don’t normally plague me. So when I found myself waking every hour or so at the Jasmine Lodge I just brushed it off, rationally telling myself not to be stupid, they’re just dreams. Every time I woke I’d tell myself this and force myself back to sleep, but each time I did this I would go back to the same point in the same dream with the same feeling of dread it gave me and it would gradually get worse.
Of course I’d realise that I was dreaming, tell myself there was nothing to be afraid of and convince myself that nothing was under the bed or in the shadows but that feeling of uneasiness I’d had the whole time we’d been at the Jasmine Lodge was becoming increasingly prevailant, especially during my dreams. The feeling that I was being watched, like someone, or something, really was in the shadows just waiting to pounce on me the moment I came out from under my blanket, just wouldn’t leave me. So… under my blanket I stayed, like a child scared of the dark but too afraid to move and turn the light on to keep safe and this went on throughout the night until at about 3 or 4am when I literally woke up screaming. At this point though, I had no idea I was actually awake… I was still in some house… and it was the Jasmine Lodge but it wasn’t and our Dutch friends hadn’t made it to their boat and had been reported missing, and somehow I knew that they were still here, trapped in this place and there were all these staircases that lead nowhere… there was no way out… I was alone and there were these "things"… or "people"… with dirty black hair or fur all over their faces like monsters or dead people and I just couldn’t get away… they were grabbing me and pulling at me and all I could hear was this terrible screaming and as I fruitlessly tried to wake B from his seemingly peaceful slumber to help me get away I became more and more frantic… WHY wouldn’t he wake up!!? "WAKE UP!!!" I’d say… "HELP ME"… "THEY’RE AFTER ME"… I couldn’t wake B and they were going to get me and that terrible screaming… oh shit... and then suddenly… it hit me… the terrible screaming I kept hearing the whole time… it was ME!!!
At this point I was WIDE awake and I was screaming at B to wake up and help me when he finally rolled over, took out his earphones and husked in an exasperated, freaked out, half asleep voice "WHAT’S WRONG???!!!" As he stumbled out of bed in the darkness to turn on the light I broke into terrified tears and started to hyperventilate… I gasped "THEY’RE COMING TO GET ME!!! HELP ME!!" and I grabbed at him as though he was my only lifeline out of this terrible place. Poor B had no idea what to do and each time he moved more than an inch from me I shrieked that they were after me and that he couldn’t leave. It took a few minutes for him to try and calm me and bring me back to reality and when I was finally lucid there was just the sobbing left. No more petrified shrieking.
As my body calmed, and some resemblance of a clear mind returned I tried to relate to B what I was so scared of and could only really explain the feeling of dread and hate that it gave me. I was too afraid to go back to sleep even still, as I lay there completely awake and in reality and the feeling of being watched still haunted me and amazingly, even though I knew I was now awake and lucid I still feared that whatever I was so afraid of, which now seemed so stupid, was still waiting to get me. I demanded my friend climb into my single bed with me and I stayed tucked under those covers like my life depended on it, I was still shaking with fear, flinching at every sound and staring nervously at every shadow.
We were both wide awake now, so B and I talked for a while and he confessed that he had been experiencing bad dreams ever since our first night at the Jasmine Lodge, and he too, had that same dreadful feeling the dreams gave him afterward even though he couldn’t quite remember what they were about. We even questioned whether or not it was a coincidence us both having the same kinds of dreams that we’d never had before. I wouldn’t call myself a believer in such things as ghosts or spirits and even though I’ve had some pretty unexplainable things happen to me I still find it hard to just believe. But as I lay there with my friend in the early hours of dawn and as we chatted about how it was probably just a build up of emotional exhaustion from seeing too many horrible things and hearing too many terrible stories of the Khmer Rouge cruelty we settled that that’s probably the most likely, the most rational explanation. Yet there was still the question, was it just my subconscious catching up with me?… Or was it something more?
For almost 3 seconds we contemplated asking the owner of the Jasmine Lodge if it had been involved in any way during the KR regime, or if anyone who had lived there had been a victim… but those 3 seconds passed by VERY quickly and we decided that we just didn’t want to know… and when morning finally came we checked out of that place as fast as you could say it was just a bad dream.
A few days later our Dutch friends emailed to say that they had made their boat and were now safely at their destination in east Cambodia, our new guest house was fantastic and a lot cheaper than the Jasmine and everything seemed to be going well, but the moment we left the Jasmine is when I fell ill and it would be starting point of a series of ailments I would suffer for weeks to come including a bout of Delhi Belly and the infamous dust eye incident that sent me half blind for days. Yet somehow, that feeling I experienced those sleepless nights at the Jasmine Lodge, even though it’s well and truly gone, I’ll never forget. I have never… ever before in my life… been so terrified of… nothing… and it will stay with me.
Night terrors fuelled by emotional stress, early morning confusion and broken sleep? Or something more sinister?
You be the judge.

posted by Lucyspeak @ 10:00 pm