What Are Toddler Nightmares?
Nightmares are bad, scary, and realistic dreams that wake your child up during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. A nightmare causes your child to immediately get up in bed and cry.
Your child will remember a nightmare and will most likely engage in a conversation about it. Sometimes, children who recently experienced a nightmare will have difficulty going back to sleep as it is hard for them to separate reality from a dream or nightmare.
What Are Toddler Night Terrors?
Night terrors are often confused with nightmares because they involve a scared, crying child. However, night terrors do not involve real-like imagery, as nightmares do. Instead, night terrors are a sudden reaction to fear during sleep stage transitions.
Toddlers might scream, wail, shout, and on rare occasions sleepwalk during night terrors. Waking them and consoling them is not going to help, as they are still in deep sleep.
Night terrors happen during non-REM sleep and last for a few minutes that can be recurrent during sleeping hours. Toddlers will not remember a night terror once woken up in the morning, unlike nightmares.
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