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If his troubles are brought into the light of day with kindness and sympathy they will melt before his eyes. Even night-terrors are, as a rule, determined by the suppressed fears of his waking hours. If they are provoked by his experiences at school, by the fear of punishment or by dismay at a task that has proved beyond his powers, he should be taken away from school for the time being.
Tales of naughty children who meet with a distressing fate may either frighten the child unduly, or else produce in a child of inquiring mind the desire to brave his fate and put the matter to the test. Pictures should not be terrifying or horrible. Ogres devouring children are out of place as subjects for pictures and may cause night-terrors.
It is rare for children of two or of three years of age, whose case we are now considering, to be troubled by bad dreams, nightmares, or night-terrors. If these should occur, obstructed breathing due to adenoid vegetations is sometimes at work as a contributory cause.
Night-terrors are said to be aggravated by nasal obstruction due to adenoid vegetations. Clothing at night should be light and porous, and particular attention should be paid to the need for free ventilation. We have spoken in an earlier chapter of the trouble sometimes experienced in inducing a nervous child to go to sleep. In older children insomnia is common enough.
Often we find those distressing attacks to which the name "night-terrors" has been given. The child wakes with a cry, usually soon after he has gone to sleep, sits up in bed and shows signs of extreme terror, gazing at some object of his dreams with wide-open startled eyes, begging his nurse or mother to keep off the black dog, or the man, or whatever the vision may be.
"Why, no," I returned, wonderingly, for such suggestions were new to me. "Sleep your happy sleep, my dear," she said, tenderly, "and thank God for your perfect health, Esther. I dozed a little myself toward morning, before the day woke in its rage, and then I had a horrible sort of dream, a half-waking scare, bred of my night-terrors.
When the child retires to rest, leave a candle burning, and let it burn all night, sit with him until he be asleep, and take care, in case he should rouse up in one of his night-terrors, that either yourself or some kind person be near at hand.
This frightening of a child by a silly nurse frequently brings on night-terrors. He wakes up suddenly, soon after going to sleep, frightened and terrified; screaming violently, and declaring that he has seen either some ghost, or thief, or some object that the silly nurse had been previously in the day describing, who is come for him to take him away.
And the jabbering teeth.... We dream as children of night-terrors, of goblins and phantoms that start out of the gloom and flit about with hideous grimaces. They are gone, while yet we shudder at that momentary flash of grizzliness; intangibilities, whose image is not easily detained. To see spectral visions embodied, and ghosts made flesh, one should come here.
Moreover, the mind thus filled with fear, acts upon the body, and injures the health. A child must never be placed in a dark cellar, nor frightened by tales of rats, &c. Instances are related of fear thus induced impairing the intellect for life; and there are numerous examples of sudden fright causing a dangerous and even a fatal illness. Night-terrors.
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