REFERENCE has already been made more than once, though only in an incidental way, to the childhood malady of pavor nocturnus, or "night terrors." In any book like the present one the subject of night terrors is deserving of detailed discussion. Not only do night terrors constitute a real handicap of childhood, but also they constitute a handicap, the seriousness of which is not yet appreciated by many people, and the true nature of which is as yet known to exceedingly few. In some quarters, indeed, there has been a disposition to minimise this malady, because it usually is "outgrown" by the eighth or ninth year. But, in reality, its effects—or, rather, the effects of the condition At bottom, night terrors are almost identical with the nightmares of adult years. They are, to put it precisely, juvenile nightmares, with the added feature of profound disturbance in the waking state. The one real point of difference between night terrors and nightmares is that the former indicate a greater degree of nervous strain. The child who is a victim of night terrors generally has an hour or so of quiet sleep after going to bed. Then he wakes, shrieking for his mother. When the parents, alarmed, rush to his room, they are likely to find him out of bed, crouching behind a chair, or in the corner. His eyes are staring and full of horror. He seems not to recognise his parents, though he will eagerly clutch at them for protection. After a few minutes the attack passes off, he quiets down, returns to bed, and sleeps While the night terror is at its height the child may have ghastly hallucinations, representing a continuance in the waking state of the dream-images that have distressed him. Also, instead of leaping out of bed, he may merely sit up, or may find it impossible to move at all, as is the case with many adults when coming out of a nightmare. A Chicago physician, describing his experiences as a child, relates: "When I was five years of age, and during the sixth year, I suffered from nightmare. I sat up in bed and fancied I saw a monkey come down the chimney and fasten itself to my shoulder and bite me, and terrify me so that I would scream out. My older sister would then come, wake me up thoroughly, and satisfy me that it was but a vision. "Other nights I would feel a sense of oppression, ringing in ears, a sensation of perceiving something The reference to the buzzing in the ears is typical of the attitude that until lately has been taken by almost all physicians in respect both to adult and to juvenile nightmares. For that matter, it still is the attitude of those physicians who are not familiar with the findings of medical psychology. Nightmare to them, whether in the old or in the young, is altogether a question of physical causation. As they see it, one need not look beyond bodily conditions of some sort to understand the nightmares of adults and the night terrors of children. Accordingly, treatment by sedatives, dieting, and hygienic measures has been the rule. Unfortunately, this by no means always succeeds in bringing about the desired result, Seemingly, to be sure, they are especially successful in the case of night terrors. But it is significant that, even if left untreated, night terrors seldom persist beyond the period of childhood. Then, however, those who have had them show a tendency, in many cases, to be troubled by unpleasant dreams, often taking on the character of most distressing nightmares. The frequency of these may, or may not, be diminished by the usual treatment of a dietetic sort. On the other hand, observation has shown that many persons afflicted with the indigestion and other physical conditions commonly held responsible for nightmares are not troubled by nightmare at all. As one observer puts it, even a person whose stomach is half destroyed by cancer may commit all sorts of dietary indiscretions and not suffer from nightmare in the slightest. Evidently, then, physical conditions do not of themselves account for nightmares and night terrors. For example, a boy of eight was sent to the Washington neurologist, Doctor T. A. Williams, to be treated for general nervousness, and, in particular, for a tendency "to see things where there is really Questioning his little patient more closely, Doctor Williams next learned that he had a veritable horror of being alone at any time. As long as somebody was in sight, he could enjoy his games, and would readily run errands. Left alone, the imaginary snake, or some hallucinatory wild beast, was almost His horror of being alone was paralleled by her dread of having him out of her sight. She was continually thinking, and talking, of risks he would incur if he were allowed to be by himself. In this way she had unconsciously infected him with a "fixed idea" that something dreadful was sure to happen to him unless older persons were at hand to protect him. This fixed idea preying on his unusually impressionable mind, and keeping him in a constant state of emotional strain, was the decisive factor in the production of his day terrors. In proof whereof it need only be added that his hallucinations and general nervousness ceased to trouble him soon after corrective training was begun, supplemented by treatment by "suggestion" to rid him of the abnormal fear of being alone. Fortunately, though I might detail a number of "If I say to a small boy that a bear will eat him up, the effect upon his emotions entirely differs, whether I make the remark with portentous gravity and horror, or whether I say it with bubbling joviality as, evidently, a huge joke. In the first eventuality, the boy will rush to my side in terror and try to be saved from the bear, and a phobia is in course of construction; with the latter proceeding, the boy will laugh consumedly, and it would not take much to make him enter the cage and strike the bear. But, even when terrified, a child feels a refuge in the protection of his elders during the day, when they are rarely absent.... "At night, however, the child is alone, and his little consciousness cannot find the support of others. In many a case of night terrors, no great psychological skill is required to detect the influence of emotional stress as the prime factor in causing the alarming attacks. In one instance that has come to my knowledge, a seven-year-old girl was brought to a physician, with a history of both night and day terrors. She was subject, her mother said, to attacks of loud screaming, during which she seemed dazed and in an agony of fear. The attacks sometimes lasted ten minutes, and immediately afterwards the girl generally fell into a heavy sleep. Her night terrors were of the usual sort, except that on the occasion of the first attack she was in such a panic "She had gone to bed as usual," the mother said, in detailing this episode, "and seemed to be quite well, though I remember I thought she looked a little wild about the eyes. For an hour she slept quietly. Then, as I later learned, she woke up moaning, jumped out of bed, and made for the window." "And," asked the physician to whom the child had been taken, "had anything out of the way occurred to her that day?" "Nothing." "Are you sure of that?" "Well, nothing of real account, at all events. I have been told that somebody jokingly said to her that if she were not a good girl a black man would come to her room and carry her off. But this did not seem to disturb her much at the time." Hereupon, the situation became clear to the physician. Compare with this the case of a four-year-old boy, whose night terrors were accompanied by a strange hallucination that he saw the devil, and that the devil was trying to catch him. Every night for several weeks he would wake after one or two hours of sleep, would leap from bed with a shriek, and run wildly around the room, calling on his mother to save him and to drive the devil out of the house. Impressed by the recurrence of this hallucination, the physician in charge of the case questioned the boy's mother as to a possible explanation for his Anything which causes the instinct of fear to function abnormally may act with decisive force in bringing on night terrors. The telling of ghost stories and other gruesome tales of the supernatural has been productive of much harm in this respect. And, as brought out in the preceding chapter, cases of night terrors have similarly been traced to the hearing or With the night terrors left untreated psychologically, subsequent nervous ailments, perhaps lifelong invalidism, may further penalise the hapless victim of parental thoughtlessness. I am reminded of a certain patient of Doctor Sidis's, a woman afflicted with neurotic ills up to the age of sixty, and, when she first consulted the New England specialist, displaying a most complicated set of disease symptoms. She had kidney trouble, stomach trouble, frequent headaches, insomnia, and general nervousness. In especial, she suffered from an obsessive fear of becoming insane. This fear, at times, was so extreme that she would walk up and down her room night Step by step, by a method of psychological analysis of his own invention, he took his patient back through her life history. He found that, in middle life, she had had several distressing experiences, but none of them adequate to account for her hysteria. Always, there remained an obscure element which did not become clearly outlined until, in the course of the analysis, childhood memories began to emerge. Then it appeared that there had been a period of night Of a sensitive nervous organisation to begin with, she was overwhelmed by this experience. She could not get the image of the insane woman out of her mind, and the fearful thought kept coming again and again to her, "Do little girls ever go insane?" Then followed the night terrors, to be "outgrown" in due course. But the analysis revealed that, though the memory of her experience with the insane woman had gradually faded from conscious recollection, it had never been subconsciously forgotten. Even now, fifty-five years later, she still saw this woman in her dreams. It was the baneful influence of this shock that had given rise to her obsessive fear of insanity and had prepared the ground for the condition of abnormal suggestibility making possible the hysterical imitation of organic kidney and Now the question comes: If night terrors are so portentous a danger-signal, how prevent the development of the mentally disturbed and nervously strained condition which they indicate? This question has, perhaps, been sufficiently answered in previous chapters. Here I would simply reaffirm that emotional control is the great object to be kept steadily in view. It is, indeed, significant that night terrors are most likely to appear in children having a nervous, excitable father or mother. The emotionality, the chronic worrying and anxiety of the parent infect the child by the power of psychic contagion and make him fall an easy prey to any disquieting experience. And if, despite well-ordered moral training and the benign influence of a good parental example, the child shows a tendency to develop night terrors—what then? Well, here is how one psychologically enlightened parent nipped in the bud a fear-bred "For several weeks my boy, three and a half years old, had been visiting the zoÖlogical garden every afternoon, in the company of a French maid of exceptionally forceful character, and apparently free from the superstitiousness of the average nurse. For a long time all went well, until one evening the boy began to cry soon after he was left for the night. At this unusual occurrence, I mounted the stairs and inquired the cause of the boy's trouble. "He said there were lions in the house and that he did not want to stay alone, as he was afraid they would eat him. The source of the idea had been that the lions had roared more loudly than usual on that particular afternoon, and he had been much impressed, standing for some time quite motionless before the cage, though terrified. I soon convinced the boy that the lions had to remain in their cages, and could not get out; hence, there were none in the "In this way the state of terror was dismissed, and the feeling of protection was induced before we returned to the subject of the lions. Then we made rather a joke of the funny roaring of the lions before we had finished, and he finally lay down, with the solemn purpose to go to sleep and think, as I suggested, of the tramcars and motors passing outside his open window. It was all very simple substitution, but it was the prevention of what might have become a serious fear-psychosis if injudiciously handled." It should be added that special need for training in emotional control is indicated if a child begins to be troubled, not by night terrors, but by another and more common childhood malady—somnambulism. Sometimes he can do this by closely observing the behaviour of the child in his waking moments, and the trend of his waking thoughts. Or he can do it by gaining the child's confidence and questioning him as to any fears, worries, or griefs that may be disturbing him. If, as will often happen, the child insists, it may be in all sincerity, that nothing is troubling him, there is yet another avenue of information open to the parent—namely, by questioning the child about his dreams. Through studying his dreams, in fact, it is possible to gain clearer insight into his mental life than perhaps by any other means. Again and again, as we have seen, the modern psychologist has made use of dream-analysis with illuminating results. Parents can and should similarly analyse their children's dreams. And I feel justified in predicting that parents of the future, alert to detect and correct any undesirable trends in their children's mental and moral development, will make frequent use of dream-analysis as an aid in successful child-rearing. The helpfulness of dream-analysis to parents comes from the fact that the dreams of children usually relate either to things which the children dread, or things which they desire. This is also true of the dreams of adults, as shown by the analysis of thousands of dreams. In the case of adults, however, the fear or the desire mirrored by the dream is nearly always masked by the variety and seeming absurdity or incongruity of the dream-images. As when, for example, a complicated, fantastic dream of adventure in an out-of-the-way part of the world is found, on examination, to be connected with a secret longing for marriage. Accordingly, prolonged and tedious analysis is often needed to get at the true meaning of an adult's dreams. In the case of children's dreams, the opposite is the rule. There is little repression or distortion, the dream dealing directly with what is uppermost in the dreamer's waking mind, and emphasising the fears or fulfilling the wishes of his waking life. This is what makes dream-analysis both easy and "It was after school, and I went with other boys to a candy store, and the storekeeper told us we could have anything we wanted. We had a fine time. I filled my pockets with chocolates and caramels and peanut candy, besides what I ate while I was in the store. "I was at a party, and there was plenty to eat and drink. We had sandwiches and lemonade, ice cream and cake. After it was over, they told us we could take away all the food that was not eaten. "There was a fire in the next street, and I went to see the firemen at work. It was rainy and cold, and somebody brought out coffee and cake for the firemen. There was more than they could eat, so they gave me some." Dreamed by a small boy living in a poor home, dreams like these would be of a pathetic, rather The frequency with which dreams of a given type are dreamed has, indeed, much to do with their significance as indicators of character defects. An occasional dream of gorging one's self—or, say, of being the centre of attraction at an evening party—would not be valid ground for indicting a little boy of greed, or a little girl of vanity. But, if such dreams are habitual, or if, despite a seeming variety in the dreams reported by son or daughter, there is And, as emphasised by the experiences of many of the youthful nervous patients whose case-histories have been given in this book, dream-analysis should particularly be utilised to help children who—being free from adenoids, eye-strain, or other adverse physical conditions—show a sudden and unfavourable change in disposition. Some cause of emotional stress is undoubtedly present, and it may be taken for granted that the child will betray, through the content of his dreams, what is troubling his mind. Dream-analysis will thus give insight into secret jealousies, secret desires, secret fears, secret mental conflicts of many kinds, that are provocative both of unfavourable changes in character and of outright ill health. One such conflict, to which I have already referred But let me quote, at this point, the findings of an English medical psychologist, Doctor Ernest Jones, "The extent to which such matters occupy the mind of the young child," says Doctor Jones, "is always underestimated by adults, and is impossible to determine by a casual examination, for, on the one hand, the later memories for these years are always deficient and erroneous, and, on the other hand, this aspect of the child's mind is rarely accessible to direct inquiry, on account of the barrier always existing on the subject between child and adult. As the child grows older, the desires and tendencies in question meet with such obstacles as an increasing sense of shame, guilt, wrongness, remorse, and so on, and are fought against by the child, who now half-consciously strives to get away from them, to forget them, or, as it is technically termed, to "repress" them. The repressed mental processes are later thus forgotten, and, along with them, a major part of the mental experiences associated "The desires, thoughts, impulses, tendencies, and wishes thus repressed do not, however, die; they live on, but come to expression in other forms. Their energy is directed along more useful paths, a process known as "sublimation," and upon the extent and kind of this sublimation depends a great deal of the future interests and activities of the individual." Under certain conditions, instead of smooth, successful sublimation, there may be mental conflict, with nervous or mental maladies as a possible result. To this undesirable outcome the parental course sometimes contributes materially. Again, I quote Doctor Jones: "It is almost a regular occurrence for children of the age of four or five to turn from their parents, to withdraw into themselves, and to pursue private speculations about the topics concerning which they have been denied information, whether by a direct Of course, readers of these pages scarcely need to be reminded, conflict over questions of birth and sex is only one form of emotional stress that may occasion night terrors, somnambulism, changes in character, and unmistakable nervous ailments. Whatever the stress, it will be indicated by the child's dreams, either directly or symbolically. Which, of itself, is abundant reason for parents to gain knowledge of at least the chief principles of scientific dream-interpretation. |