Question: My now six-year-old daughter had night terrors as a toddler for about six months and then grew out of them. Her dad’s family has a history of sleepwalking and she sometimes seems to wake a few hours after falling asleep, sits up, says something nonsensical and falls back to sleep quickly.
In the past month she has had two identical, strange incidents. She goes to sleep and after about less than 5 minutes she wakes crying about a drawing she says she accidentally gave to her kindergarten teacher in june. She yells that she didn’t mean to give it to her teacher and wants it back now. She cannot be consoled. She seems fully awake but completely irrational. She never mentions this picture during the day and when I brought it up once she didn’t know what I was talking about.At first, since it happened so soon after she fell asleep I thought maybe she was just having a tantrum and trying to delay falling asleep. Now I wonder if it is a new manifestation of her old night terrors brought on by exhaustion (she has a later bedtime in the summer) or worries about first grade.Could she really be having a night terror after being asleep for just a minute or two? Thanks for any light you can shed on this.