Confusional Arousal

I know what inspired the movie Exorcist. Just imagine a kid waking up at night and screaming. Mother enters the room, "Mommy's right here. Everything's okay!" and the mother touches the child's arm. The child starts screaming twice as loudly as if touched with burning iron. The father joins the scene and also tries to calm the child who still hasn't opened her eyes. The child cries and cries and screams and then cries some more for 10 minutes while both parents are confused. Then she walkes around the room being angry at everything  and suddenly calms and goes back to sleep. In the morning the child is happy and playful as if it had all been a dream. 

The contrast between nighttime Siiri  and daytime Siiri and is like the difference between night and day, or the difference between being possessed by a demon or not being possessed.  (A lot of good that baptism did.  ). I've done a lot of Google research and it's actually a sort of sleep disorder ( a parasomnia) called confusional arousal. It mostly affects infants and toddlers. It's almost like a form of sleepwalking, because the child is still asleep during the episode. Siiri is very difficult to wake up when it happens. At first we tried to wake her up every time. What else are you going to do if the child is screaming at 3 a.m. for no particular reason. It sometimes worked but usually it just made her mad. And I really mean MAD! She was still not very responsive, except she started making demands. "Bunny doesn't want to be tucked in! BUNNY DOESN'T WANT TO BE TUCKED IN! BUNNY...  "

A few days ago she made up a new demand "Put Siiri back!". Neither me nor Erkki knew what she meant by it until Siiri started demanding it in the middle of the night, screaming it as loud as she can. Finally Erkki picked her up and placed her in the last place she had been standing and that solved it. Erkki must have casually nudged Siiri, thus "helping" her move further and now had to restore Siiri's location in the room. You see, any kind of help is completely forbidden at night. For Siiri it's all about "myself!". I do like to encourage Siiri to try to open buttons herself, open the door herself, put on clothing herself, but it's not quite the same when a sleep deprived (or still askeep fidgety toddler picks up a class full of water, says, "I will do it myself." and then attempts to climb and sit on the bed while still holding the glass. If I take away the glass, she will say (I mean, scream as loud as possible), "do not help me!". 

Some of the demands are perfectly reasonable. If a stuffed toy falls off the bed and she wants to climb down and get it, it's a perfectly reasonable request. However, if she holds on to her thumb with the other hand and cries, "Remove finger!", that's not quite as reasonable. I thought she was simply confused but then she told me to get the scissors from the kitchen to cut the finger off.  There's also a thing with hating her left hand. At night, Siiri's left hand isn't allowed to do anything. It can't help adjust the blanket or pick up a stuffed toy. Sometimes it isn't even allowed to help hold that glass of water. Sometimes Siiri lets me help her hold the glass with my right hand, but not with the left hand.

The nighttime tantrums are really annoying and cause sleep deprivation to all of us. It's been going on for months, with some nights worse than others. Sometimes all is quiet for weeks and then sometimes there isn't a single quiet night for a week. Lately it happens several times a week.  After I read up on confusional arousal (or sleep terrors, whatever the difference really is), I found out we're not supposed to wake her up at all. Actually we had tried just waiting out the crying but only for a few minutes at a time and then we interfered. When we finally tried to not interact with her in any way during the episode, she cried for 6 minutes and then simply went back to sleep, not saying anything or doing anything. It won't always work though. Even touching the blanket in the wrong way can end with 30 minutes of confused tantrum. I call it confused because even if she gets exactly what she wants, she decides she wanted something completely different in stead. 

Confusional arousal is really interfering with potty training.  During the day she doesn't use diapers and doesn't have any accidents. She often wakes up in the morning completely dry, except when she has one of those nighttime confusional arousal episodes and can't make it to the bathroom in time. She tries, but it's just doomed effort. She tries to do everything with only her right hand, including taking off her pants and climbing on the toilet seat.  When something fails, she has to do it again from start, all while crying and screaming. By the time she's sitting, it's 20 minutes later and too late.

Some mothers think that the episodes are caused by discomforts such as wanting to pee or being too hot or too cold. Doctors are mostly just confused themselves. The description of the episodes varies a lot but tantrums are rarely mentioned. They often say that interacting with the child will make the situation worse but they don't say that the child might want to cut her finger off. One thing that all the medical descriptions say is that lack of sleep causes such parasomnias as night terrors and confusional arousals. And since parasomnias  cause lack of sleep, the condition starts to feed itself. For Siiri, lack of sleep is most definitely an issue. It takes HOURS to get her to fall asleep. Lately we start putting her to bed at 8 or 8.30 but she falls asleep near midnight. Nap time isn't much better: I read her the stories at 1.30 and she falls asleep around 3 p.m. or later. The smartest solution suggestion to a similar problem was to put the child to sleep even earlier, at 7 p.m. because of the child's circadian rhythm. If we do that, Siiri can only see Erkki in her dreams. I don't like that solution one bit but we might not have a choice. 

...or perhaps a priest with holy water would be more convenient.