“Daddy you look tired, did you not sleep well last night?”
There is a strange kind of quiet when you are up at 2 am, but there are few things scarier than the silence breaking by hearing a noise, checking the monitor and realizing that your child has left their room and is walking down steps. Oh, and by the way, they aren’t awake.
Every fear goes through your mind as you try to stop them, knowing they’re not actually awake. As I raced out of my room, Adam was right in front of me, and yet, I still couldn’t reach him. I wanted to do something to help make things better without making the situation worse, where he would fall or something more serious. He called out like he was looking for someone, or something, but he didn’t realize that I was right there.
Adam has had bad dreams since he was much younger and even sometimes what one would call night terrors. But I don’t remember him actually getting out of his bed and out of his room in this way until recently. And if you ask him in the morning about it, he has no idea what happened unless he actually woke up from it. If he managed to resettle himself, then he had no memory of the episode. We, on the other hand, remember every moment.
As we try to figure this all out, we are asking lots of questions. Why is this happening? Is it something that happened to Adam during the day? Is it something he saw on TV? Is there something going on before bed? And then once he is having a bad dream or sleepwalking, what can we do to keep him safe without scaring him? It’s not really something either of us are familiar with. When I put my head down on the pillow, I’m out for the night. And Sarah, although a light sleeper, stays in bed once she closes her eyes too.
I started reading, and that scared me more. We had already put gates back up at the top of the steps just in case. Everything said don’t wake your child because not only is it hard to do, it could make them even more agitated. Then I started seeing things about alarms on doors and windows. How far is too far? One of the hardest things about this is that not every night is the same. So it’s difficult to get a pattern that lets us come up with solutions.
We’ve tried lots of different things. We’ve changed what we do at night, trying to have a more regular bedtime routine that includes practicing his reading. Some nights we have better success than others, with Adam sleeping through the night quietly. But even when he does get a good night’s sleep, we probably won’t because of the anticipation of what might happen. Even the potential of him getting up makes it that much harder for us to get settled – that’s just added to everything else that might be on our minds from the day.
Adam may not remember the nights getting out of bed or crying out, but it’s something I will never forget. So while we hope this is something he grows out of as he gets older, if you’ve got a sleepwalker that you love, we are open to suggestions. Because we are doing our best to keep him safe while also trying to figure out how we can rest easy each time he closes his eyes.
