serge bielanko's night terror blues.

Mar 28, 2025

Every town has an Elm Street.

-Freddie Krueger

There are these things called night terrors. They mostly happen in little kids under the age of 12 and that doesn’t seem fair to me. Little kids don’t deserve anything like that. What happens (on the surface of things) is that the kid is asleep but then suddenly they are also talking excitedly or screaming or calling for help. They might be understandable or they might be incomprehensible. And apparently they don’t have any indication that what’s happening is actually happening to them either. Unlike nightmares (which something like 89% of the human population experiences) people experience night terrors at a much, much lower rate of frequency. Try something like 5-7% of children. Those that have night terrors (also known as sleep terrors since apparently they are not limited to night time) have no conscious memory of what happened, although they eventually wake up to a pounding heart and hyper state of panic or distress. But again: night terror people have zero recollection of what they just went through.

More fun facts?

Night terrors typically last anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes but they can go on as long as 20-30 minutes in some cases.

Most people who witness their kid in the throes of one of these report that it’s almost impossible to wake the child up during it. But I don’t have any solid proof on that one way or the other.

Also, these children frequently have their eyes wide open but are sound asleep. Just in case you needed a higher level of WTF-ness for any of this.

In addition, night terror people frequently get up out of bed and walk around. This can be very dangerous (duh) as well as God-awful freaky to stumble upon for the poor parents. Think ‘The Shining’ but instead of those twins it’s your kid down at the end of the hall bumping into the wall or standing at the top of the goddamn steps.

Strangely, modern science knows next to nothing about night terrors. It kind of seems as though very little research has been done either. I have no idea why. It might be because they’re so mysteriously creepy. Or it might be because they are too random or unusual. I get it either way; I mean, no one can imagine having to watch their beautiful child being dragged through some kind of an impenetrable state of terror-fueled parallel dimension.

Is it a deep dark triggering shot up out of the extreme subconscious?

That seems logical.

Is it the mind trying to tell the body something very, very critical?

That also makes a lot of sense to me.

Is it related to trauma?

That would ring true but if so… why are the kids so young? And are they the known victims of what we define as trauma/PTSD or cPTSD? Or is there more to the notion of trauma than any of us realize? Obviously, I have no idea but that all seems plausible as well in my opinion.

_____

It’s all just too much. Our brains, our nervous systems, our incredibly complex existence in this light pageant called living/ it’s just all too much more than any of us will ever wrap our peanut brains around. Even the best and brightest of us stand nimble and foolish in the face of what really happens out beyond the university parking lot. We’re all being groomed, it might seem at times, by the crooked fingers of demons we dare not address let alone try to fathom.

Dumbass human beings. All we do is bitch about stuff and break things. No wonder there are certain enlightened souls who see into the abyss. And no wonder they are so young and innocent and pure and afraid.

____

Without any hardcore studies to draw from on night terrors, it’s impossible to say just how many actual adults experience them, but various searches online seem to indicate that it’s a very small number indeed. Something like 2% of the world’s mature human beings experience night terrors. That’s the number my unscientific ass comes up with anyhow.

I guess that right there might be the reason no one takes the time to delve into these things, huh? You can’t make big money coming up with drugs for something hardly anyone has ever even heard of, you know? Night terrors? Pfff. Please. No way. Make weight loss miracle drugs. Get so rich you can’t even feel your feet anymore.

_____

So, yeah. I have these night terrors. I never wrote about it before because, frankly, I didn’t even know what they were. I’d never heard of such a thing. I only knew that for years now, at varying intervals of varying intensities, people who sleep near me would talk of times deep in the night when I would begin to scream/freak out/ curse/ beg for help/ and struggle to make my voice heard in ways that seemed as if I was in a nightmare.

So how do I know that’s not what I experience, right? How the hell do I know that I’m having night terrors and not plain old nightmares?

It’s easy. I don’t remember anything after they happen except this bizarre miasma of some sort of essence. But it’s only like these ripped shreds of some long ago life. Like memories of being raped by vikings or fighting with weird monkeys or some bonkers other life thing. I can’t even begin to explain it. I’ve always known that something was occurring sometimes in my night. But it always remained far from reality, distantly inexplicable, like the bizarre stench of cigarette in my shirt but I haven’t been anywhere near a smoker in a long time. Something is there. Something was here. But what? And how? And like… why?

_____

_____

How often?, I mumble to Arle.

“At least once a week now,” she whispers.

Her hand is in my hair, where it’s been since she used her long fingers to cut through the night and guide me out from this strange place I was. She puts here nails into my scalp and it feels so good; I have a breathless feeling, some sort of sense of a sense of something, but that’s all.

What woke you up?, I say, perplexed.

Her palm in the blackness presses smooth on my forehead. I gather that she is calming me. As if I’m a kid, you know? As if she’d woken a kid from some bad thing and the world rushes back in and there is the fear from before giving way to the relief of the now.

“You were screaming,” she responds. Her words are gentle in the dark. Her voice is warm on my skin. “You were having another bad dream.”

I was? But I wasn’t dreaming. She says nothing. I mean, I don’t remember anything. Her feet find mine. Down in our night ocean. I feel calm and mortified/ somehow safe and in harm’s way. What happened? I want to ask. But how could she know? Oh, how could my poor love know?

_____

In all of my mucho therapy, I have been given glimpses of what might be true. People are helpful but the world is cautious. This I understand. Or if not ‘understand’, well, at least I try to. After all, to tell someone they have known trauma is to introduce them to a new concept of living, one in which everything must be viewed from here on out through a certain filtered lens, whether they like it or not.

I suspect there are ways to hand someone something so hot and heavy and powerful, but I don’t know what they are. A diagnosis is affirmation perhaps. But maybe it’s also more than that, good or bad. I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t quite know what I’ve known.

My heart has been smashed, same as yours, I’m sure. And my memories are staged, like TVs lined up/ scenes paused to tell a story/ but there is/ I understand/ all of these other scenes that I’m not showing anyone. Or even seeing myself. Why? Because they live out behind the pauses, I guess. Because there was a million miles of technicolor footage scattered all over the yard last night, but I couldn’t bring myself to watch it. I don’t have the energy to wrap it all up, unravel the knots and tape things together that have split in the wind.

_____

What is trauma anyway? Everyone is saying it. Everyone is trying it on. Trauma. Trauma. Trauma. You gave me trauma, little mama. Motherfuckers. I don’t want to know. Vampires had me late last night. You fuckin’ cunts. Just let me go.

_____

They scream your name at night in the streets/ your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet.

-Bruce Springsteen

_____

Arle records them for me now. I asked her to- not long ago- so I could try to understand what all she was telling me. Things began to repeat themselves more and more over the last few years. And then more recently, much more frequently. Record them, I said. If you are awake and you can. She said okay. Now I have these sounds I could play you.

It’s fascination street/ macabre as hell, I won’t lie.

But at the same time it feels as if I’m listening to old cassettes of me being gutted by witches. The sounds are spine-chilling/ nothing less. Even if you are not me, I suspect you would listen for a moment or two and then have a feeling like you are being watched. Or indoctrinated by senseless evil.

It’s a night forest. My box fans on the audio sound autumnal. There is an expanse of space, of a hum so humming that it creates its own silence. I find it ghostly, but then again I would, huh? In the playbacks I listen for the solar bumps or the creature’s words/ something hidden in the savage long moment that defines the recording before I appear. As it goes, Arle wakes to the sound of me in my terror and she fumbles for her phone on the table by her side. It is pitch black but you know how it goes. We can see certain things with our hands. Familiar places/ tiny spaces/ between a metal cup of water and some cold medicine she knows that her phone will be there. She misses all knockdowns. She avoids all collision. Her fingers turn to the side and effortlessly she slices down into the canyon to land upon her machine, retrieve it silently, the light shining with the movement, her eyes blinded by the screen. It is as if a UFO has come. She blinks, squints, a mere moment has passed since I was hurtling my voice/ struggling to make sound/ but she knows it might be gone.

She moves into her app, hits record. She waits and I can only imagine that it is a feeling unlike any you or I have known. You are helpless next to someone you love while they are helpless on the other side of the universe. She could shake me, try to wake me, but what might come of it?

Record me please, I begged her.

Now she records and there is a pause in my sounds. There is only this upside down wilderness blowing. This heaving steady silence made of a trillion tiny sounds.

Then we hear something. It’s me, alright. It’s my voice but eerie and cutting and panicked. My words sound hard for me to muster. I am up against something. I am desperate to scare someone away. Get the fuck out! I moan. Get the fuuuckckc out of here! I scream, drawing it out, my brain apparently struggling. And then I wail. I mean wail, man. Like I’m being burned or sliced. My skin being pulled down off my bones like a wet sleeve.

I wail, I scream, it is terrifying to hear it and it isn’t uncommon, you see. This is me in the night some nights and I am despondent/ heaving with fear/ a long repetition of drawn out guttural cries/ one after another/ as if I’m somewhere far from here. Somewhere far from our bed. Somewhere far from this town. From this street between these ridges down in this valley beneath those stars.

The light of her phone shines on the back of my head and I scream and I scream. I say the names of actual people. I untie them from where I try to hide them and they float up into my face and I am so terrified by them, so afraid of who they are and what they do. Or what they did. I don’t know. I don’t even know why we meet again and again like this. In my darkest place. My love at my side. Fuck you, you fucking cunt! I wail. I say it at a very certain person. You see, I say their name too! I cry these various names and why, oh, why? It’s all seems so indicting, but what does it mean?

Then I wake, in time. 20 seconds later. Maybe a minute. Arle pulls me from my haunted woods. What?, I say. But I guess I already know. I can’t remember a thing but my skin feels so alive. My blood crashes in my veins. I lay there in our night bed. I feel her fingers wrapping around mine.

I remember nothing.

I just float in on the surf.

_____

What can I tell you?

Ever since I was a kid I have been having a recurring dream, a bonkers one. I’m out on Fayette Street in my childhood hometown. I’m a kid and I’m outside my Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop’s house. There’s an old regal maple tree there that probably was planted after a world war and I am always standing underneath it, outside Sam Webster’s house right by my grandparent’s rough and tumble hedges by the tall pine tree with the sap and the locust shells clinging to the eyeballish knots even though they are only husks now/ brittle crumbly coffin skins. Pork rind demons.

In the dream, it is always summer and I am always small. I reach out to the tree, raising my right hand to pinch a green leaf/ I can feel the smooth thin of it between my fingers. I pull slowly then, towards my head, down and down, the branch bending easily/ the cars on the big street/ the Tastykake box truck that follows me still/ revving from the corner by the deli/ by the pizza place/ moving in from behind me/ slipping into my corner eye and sounding like some crabber’s bay boat/ burrrring past as I pull the leaf down and then I see it. All over again. A fat black carpenter bee laying on the top of the leaf. Why is it there? How did I know? Or am I surprised? When did this happen? It never happened I don’t think, but here we are, a thousand times later, a million times later, this dream of mine like it’s all I’ve ever owned.

The bee: I see it. My fear is instantaneous. It moves so quick. Straight at my face. Decades of time and it keeps coming and coming and coming. Never an empty leaf. Does the Tastykake driver see what happens? Does he stop to watch me get stung?

I don’t know. No one knows. I black out in the moment before the bee and I meet. We are like some old Greek myth, the bee and I. Some purgatory where I go from my peaceful childhood place to this horror coming down.

I’m 53.

Why does this keep happening?

_____

Some say that if you die in your dreams you die in your bed. I don’t know. It seems a fine notion, honesty. I mean, why not? Anything that makes life interesting? I’m all for it. But no one can say for sure. We are nothing when we stand up to these things. These dreams and this night world where we are not who we pretend to be out there in the waking day.

I wonder to myself. Who are you when you drift away. Where do you go? And what do you see. Or fear? And why? Some people act so smart, so self assured. I loathe those types. I laugh too, at the crew of big earners, the intelligent exercisers. You have no idea what lies ahead. There is a reckoning, I suspect. Not a goofy Christian one or some other holy one or whatever. I’m talking about a pin drop in time’s fleeting instant at forever’s gates.

Full disclosure. I don’t use the words you use anymore. I don’t walk the same lanes as you or hear the same songs as you anymore either. Walls up, I learned so much from you. Even when you were trying to hurt me. Now I see you on a summers day. I see you in my Pop-Pop’s tree.

A harsh scar from all this living.

Thunder Pie

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