Totally Batshit Crazy

This morning, some time in the witching hours, I woke up to hear Dutch crying in her room. I went down the hall, and found her sitting up in bed wailing. I asked her what was wrong, and it quickly became apparent that she was in a state she occasionally reaches when she wakes up in the middle of the night - desperately, inexplicably, inconsolably upset. She was pretty hard to understand, what with all the bloody-murder screaming, but I did make out several things she was upset about. She had to pee, but refused to pee in the toilet, potty, or the training pants she was wearing. Her leg was angry at her (this freaked me out, since it rang some bells from the article I had recently read about Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, one aspect of which is that patients have adversarial relationships with their hands and will chew their fingers off or claw their own eye out). She couldn't lie down. She was SO tired. She wanted to be alone. She didn't want me to leave. She wanted to hug me. She didn't want me to hold her. She wanted to drink milk. She wanted to wear pants. She wanted to be naked.

I wanted her to be quiet so I could go back to sleep. I really really wanted that.

Nothing I did (including, to my shame, yelling at her) could console her. She was drooling, screaming, hitting at me, gasping, shoving her hands down her throat and gagging. She finally calmed down, after the episode had gone on about 10 minutes, and fairly quickly fell asleep. It felt like it just drew to a close by itself, but not through anything I did, though I did find that keeping up a stream of soothing talk (drawing from my experience with the self-hypnosis guy!) seemed to help. It was an unpleasant but kind of interesting window into the weirdness of the brain. I asked her about it this morning, after she woke up all cheerful and ready for the day, and she didn't want to talk about it, which I can understand. It's scary to meet your unfettered emotional wiring in the middle of the night.