The article I just read said that night terrors usually stop within a few weeks. Not so. My sister experienced night terrors and sleep walking for years. Much later, with her having become a drug addict and prostitute, my husband and I adopted her nearly-seven-year-old daughter. She also experienced night terrors and sleep walking for years. The night before school started when she was entering the fourth grade, about ten o'clock at night she leapt out of bed, ran out the back door, and vanished into the night. We lived less than a block from a river that has killed quite a few people, and we both tore out looking for her. About five minutes later she ran back in the back door, still sound asleep but screaming. I took her to the bathroom and washed her face with cold water. That didn't stop it. I swatted her lightly a couple of times on the bottom. That didn't stop it. I washed her face with cold water several more times, and she finally awoke. Much later, when she was having an asthma attack, she told me that was what she was having that night. In fact it definitely was not an asthma attack; there is asthma in the family and her birth mother had severe asthma, but what she was having was more like too-shallow breathing that did not allow her to get enough oxygen into her system until we got her fully awake.

Later she followed her birth mother's lifestyle, and ultimately, at age 26, was shot to death by Kansas police because she was in a car with a murderer.

I cannot help but wonder if sleep terrors are connected with the same receptor cells in the brain that cause substance abuse and addiction. Certainly I have lost a sister and a daughter to those problems, and came very near to losing a son over them.