Nightmares?

[lmk1]

DS (almost 2.5 years old) wakes up at random times during the night (not consistently) yelling/crying "No NO NO" or "STOP STOP STOP". We always co-slept, but for the past few months he's been sleeping on a futon in our room, about 1 foot away from our bed and usually whoever is putting him to bed, falls asleep with him, so we're still somewhat doing co-sleeping. When he wakes up screaming, he tends to kick/or push whoever's in bed with him out, but doesn't want us to go away, and cries for water, but if you give him a sippy cup, he'll throw it down. He just seems very rattled and doesn't know what he wants...like whatever he was dreaming about is still with him. He'll eventually fall asleep within 15 min or so of waking up. He's never seemed afraid of the dark (and it's not super dark in our bedroom as we live in a condo and you can see lights from other buildings), nor does he know concepts like "monsters", etc. What else could be setting him off?

[sarahtdubb]

My son (also 2.5) is doing something similar--- he will wake up crying and crying and won't let us cuddle him or touch him at all. The other night he cried for about 5 minutes and then said "my balloon! my balloon!" so my guess was that he had a dream about a balloon (a balloon popping would definitely qualify as a nightmare for him, he LOVES balloons!). He woke up screaming from a nap once and it took me a while to realize he was saying "the dolphin!!!"

Eventually he calms down and goes back to sleep. I've interpreted the situation as him having a dream, waking up and having trouble discerning dream/reality, and in general being in a tired daze. it's kind of like he isn't even fully awake, so we can't comfort him without breaking him out of it!

[Letitia]

My daughter went through something like this between maybe 2-1/4 and 2-3/4. She would wake up and be screaming something that just sounded like nonsense. The one I remember off the top of my head, which sounds funny now but it wasn't at the time, was "I NEED A HYENA!" She would be too agitated to accept comforting for a couple minutes, then would settle down and let us rock her. I don't know what it was. She wasn't verbal enough at the time to explain it to us in the morning, and she was way too upset to try to explain it at night.