You're about to discover the difference between night terrors and nightmares, and what you can do to prevent them.

A nightmare is a dream that takes place during REM sleep. But this dream causes intense feelings of fear, invincibility, terror, distress, or extreme anxiety. These feelings usually awake little babies dreaming nightmares, with total or partial remembrance of what they dreamed.

A night terror is an episode of extreme fear during sleep, with no remembrance of the dream itself. The child awakes screaming and crying, without knowing what he dreamed, being unable to say what scared him so badly and having a state of horror that is likely to persist even after apparently awake. Unlike nightmares, night terrors occur during non-REM sleep (dreamless sleep.) Children wake up sweating, with a rapid pulse and frightened. They are not aware of what is around them and don't respond to attempts of calming them. The crisis may last from 10, 15, or 30 minutes.

The good thing is that there are children who fall asleep immediately after the crisis ended. And most of the times, children don't remember what scared them in their sleep. But in rare cases, they remember some fragmentary picture of the "dream".