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Comment by micheljansen | Hacker News Reader

My son has night terrors and if I were living in the Middle Ages, I would probably have called in a priest for an exorcism by now. I can absolutely imagine that in less enlightened times, where we did not have access to the internet, peer reviewed journals and MRI machines, people with night terrors were believed to be possessed by demons.

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I had night terrors for years as a 30 year old and I finally fixed them.

* Removed all blinking lights from my room. Cover up smoke detector LED or turn it off. This seems to trigger my night terrors.

* Let the brain rest before bed. No phone, screen, book, anything about 20-30 minutes before bed. Hop in the shower, hop in bed. Don't think.

We need more movies where the bad looking people/creatures are the good guys and the good looking people are the bad guys.

No, please, I'm tired of what Amazon-Netflix are doing. Don't make it worse!

Yeah, well I'm tired of the good guys always being better looking than the bad guys. Maybe I should try a Netflix subscription.

It’s not that sort of a spectrum though. Netflix has very specific goals in mind, it doesn’t represent reality either.

Reminds me of Clarke's Childhood's End, where the good guys have to wait decades before revealing their physical appearance, because they happen to look like the bad guys from a certain religion.

It wasn't happenstance, though. There is a specific reason as to why humanity's depictions of demons look the same as those aliens, and it's a critical plot point. (Can't say more or I'll spoil one of the best sci-fi books of all time for those who haven't read it).

Edit: it's also highly debatable whether the Overlords are in fact the good guys.

Don’t want to spoil it either, so only can reply that literature and movies are good at masking the real horrors of the world that most of the world has to live in. Can’t remember how well society was in the book though.

Hey I wanted you guys to know I picked up and read the book just from the curiosity you guys sparked in me from the descriptions in this thread!

I just finished reading it. The book was excellent! Definitely glad I read it!

Also I’m glad you guys were careful not to spoil what happens. It was very memorable!

Please no. An inversion of a trope is still just a trope.

Nothing wrong with tropes, they're the building blocks of stories.

It's an overused trope that people think is far more clever and subversive than it is.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InvertedTrope

just as much as we need stinky drinking water and deliciously tasting poison.

Maybe Nightbreed (1990) is a bit like this.

Nightmare stems from when a mare comes at night and sits on your chest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mare_(folklore) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nightmare

TIL: in French, "nightmare" is "cauchemar" and has the same etymology (the second part, at least).

And this is induced by sleep paralysis : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis

Nightmares differ from night terrors though. To quote Wikipedia:

Night terrors are distinct from nightmares.[31] In fact, in nightmares there are almost never vocalization or agitation, and if there are any, they are less strong in comparison to night terrors.[31] In addition, nightmares appear ordinarily during REM sleep in contrast to night terrors, which occur in NREM sleep.[2] Finally, individuals with nightmares can wake up completely and easily and have clear and detailed memories of their dreams.[2][31]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_terror

For a good description of what they are like, read the "Signs and Symptoms" section of that article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_terror#Signs_and_symptom...).

still might work

Would be interesting to see a paper published on the efficacy of the placebo effect in exorcisms.

Many parents use monster spray to combat night visions, seems effective.

If those were my parents I would have required them to spray every little corner of my room.

The idea is that you give the monster spray to the small child, who then ceases to be scared of monsters.

This didn't work one notable time when the monster turned out to be 50,000 bees, nesting behind the closet wall.

I think this is a John Dies at the End reference! If not, John Dies at the End references this. A salute to you either way! Great book series.

That may help for bad dreams, but not for night terrors (which are medically a different thing, where you are not consciously awake).

This presumes that some exorcisms are not placebos.

Prove they aren't. (only semiserious)

people still believe they have a self-consistent world view when they dismiss the extra-natural world just because it is not accessible by natural means. it's like "there are no forests because you can't drive in them because there are no motorways in them"

What other 'means' are there besides 'natural' ones?

If a world can only be accessed through very specific patterns in neuron activity, but not through “natural” physical measurements, this world is imaginary by definition.

Millions of dollars are awaiting those who can confidently sync their imagination at a distance, but all these people who claim these objective worlds real are traditionally “above money”, keeping us in the dark.

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