Posted 10:14 PM by Danielle
i don't want to scare you so let me preface this by saying that we are both ok.

last night, something really scary happened to me and josh.

it was about 11:30 pm, we were both in bed. josh had fallen asleep but i was half looking at a magazine, half watching south park. at one point, josh's legged twitched and felt my lef. he forgot i was there and jumped out of the bed, terrified of me, screaming and yelling. he backed into the corner screaming "get away from me! who are you? go away!" at first i thought there was someone in the room or even that there was a mouse in the bed (we had seen one running around a few times) so i got scared too. i started going towards him, but that freaked him out even more because he thought i was an impostor and was trying to kill him. he pushed me away and then started punching me. i covered my head and dropped to the floor, trying to protect myself. i started creeping towards the bed. he said, "sit down! just sit down!" so i did and put my hands down and then started crying. then he sort of snapped out of it. he said he realized that it was just me, sitting on the bed, crying and scared.

even after he snapped out of it, we were both really upset and scared. we didn't know if it would happen again if he went back to sleep. he was even wondering if he needed to check himself into a mental hospital. his dad is a psychologist but i suggested he call his dad's friend, this guy bob who is a psychologist too and a close family friend. bob seemed to feel that it was some sort of dissociative nightmare and suggested that josh have a glass of scotch and try to relax a little and go to sleep.

he had acted totally delusional, hallucinating that i was some stranger in the bed (he forgot that i was home), who was there to kill him. he thought that either he was me and i was an imposter danielle or that he was himself and i was just an imposter danielle.

we both talked to our therapists today who agreed that it was "night terror" most likely brought on by the following things: he had had an extremely stressful week (stressful in general, plus he hates his job). when i was in baltimore monday-friday josh was scared of being in the apartment alone. then on saturday night, we were both sleeping when i heard someone knocking on our door at 4 am in the morning and then a lot of noise upstairs (our upstairs neighbors are really loud, play their music loud, stomp around, at all hours).

fortunately, he didn't harm me too badly. my left jaw has a small black and blue. my neck and left side of my torso hurt too but i don't know if he had hit me there. he feels really badly about hitting me and scaring me. he's scared of it happening again. at least now i know not to go towards him if he's scared but i genuinely believed while it was going on that he was terrified because we were both in danger. now, almost 24 hours later, what is scaring me is the memory of seeing him in the corner screaming at me, completely terrified and afraid for his life. i have the terrified look on his face frozen in my memory. the whole thing happened so quickly but it felt like much longer of course. i'm not even positive of the sequence of events. it was like something out of a david lynch movie.