I have a 10 year old daughter. She goes to bed every night around 9:30 pm. Between 1 and 2 am she sits up in the bed for about 5 -10 seconds, then lays back down. The next morning she does not remember any of this.

I believe she is asleep when she does this. Her pediatrician prescribed medicine which has not helped the situation. Do you have any experience with this? Can you help us? Also she is not tired the next day. Other than this she is a normal girl... She is a little afraid of the dark.

—Steve, Mount Prospect, IL, USA

Hi Steve—

I believe your Daddy skills are right on! Your little girl almost certainly is sound asleep during these night-time awakenings, and the good news is that her behavior, though it is strange, is completely normal. In fact, it’s so normal among kids her age that I think you need to get a second opinion, preferably from a doctor who is a specialist in sleep disorders medicine, on whether she should be taking any medication.

Your daughter most likely is experiencing what are known as confusional arousals during sleep. Confusional arousals occur during deep, non-dreaming sleep, when the brain gets stuck, as it were, between sleeping and waking. The arousal is what causes the “awake-like” behavior—sitting up, perhaps talking incoherantly and acting disturbed or disoriented—but as you have noticed, she is atually doing this while most of her brain is sound asleep. This is what explains the confused speech and disorientation (she is not fully awake) and it explains her absence of memory for the experience. She never truly was awake.