The Scream

My alarm went off this morning, and as I rolled over and turned it off, I knew my daughter was upstairs, turning off HER alarm. Next thing I know, there is a blood-curdling SCREAM. Sometimes she over-reacts to something, so I kept an ear open, but wasn't immediately concerned...until it didn't stop. She started screaming for me. We are talking that high pitched, half-crazed, someone-has-died, someone is unconscious on the floor, my-brother-is-hanging-from-his-foot-from-the-top-bunk, the-cat-is-dead-on-my-pillow screams. We are talking sheer terror. I don't think I have EVER left my bed and gotten upstairs that fast in my life.
I found her in the bathroom, still screaming. It took a minute to calm her down enough to understand the problem...she had turned off her alarm, and for some reason, the radio part of it had come on, full-blast, and would not turn off, no matter what she did.
To put it mildly, as soon as I got the roaring radio to turn off and got my heart to start beating again, I was feeling less than loving towards my darling daughter.
This was even way off the path of her normal behaviour, so I thought deeply about it over breakfast, and asked her a few things...I guess what happened was that she had a bad night full of nightmares, was only really half-awake when she turned off the alarm, and the best I can figure, it all tied itself into a reaction I would term as a night terror. It was just unbelievable...the reaction was WAAAAAAY out of proportion to the situation.
Poor kid.
But it's going to be days before I can get the sound of those screams out of my head. It was awful.
I hope that we never have to go through that again, either one of us!