‘He yelling in lower case’: Daughter can’t help but find the funny side when she overhears her dad’s night terrors

Sleep is a fascinating thing. Even the most cutting-edge medical breakthroughs have not yet been able to answer its myriad mysteries. We can go through an entire lifetime of insane experiences in just one sleep cycle, but what is actually happening to our unconscious bodies while we have these crazy dreams? One daughter captured her dad’s experience with sleep terrors and it’s drawing mixed reactions on TikTok.

“My dad has night terrors and randomly throughout the night I just hear this,” Taylor Gensolin shared over a recording of the noises her father makes while sleeping. They are essentially a combination of muffled anguished screams and would be terrifying in any other context, but the young woman, accustomed to her dad’s sleep behavior, couldn’t help but laugh.

While most viewers found his “lowercase screaming” hilarious, many other TikTok users, knowing sleep terrors are often associated with mental disabilities such as depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorders, didn’t find the situation funny at all. Some even had close experiences with relatives who suffer from the condition. “My dad has severe PTSD and has night terrors like this it breaks my heart he still relives such horrible things. Couldn’t imagine ever laughing,” one person said.

According to the Ireland Health Service Executive website, night terrors in adults can manifest via screams, shouts, and thrashing. They usually happen at the beginning of the sleep cycle and can last as long as 15 minutes. In addition to the mental conditions mentioned above, the sleep disorder can also be associated with obstructive sleep apnea, restless legs syndrome, or migraines, and could be tied to genetics. Sleep apnea, for example, is more common in older males, who are two to three times more likely to suffer from it than women, per the Mayo Clinic.

Taylor was quick to reply to these comments, posting another video with her now-conscious dad, who was sitting on the couch with his iPad watching ring-camera clips of himself farting so he could show his daughter’s social media followers which ones sounded the most like Chewbacca. “For those of you who feel bad for my dad — don’t. Because he absolutely is eating this up. He loves attention. Don’t feel bad, he wants you to laugh,” she said.

As for those whose minds were in the gutter, who immediately associated Taylor’s Dad’s noises with another kind of nightly activity, he had an answer for them too. Replying to someone who had commented on Taylor’s original video that her dad was actually “bustin’,” the older man said, in between fake laughs, “All you TikTokers, in TikTok land, with your TikTok fingers, on your TikTok keyboards (…) I don’t need help, I’m strong.”

Taylor’s dad is now a superstar not just on her profile but TikTok in general. Her video has collected more than six million views and Mr. Gensolin seems to be doing just fine. We’ve all got weird sleep patterns and habits that probably warrant a trip to the doctor’s office, after all.