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A description of childhood night horror by Rilke: 

"THE existence of the horrible in every particle of air! You breathe it in as something transparent; but inside you it condenses, hardens, assumes pointed, geometrical forms between your organs. For all the torments and the agonies wrought on scaffolds, in torture chambers, mad-houses, operating-theatres, under the vaults of bridges in late autumn: all these have a stubborn imperishability, all these persist and, jealous of all else that is, cling to their frightful reality. People would like to be allowed to forget many of these things; sleep softly files down the grooves they have made in their brains, but dreams drive sleep away and trace the furrows again. And then one wakes up panting and lets the gleam of a candle melt into the darkness, and drinks like sugared water the twilight quietude. But, alas, on how narrow a ledge this security rests! Only the slightest movement, and once again vision plunges beyond things known and friendly, and the contour but now so consoling, grows clearer as an outlined edge of terror. Beware of the light,that makes space more hollow; look not around to see whether, perchance, behind you as you sit up, a shadow has arisen that will master you. Better perhaps to have remained in the darkness, and your unconfined heart would have sought to bear the whole indistinguishable burden. You have now pulled yourself together; you perceive the limits of your being within your own hands; you trace from time to time with an uncertain gesture the outline of your face. And there is scarcely any room within you; and it almost calms you to think that nothing very large can abide in this restricted space; that even the unheard-of must become an inward thing and must shrink to fit itself to its surroundings. But outside — outside there is no limit to it. And when the level outside rises, it becomes higher within you as well, not in the vessels, which are partly under your own control, nor in the phlegm of your more impassive organs, but in the capillaries: it rises, sucked up through these tubes into the outermost branches of your infinitely ramified being. Hither it mounts, here it passes out over you, rising higher than your breath, to which you flee as to your last stand. Ah! whither then, whither then? Your heart drives you out of yourself, your heart pursues you, and you are almost frantic, and you cannot get back inside yourself again. Like a beetle that has been trodden on, you gush out of yourself, and your slight surface hardness and adaptability go for nothing."  __from Rilke <The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge>