Female rabbit has nightmares (?)

Hi,

I was wondering if any of you has had, or heard of, bunnies with night terrors?

My nearly 2- year old girl has had nightmares every couple weeks since she was around 5 months old. She was always in a different room than us, and she’d wake us up in the middle of the night, thumping really loud. We thought she saw some predators in the garden, and after a while we moved her to a different room. The nightmares would happen anyway, and I’d need to go downstairs to calm her down.

The “thumping” nightmares are mostly over since she moved in with her little brother over a year ago, but instead, she seems to be having sort of “sleepwalking” night terrors. To be clear- her little brother has never had one, it’s only her.

We’ve had a baby camera in their room, so we can see what happens; She’s wide awake and out of the blue she notices “something” in the room, and she creeps up very cautiously towards “it”. At some point she gets seriously scared and runs away for her life, bumping into the cage walls, to hide in a corner or under their doll bed. Her little brother seems totally confused, he never seems to “see” what she does. He either doesn’t react at all to her freaking out, or gets scared of the sudden rattle she makes, poor fella.

The whole thing is quite disturbing for a couple reasons: she runs into the play pen walls so hard she usually kicks away some tiles (I constructed a 2,2x1,3m pen out of those wire storage cubicle tiles). Last time it happened it ended up with a vet emergency visit, as I noticed her limp badly- thankfully it was just a swollen toe from a badly broken toe nail *.
So it’s scary, cos she’s capable of hurting herself in fear

Second, she doesn’t recognize me at all when I come in half a minute later to check on them. She gets totally scared of me, as if I was a huge threat, and will run away in panic. The weird thing is, it can take up to a couple of MINUTES for her to “wake up” and recognize me, after which she seems anxious, but will be normal with me (accept pets and comfort treats). That’s a thing that really freaks me out, and it takes longer and longer...

I wonder if you’ve had any similar experiences?

Those nightmares only happen at night, and are an opposite of what Zelda is normally - adventurous, courageous and curious rabbit, always looking for trouble.


*The broken toe, which had to be clipped at its base at the vet made us disassemble the play pen for safety reasons and now the buns live a play- tent and are fully free- roaming in their room.

Hm, my buck sometimes thumps me out of sleep, seems irritated. Turned out that he had some gas, when he does this I give him a tummy massage (yeah, in the middle of the night) and a little oatmeal drenched in Simethicone.

Guess he just doesn't feel well, but can't figure out why. Thumping might actually help him, any movement is good.

She could be hearing or smelling something that is scaring her. Could be as simple as a mouse skittering somewhere, or I've even heard of rabbits that were scared of spiders. Once they get freaked out it can take some time for them to settle back down and come back to their senses. You're right, there is a high risk of injury occurring. I know of someones rabbit that slammed into the pen wall and broke it's jaw. Maybe providing lots of tunnels and hiding spots could help reduce the risk of injury, since she will have more places to hide if she does get freaked out.

Any possibility it looks at all like a seizure?

Preitler said:

Hm, my buck sometimes thumps me out of sleep, seems irritated. Turned out that he had some gas, when he does this I give him a tummy massage (yeah, in the middle of the night) and a little oatmeal drenched in Simethicone.

Guess he just doesn't feel well, but can't figure out why. Thumping might actually help him, any movement is good.

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Thanks, I never looked at it that way! It’s been quiet so far since we moved them into the tent, will see how it goes.

JBun said:

She could be hearing or smelling something that is scaring her. Could be as simple as a mouse skittering somewhere, or I've even heard of rabbits that were scared of spiders. Once they get freaked out it can take some time for them to settle back down and come back to their senses. You're right, there is a high risk of injury occurring. I know of someones rabbit that slammed into the pen wall and broke it's jaw. Maybe providing lots of tunnels and hiding spots could help reduce the risk of injury, since she will have more places to hide if she does get freaked out.

Any possibility it looks at all like a seizure?

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Thanks, no idea what could scare her off. The camera doesn’t pick up any other noises, they must be so quiet...
Sorry, what do you mean by seizure?

Zelda&Linky said:

Hi,

I was wondering if any of you has had, or heard of, bunnies with night terrors?

Click to expand...

Hi there!
I hope you won't listen to any vet who might recommend taking some drugs (like valium) to make your bunny sleep. Your bunny is totally healthy and you should provide safe environment for her to exclude traumatic possibilities.
What you describe happens in kittens (meaning cat kids) and small infants until they properly tune in their brain waves to our reality. I had a blind cat who totally viewed the "gray zone" well, actually he had normal vision there, not here in our world. So he saw things, and even played with them or was pushed by them. My nephew is now crossing the line when he is stopping 'seeing things' and starting to learn and use human language, but even very recently he used to have visions, both when awake and half-awake (or half asleep as you wish). Me and my sister, both prone to the same experience, we call this "gray zone" (an intermediate area between 'here' and 'there', our normal reality and out-of-body-experience zone or whatever they call it) and i am not going to describe my personal visions within the same. But the bunny as a purely prey animal when in nature should really see something that looks like a nightmare. Even me, an old man who saw a lot in his life, even i sometimes was scared shitless...

Wow, it's cool to hear from someone else who has experienced that sort of phenomenon in animals... my husband and I have often felt over the years that a couple of our cats were seeing a world we couldn't. I remember back when we had Penny, she would sit upright on a box in the bathroom for HOURS and behave as though she was listening to/having a conversation with something unseen - it was the strangest thing. Our current oddball cat, Claire, is extremely skittish and also seems to be seeing stimuli that no one else is.

Imbrium said:

Wow, it's cool to hear from someone else who has experienced that sort of phenomenon in animals... my husband and I have often felt over the years that a couple of our cats were seeing a world we couldn't. I remember back when we had Penny, she would sit upright on a box in the bathroom for HOURS and behave as though she was listening to/having a conversation with something unseen - it was the strangest thing. Our current oddball cat, Claire, is extremely skittish and also seems to be seeing stimuli that no one else is.

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You know, out blind cat did not live long enough to observe him as an adult cat. Unfortunately, he died of some unprecised virus infection at the age of 1. But throughout his life, having no eyes entirely, he was very well oriented in the apartment, and even jumped high to catch something hanging on the wall high above the floor, an object he obviously should not have had any idea of. And when playing and exercising around he sometimes would bump into something invisible, or this (invisible something) would push him aside despite his obvious effort to resist! Me and my sis were amazed but immediately understood the situation because both went through some 'permutation' previously which brought about different phenomena. Long before this, when i was dying of anemia, i started to leave my body and later learned to manage this activity after reading some books by Castaneda and Co. etc don't remember names. As an industrial technologist i was always sceptical abt various "experiences", but when you totally get "out" of your body all scepticism evaporates naturally. There is also an intermediate situation when you are still inside but see the surroundings quite clearly despite being aware of your being asleep. This i call "gray zone" and here, i believe, those things occur which are observed by the cats, kittens and other kids. It is not completely out of our range and it is populated. My sister, she totally lands into this gray zone when she is extremely exhausted and out of sleep for a long time. And she hates it. As for me, sometimes i experience this "sleeping paralysis" when you know your body is asleep, and very weird and totally very real occurrences are going on around you but you cannot move a finger. When my nephew was already started being able to explain himself he told once (last week) that a huge black trunk came to take him and was waiting in the corner of the room. Mommy was talking to him and explaining, but he could not stop looking at the same corner in terror until my sister invented some "magic" trick and "shut the trunk" (of course that was a perfectly empty corner) which she of course could not see.
Of course we cannot help our pets in similar situations but at least we can understand them and restructure environment to make them be as safe as possible.
When i see cats looking into space and listening something i cannot hear i believe there are many things we don't know about our world.
There is much more i can tell about that, but i am out of time already. Maybe, once upon a time i will complete a book, i already started three of them...
Cheers!
Kiss and cuddle with all your precious pets!!

Wow, I didn’t expect to see such answers in the bunny forum! It’s really fascinating to read, really happy to see the alternative approach to the problem

I must say myself, I try to stick to realistic explanations for my bun’s night terrors, but... It did cross my mind she could be seeing things my eyes can’t see, my ears can’t hear and my human nose can’t smell... Maybe they can see into astral sphere? Whatever it is, I’m not sure I can help my bunny much to prevent those nightmares :/

I believe animals (some, at least) can see aura if other living creatures. Cats are said to sense sickness in people, dogs are great in sensing your moods from far away. My own bunnies are masters at sensing my intentions towards them, sometimes even before I realize them myself!

mizunodaddy said:

There is much more i can tell about that, but i am out of time already. Maybe, once upon a time i will complete a book, i already started three of them...
Cheers!
Kiss and cuddle with all your precious pets!!

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I would definitely be one of the first to read your books I never experienced any OBE, or lucid dreams myself, (too scared to try that for now!) but people do it all over the world and have done so since ever. I love to listen to other people telling about their experience, usually in interviews on YouTube. I’ve had a couple small unexplainable experiences in my short life myself, so I tend to think there’s more to this world than what our human senses can filter out

Lucid dreaming is crazy amounts of fun! It started by accident for me a number of years ago when I realized mid-dream that I was dreaming. I woke up right afterward, though. Those events repeated themselves periodically until I reached a point of being able to KNOW I was dreaming without it immediately terminating the dream. Just being able to keep it going after realizing I was dreaming was really cool... but in the last year or so, I started making small decisions to consciously alter the dream to some degree.

One morning last week, I had a really amazing series of lucid dreams (I'd wake up and fall right back asleep and go back to the dream). I remember at one point, I was going into a bar or restaurant and some guy was about to exit through the door I was heading towards - I concentrated for a split second on the fact that I wanted him out of the way and right before he reached the door from the inside, he did a u-turn back into the place and was out of my way! Later that morning, I was having a very vivid lucid dream that took place in my old house and I made a number of deliberate changes. The coolest one by far was when I walked outside to the street and made it start to rain... lightly at first, but then I increased it until it was a torrential downpour! The rain hitting my skin and soaking my clothes felt SO real. Finally, I channeled a bolt of lightening into my body and felt the surge of energy... after that, I lost control of the dream for a bit, perhaps because I'd used so much focus/energy and needed to recover a bit? I've never been able to alter a dream that drastically before without it falling apart.

Lol Imbrium, sounds like divergent when tris controls the simulations to her likings.