Pedro has night terrors too. I always wake him up. It's hard not to, actually, because he thinks he's already awake. His eyes are open, his speech is clear, he seems lucid. He often gets up and turns on the lights himself. His are almost always about some sort of vermin -- spiders, rats, centipedes -- in our bedroom. Sometimes it's one, sometimes it's hundreds. He pulled my out of bed by me feet one night because he thought the sheets were crawling with fire ants. He can still see them after he turns the lights on, and I have to go stand in the place where he sees something and try to touch this invisible threat to prove that it's not there. It's a full-blown hallucination -- audio, visual, and tactile. And no, he's never experimented with any kind of recreational drug.
These are distinct from nightmares, which I have more frequently than he does. They always occur during the first hour of sleep -- that's non-REM sleep, by the way -- and his parents tell me he's had them since he was about two or three. Even after getting up, turning on the lights, being convinced that he was only dreaming, etc. -- a process that can take upwards of thirty minutes -- he usually doesn't remember the event in the morning. Sometimes he'll have the vague impression that something happened, but only after I've mentioned it to him. I usually don't even tell him any more unless he has more than three in a week. At that point, I know something is stressing him out that needs to be addressed.
LFM, don't feel bad. As a kid (6 - 10), I had a recurrent nightmare about being chased down and eaten alive by very small dinosaurs in our kitchen. It took me about four years of having the same dream before I figured out: don't hide under the table. The wooly mammoth will totally pull you out with his trunk.