Is it normal to sometimes get panic attacks when waking up?

Ever since I was a kid I've experienced a weird phenomenon. Sometimes, quite rarely, when I woke up I would fall into a state of complete fear and panic for 5 to 10 minutes. Usually my mother held me until I calmed down. When I was younger I would explain it as "hearing a lot of shouting voices in my head", but I could never hear actual meaningful words, simply noise as you would hear in some busy place.

As I grew up the essence of the fear changed, and it started happening more rarely. Finally, it stopped occuring randomly at all, but would still happen almost every time I was ill and had high temperature. It worked the same way - I would be completely terrified for 5-10 minutes after waking up randomly in the middle of the night. Sadly, there are not enough words in any vocabulary to describe the feeling that caused that fear. The closest I could get when my family asked was that "everything felt enormous".

I remember that while in fear, speaking helped me. I had to hear some voice or sound to get that feeling away from me. I would make my mother turn on the computer just so I could hear some sounds and I'd speak to myself.

My guess is that my brain simply overheated or woke up too suddenly, but I'm wondering if someone has had a similar experience. I haven't felt it fully for about 2 years now, but now and then, when I'm laying in bed, drifting away, I feel a tiny bit of that feeling and I mumble out a word to hear some sound.