What do scientists know about sleepwalking, and what can habitual somnambulists tell us?
One time, it played out in an abandoned mine. Or was it the basement of a ramshackle wooden house? In the pitch black, I navigated by touch against rough timber planks, bumping down passages with dead ends. Panic began to creep in. Something sinister was afoot yet escape was proving impossible.
Experts find somnambulism fascinating: why it happens, what goes on in a sleepwalker’s mind, what it can tell us about the human subconscious. But it’s also difficult to study. Researchers can obviously talk to sleepwalkers after the event, but catching them in the act under laboratory conditions is another matter.
“That’s why they’re doing things that people can do when they’re awake ... but they’re clearly not fully awake.” While dolphins intend to switch off half their brain capacity, though, in humans it’s clearly a glitch with no apparent evolutionary benefit. One way of looking at it, says Tuft, “is that the brain has a mechanism to promote sleep, it’s got a mechanism to promote ‘wake’ but it also has a third mechanism, which is the transition between wake and sleep, and that’s probably what’s disordered in these non-REM parasomnias. It’s also the mechanism that is disordered in narcolepsy.
Sleepwalking or night terrors are more likely to be triggered if a child’s sleep is disrupted by illness or if erratic sleep patterns cause them to miss out on sleep. The occasional outlying case might result from another sleep disorder such as sleep apnoea or might turn out to be a different condition altogether, such as epilepsy, Davey says. Most of the time, though, the cure is straightforward: “Making sure they get sufficient sleep is a very helpful strategy.
Sleepwalkers are unreliable witnesses. It’s typical for them to have no recollection of their nocturnal adventures, and if you wake one in the act they are groggy and confused. Still, anecdotally, some of us who walk report dreams, at least of a kind, and can remember vaguely what happened. My experience – sample size of one – suggests at least some walkers believe they are doingwhen heading off into the night. Some have reported having dramatic dreams: being chased, being attacked.
Indeed, “Sleep isn’t as black and white as some of the traditional teaching will have it,” says Kirk Kee, senior sleep physician at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. Until the day comes when we can see into somebody’s head and project their dreams onto a screen, we can only speculate about what is going on in there. Says Kee: “How would we ever know?”Photo: Getty Images.
Some sleepwalkers make it out their front door. I know because I’ve done it, and a parent interviewed for this article said their son had once escaped down the street. More complicated behaviours are much less common. There have been uncorroborated reports of people driving cars or walking long distances but “it’s incredibly rare”, says Colin Tuft. “It’s possible to go outside the house before walking down the street.
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