Once on holiday with a cousin, Renee, we shared hotel rooms to save money. One night, I woke up and there was Renee, walking around the large room, slowly and meticulously repacking her suitcase. In fact, normally she tended to throw items from a distance. The dim light in the room let me see the glassy look in her eyes. I spoke to her but she was in a different world. Next morning when I told her, Renee didn’t believe me. It creeped me out.
I thought about this experience for a while, remembering that when I was about three or four years old, my parents discovered me sleepwalking too. Some mornings I would wake to find my pillowcase separate to the pillow and folded neatly by my bed. My father’s solution was to tell me that he was going to put a bucket of water on each side of the bed. If I fell, I would drown, he said. Nice touch, dad. It must have worked because I stopped wandering about the house in the dark.
It seems that children are prone to sleepwalking but grow out of it. Sonambulism is a parasomnia which occurs when we are in deep-sleep mode. According to UniSA 2016, 6 to 9% of people sleepwalk at some stage of their lives. While there is no central cause, various conditions can lead to its occurrence, such as migraine, stress, alcohol, sounds, genetics and medication. In adults, it can develop into sleep apnoea.
