August 24, 2019 • 26 mins
Sleep behaviors are pretty fascinating. Some people snore, some grind their teeth -- and some take a little stroll, or perhaps a drive. In this classic episode, Josh and Chuck investigate how sleepwalking, or somnambulism, works.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Good morning everyone. I hope you had a RESTful Friday
night's sleep, so you can listen to your Saturday Select
episode on sleep walking. I myself was a bit of
a sleepwalker when I was younger, and I talked about
it in this very episode from August. Welcome to Stuff
You Should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How
(00:22):
Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles w Chuck Bryant. It makes this Stuff you
should know. Um the late night edition. It's late. Let's
(00:43):
go and Chuck great, awesome, it could be better. How
are you same? Just the same? So, Chuck, I got
a story for you. Let's hear it. Back in eight
in a little town called Weymouth, Massachusetts, although Massachusetts they
probably pronounced it in some radically different way than it
(01:03):
would be spelled woman or Worcester or something weird like that. Um,
there was a woman named um Maria Ann Bickford, and
she was a prostitute. And she was discovered on October
that year, murdered and brutally murdered. Actually uh. And it
(01:25):
was quickly traced back to a guy by the name
of Albert Terrell. Jack the ripper. No, but it was
ripper asque. Her head was severed or almost completely severed. Yeah,
and it was with the knife. Um. But the the
reason everybody knew it was Albert Terrell was because that
was her boyfriend and he had left his wife for her.
(01:48):
He was a wealthy guy in Massachusetts and he left
his wife to be with Maria Anne Bickford. Um. And
he wanted her to quit the quit the job. I
guess you could call it. I would say that too. Well,
she didn't. She liked having a an income because she
didn't have to depend on any man for um, whatever
(02:09):
she wanted, and she refused. And ironic though, because she
was depending on men. Yeah, that is very ironic actually. Um.
She uh ultimately died, was murdered, and it was Albert
Terrell who who admitted to doing it, but he was sleepwalking.
He said it was pretty thin case. But he was
(02:30):
ultimately acquitted, even though he had set three fires in
the brothel in an obvious attempt to cover up what
he had done while he was still supposedly sleepwalking. But
the jury bought it, and one of the reasons they
bought it was because it was a jury of wealthy
white men who weren't about to put one of their
own behind bars as big of a crook as he was.
But secondly, because in eighteen forty five, we didn't really
(02:54):
understand sleepwalking. We didn't understand what people were capable of,
we didn't understand how so walking worked. And I know
you sent me an article as recently as a month
or so ago a guy in Arizona was acquitted of
sexual assault because he was sleepwalking. Right, yeah, it was Illinois,
but um, that was today. The news articles from today
(03:18):
even better, even more recent, which makes my point even
more thorough, which is we don't understand sleepwalking too terribly
much more than we did in eighteen five as far
as explaining why it happens, right, abstely, But there are
some really interesting aspects of this, uh, this sleep disorder
which is called the paras omnia. Right, yes, it's that's
(03:39):
one of many, but it's called somnambulism. Specifically sleepwalking is
and not to be confused with batum, no, not at all. Uh.
And there's an official definition if you want to look
in a mental health professional handbook called M four. Uh.
You leave your bed while you're sleeping and you find it.
(04:02):
Others find it difficult to wake you. When you're sleep sleepwalking,
you can't remember what happened afterward. Uh, you're confused when
you wake up. You aren't suffering from dementia or anything
else physical. That's a big one. And it impairs your
social life, or work life, or your life. And that's
for straight up sleepwalking. There are sleepwalking can be a
(04:23):
symptom of things like dementia or Parkinson's or something like that.
But that's um kind of significant, and I should think
that it's found in the d S M four, which
is the psychological Bible. Right, So it's it's considered a disorder,
a disorder of arousal, I think is what it's called. Right, Yes,
(04:44):
so chuck while you're sleeping. Um, when does this occur?
When does it take place? Uh, if you're an adult
or actually kids too, I think it occurs in the
first third of your sleep, which is the non r
M sleep, which is when your body is, uh, you're
in your deepest state of sleep, but your body is
(05:05):
kind of awake, so you're tossing and turning a lot,
but your brain is shut down. So it's sort of
the opposite of rim sleep, right, you've got non r
E M in R E M sleep right, and um,
usually sleepwalking occurs during the deepest part, which is what
I think phase three or four or possibly three and
four when as Kitty Lambert, who wrote this article put it, um,
(05:29):
with R E M sleep, your brains active but your
body is not. With non r EM sleep, which is
when sleepwalking occurs, your brain is just dead to the world,
but your body is still moving around, which accounts for sleepwalking. Right,
perfect recap, thanks a lot. Uh. And you know your
brain is also resistant to arousal when you're asleep, so
(05:51):
that explains why it's hard to wake somebody up when
you're sleepwalking. But it's not dangerous necessarily. No, And that's
a question that we should probably just go ahead. And
or should you wake a sleepwalker? You've you've heard warnings
against that kind of thing, I think on everything from
the Brady Bunch to Hawaii five. Oh. Let's say, okay, uh,
(06:12):
myth Yes, you can wake a sleepwalker. But the rule
I put in is wake a sleepwalker like you would
want to be awakened just from bed. Don't go shaking
them or anything. You wouldn't do that to somebody laying
in bed asleep either they'll probably have a heart attack,
so be gentle and try and guide them back to
the bed. If they wake up, that's fine, but it's
(06:33):
not it's not like a danger they're gonna have a
heart attack if they and die if they're awaked from sleepwalking. No,
but you could aroused their startle response, and um, they
are going to be confused and not know what's going on. That's,
like you said, one of the symptoms of sleepwalking. Um.
But if you do manage to get the sleepwalker back
to bed and they lie back down and that's it,
(06:53):
you can pretty much rest assured that there's not going
to be another incident like that because most people sleepwalk
only wants per night. Interestingly, that's what they say, and
thirty seconds to a half hour. I've heard it even
longer than that, because it very much depends on what's
going on or maybe what you feel like you have
to get done while you're walking around in your sleep.
(07:14):
You're gonna be sort of zombiefied, but you're not gonna
be walking around with your arms out in front of
you like in the movies. That's a bunch of bunk
um and you're probably gonna be pretty clumsy, but you
can still perform activities, which is kind of the weird
thing about it. One of the weird things about it, Right,
you just perform them clumsily or you get oddly, I
guess is another way to put it. Yeah, um, and
(07:36):
sleepwalking is one of these. It's a hilarious disorder really
because it's not generally that dangerous. It doesn't have to
be that dangerous, although it can put you in dangerous
situations and people have been hurt um in sleepwalking. But
the idea of just, you know, interacting with somebody with
a glassy eyed look on their face who's clumsily playing
the guitar, right, It's that's a funny disorder. It's even chance.
(08:01):
I haven't either. I've never been much of a sleepwalker.
I don't think I've ever sleepwalked. I've sleepwalked, but I've
never interacted with someone who was sleepwalking. So yeah, I've
done it myself. Though. It's good. It's a lot of fun.
But it's one of these conditions where we have all
this evidence, in all this data, we just haven't been
able to fully put it together, to figure it out
once and for all, which makes for a better podcast
(08:23):
for us. Right. Um, A little bit more data that
we have on at Chuck is that UM sleepwalking tends
to run in families. Children sleepwalk more than adults by far. Yeah,
you're ten times more likely if your family, uh, if
you have a family member who has sleptwalked to be
a sleepwalker yourself. So is it slept walked or sleepwalked
(08:47):
slept walk? Sure, that sounds good to me. We'll just
call it s W past tense. Uh, it's more often
is founding kids. Obviously, it's something you usually outgrow. Uh,
more often identical twins, which I thought was pretty interesting. Yeah, well,
gene expression at all. And uh, I think they said
adults two point five to four percent of adults sleepwalk,
(09:10):
and this is they're almost always uh, adults who slept
walked as children. And if you start sleepwalking for the
first time as an adult, you might want to like
get that checked out. You definitely want to get that
checked out, because again, it can be a symptom of
another another problem like UM Parkinson's, Alzheimer's UM. Severe stress
I think has been associated with it, not just in
(09:32):
children or not adults, but children too, which I'm I
was kind of like, if you have a child who's
suffering from sleepwalking and it's stress related, what are you
doing to your poor kid? To where the kids suffering
from such stress that he's running around at night? Absolutely,
I wonder what I was stressed about. I don't know, man.
I find it odd that you haven't asked me about
(09:53):
sleepwalking yet, even though I said three times that have
slept walked. And I'm trying to drum up the tension. Uh.
They used to think that, um, it was like an
epileptic thing or hysteria. Well, it still is associated with epilepsy. Actually,
hysteria is kind of out the window though. Yeah, they
still think it's caused by epilepsy though it's associated with
it still. Yeah, I did not know that we should
(10:16):
change this article. Uh. And like you said, no one
knows exactly why it's happening, um, but they can just
say kind of what goes on when it does happen, right, Right,
We have all this information that hasn't been fully put together,
which again I find fascinating. Yeah, absolutely so, chuck. Um,
what are some of the I guess competing theories for
(10:38):
why we sleepwalk? Uh? Well, it's a lot of people
think it's just like you're in a transition stage between
being awake and being asleep. So if you've got a
dead brain, we'll not dead. If you've got a very
sleepy brain and a very wired body, uh, you could
potentially get triggered, they think a lot of times. I
saw this one study where um, they took ten sleepwalkers
(11:01):
and um they kept them awake for more than twenty
four hours and then allow them to sleep, and they
found that a buzzer going off. All ten people got
up and slept walked when they heard this buzzer. Weird.
After sleep deprivation and before during just regular sleep, three
out of ten were triggered by the buzzer. So they
(11:21):
think that like any noise like a dog barking outside
could like wake you up, wake your body up, and
send you doing whatever. Good yea uh, And sleep deprivation
is a magic term as far as sleepwalking goes. They
found that um sleepwalking increases dramatically and in studies when
(11:42):
they're sleep deprived, when the person sleep deprived first. And
they recommend also that if your kid um is sleepwalking,
you should not only decrease their stress somehow maybe let
them give up the trumpet if they really hate it, right, um,
But also to get them on like a regular sleep
schedule too, that that could be part of it as well,
(12:02):
that they may just be sleep deprived and stressed out
adults to little kids show. Um. Another theory with the
kids is that there's all kinds of crazy hormones being
shot about the body during the night and that that
may disrupt the kid And that's why that would explain
why it like tapers off after puberty. Yes, Um, have
you ever liked done something to say, driving or walking
(12:27):
or doing anything where you realized you got somewhere and
you hadn't been paying attention. You didn't really It wasn't
like you're blacked out or you're drunk or impaired or anything,
but you were just distracted or doing something else daydreaming. Absolutely,
So I would imagine that that has a lot to
do with how we could possibly sleepwalk. It's like maybe
more basic part of our brain is activated, like the
(12:49):
brainstem with that controls like breathing, walking, that kind of stuff. Correct,
So maybe it's all brainstem makes sense to me. Uh,
people have actually killed pepe bowl in their sleep. Like
you said the first guy, Uh, there was someone else
who And it kind of depends on the case. From
what I've seen, some of them get acquitted, some of
them get convicted. One guy stabbed his wife forty five
(13:11):
times and he was convicted. Another guy I murdered his
father and he was acquitted. So I guess it's sort
of a crap shoot. There hasn't been any You can't
go to a law book and say, well, we gotta
we have the sleepwalking defense, like the insanity plea. No,
but um, I think that, uh, you could probably find
the same um state witness or defense witness in the
(13:37):
acquittals or or um convictions. But there's some like great
professional witness out there, like can convince any jury that actually,
if you're sleepwalking, can't you can't possibly know what you're
doing right. Well, the guy from Illinois last week that
was acquitted was I think they proved that he had
a long history of sleepwalking. And this was some friend
(13:59):
of his. He like went out to rinking with her
and slept crashed on her couch and then he said
he woke up to some guy punching him in the face.
She said that guy was the guy I called because
you were assaulting me in my sleep and he was like,
I didn't mean it, and they said, okay. Yeah. It
took him like a couple of hours or something to decide. Yeah,
the jury, Yeah that was really fast. I thought so too.
(14:20):
That's what I'm saying. There has to have been somebody
who convinced them and just laid it all out for him,
because it's not like the average juror knows a lot
about sleepwalking. It's all you know, the cabinet of Dr
Kelgary or right again, the Brady Bunch. Yeah, who Who's
who was that? I don't remember. I just remember there
was a sleepwalking episode and seems like I could be
making it up. You talked about injury and U I
(14:43):
saw a study in England that eleven percent of people
that responded sleepwalkers said they have been injured. And it's
usually like bruising or cuts, but I think eleven percent
of that eleven percent actually broke bones well, which is
not a happy way to wake up out with night.
(15:13):
That's why skaff you shouldn't chuck. Sleepwalking is not the
only paras omnia. Remember we called it paras omnia. It's
a sleep disorder. There are other paras omnias, And the
(15:35):
first then I think we should talk about, is called
somnambulistic sexual behavior inexplicably UM, abbreviated as SPS. Yeah, that's weird.
I wonder what the BE stands for. I guess that's
part of the ballistic Maybe that's the Spanish UM, the
Spanish abbreviation. It's some nambulistic behavior sex you all. Yeah,
(15:58):
so sleep sex or sex insomnia is UM, Like Katie
says in here, it's pretty much what you think. It's
being asleep in the middle of the night and either
you know, masturbating or doing something to whoever is nearby, right, sexually, yes,
and again that can lead you to an assault conviction,
or you can wake up very happy, depending on the situation. Right.
(16:23):
And then of course there's the very very famous sleep eating,
which one generally associates these days with the sleep aid ambient, right, Yeah,
eating all kinds of crazy things with ambient cigarettes and
raw meat. I think we've talked about it before. It
seems like, yeah, we've talked about it. Kristen congerrote article
on it, and um, apparently the chemical zolpidem in ambient
(16:46):
like crosses the eating and the sleeping wires and like
one in a thousand people and they don't know why.
But I also found another stat that said one in
one percent of people have sleep eating disorders anyway, so
I can't you know, Well, there's reports of people who
have been on ambient and then switched to another similar
drug and it said that it all went away. There,
(17:07):
sleep eating, abnormal sleep behavior. And then there was the
first case of well the first documented case of a
woman who was on ambient UM who sleep emailed. And
I can't stand the um the term the media gave it,
but Z mailing with three Z people. Yeah, it's completely awful.
(17:28):
Uh yeah, that was pretty cool because she emailed. She
fired up her computer in the middle of the night,
logged in to the internet. Onto the internet, she had
to UM use her password to use her password, and
sent several emails that apparently were a random mix of
upper and lower cases, and they were written in some
strange language, although when I read the first email, it
(17:50):
didn't seem very strange to me at all. Uh No,
it said, um, this is a quote. Come tomorrow and
sort this hellhole out. Dinner and drinks four pm. Bring
wine and keV Are only it seems like a very
normal email to me. I've sent that same very same
email before. What about the second one? Yeah, one said
(18:11):
what the dot dot dot I think, but it was
the mix of all caps in lower case that really
just kinda that had to be a little off putting
to see that. It looks like brain damage, you know,
it's like brain damage and text form. She's probably seen
a doctor by this point, I would say, although she
was on ambient right, Yeah, okay, well that probably explains
(18:32):
that zolpi um like you said. And then also this week,
very sadly, a guy fell. He basically walked off of
his third story hotel room in Majorca and just like
broke a leg. Hit his head too, and hit his
head and his girlfriend just like this, she woke up
to find her boyfriend had gone out the window. Awful.
(18:57):
That's more than a bruise, my friend. And if you
like connecting podcasts, there was a guy um in England
in hart old Pool right and on um Holy Island
at the Crown and Anchor on Holy Island off north
the Northumberland coast. He woke up in quicksand actually he's
(19:21):
sleep He drank too much. But then he he sleepwalked.
He s w pass tensed um into the marsh land
and found himself waking up in the sinking and quicksandard
and trapped in quicksand And the guy was smart enough
to know that you stopped struggling and lie flat and
(19:42):
he would listen. Was a fan. Wouldn't that be something?
It's possible check because this just happened, right, it was,
um August eleven. I wonder so, as sleepwalker Stephen Rook,
if you listen to this podcast, let us know if
we saved your life and put the bottle down. Yeah, well,
he said he did. He said he spent the next
day in bed and uh, he was avoiding alcohol for
(20:03):
a long time and wants to thank everyone. A friend said, yeah,
he'll be back on the sauce this weekend. Totally. I've
said that before too. Uh. My uncle actually was a
famous sleepwalker in my family. He um, my uncle Steve,
who you know as the guy who's helped us out
before with some stuff, the guy we bought Scotch four
a k a h. He had a few incidents is
(20:26):
when he was young, and one time they found tracks
in the snow leading from his house, so he went.
Apparently he said he went outside see if it was snowing.
Another time, he fell asleep on the couch after school,
got up an eate dinner, and then later on woke
up and said, hey, what's for dinner tonight? And they're like,
(20:47):
you just had scallops. And another time specifically, that's what
he said, I asked him today. Uh. And then another
time he was going to the store with my grandfather
and he fell asleep in the car on the way
to the store and then woke up like in the
shop that they were going to, like, at the counter
paying for something weird. What was he buying? I think
he said tickets to like a Danny Thomas benefit show
(21:10):
or something. It's like the early sixties. Yeah, pretty much
everybody was sleep walking in that line. Yeah that's a
hot ticket in MEMPHISO back in the day. Oh yeah, yeah,
oh yeah, And I used to sleep walk, all right.
Let's hear well. A couple of times I'd gotten up
and just gone out to my We had a split level,
so I'd go out to the banister overlooking our den
and just start yelling things. And um. Another time I
(21:34):
specifically remember I got up I mean I remember after it, obviously,
I got up and I got ready for school and
took a shower and got dressed, and then I woke
up the next morning. I was like, that was weird.
I must have dreamt that. And I saw like the
wet towel in my clothes on the floor, down your head,
your saddle, shoes on your like I was like clutching shampoo.
So I don't sleep walk anymore. Them I sleep talk, though,
(21:57):
do you? So? It's Emily. It's a lot of people
sleep talk. That's no big deal. Yeah, what are you
say in your sleep? Um? You? Me actually likes to
use her iPhone to record me sleep talking, and she
loves to share it with everybody who will listen. Has
actually emailed the soundclips to people before. But there's this
one of me like just muttering and all of a sudden,
(22:19):
I go to real pop and that was it. I
have no idea. Why why am I not on that email?
That's disappointing. I don't know. I'm sure I could get
it for you. Chuck, lastic Chuck. There's one a point
(22:52):
that I found fascinating, which is people have always thought
and still probably think because we're dumb that, um, you
act out your dreams while you're sleepwalking. Not true. The
point that Katie Lambert makes is your brain is not
really active. It's it's in the slow delta wave that
you couldn't possibly be dreaming in, so you're not actually
(23:14):
acting out your dreams. But there is a disorder called
R E M sleep disorder where you actually are acting
out your dreams. It's the it's a sleepwalking that occurs
in that in that phase of sleep, the R E
M phase where your brains active but your body is
not supposed to be, so you are really wound up.
If you have the R A M sleep disorder, you
really need to give up the trumpet immediately. Yeah, that's
(23:36):
when you wake up in your your dreaming that you're
you know, cutting wood for the fire, and you're like
chopping your wife's leg with your hand exactly, and she guess,
what are you doing? That's not what she's saying, Sam,
cutting wood, babe, You say, I'm correcting you. All right,
Well that's it for sleepwalking. UM. I can virtually guarantee
you guys will email us your sleepwalking story, so please do.
(23:58):
If you want to learn more about sleep walking and
read a page that didn't make it into this podcast
at all about sleepwalking in the organically did not make
it in. I guess you could call it organic. Well
we didn't say let's not include that. Just go ahead
and type in sleep walking that's one word, or try
(24:18):
s w past tense and see what happens. Um into
the handy search bar at how stuff first dot Com
and I said I wasn't going to use handy anymore
either way. This we arrived at listener mail. That's right, Josh,
gonna call this uh pot growing Granny And this is
(24:39):
from k M Yes cryptic. Hi guys, I literally just
finished listening to your how grow houses work and I
couldn't resist sending in this story. My grandmother has always
been an avid gardener and avid gardener. She was very
interested in pretty plants and had learned at some point
that marijuana was a very beautiful plant. Uh So she
(25:00):
decided she wanted to grow some just for the sole
purpose of seeing what it looked like firsthand. Now where
would a middle aged woman in eastern Pennsylvania get seeds
to grow pot from my college age mother? Of course?
My mom, though, was not a smoker by any means,
so when she asked to find she was asked to
find pot seeds. She of course pawned the task off
to to her frat frat member boyfriend, who later would
(25:22):
become my father. My father was also not a smoker,
but he had a frat brother that was known to
partake in this particular lifestyle, and he has always only
been known as bob Oh in my family, which I
think is pretty cryptic. So Babo got him some seeds
for the grandmother. She planted him began growing pot in
her yard, to the dismay of my grandfather, who was
(25:43):
good friends with the chief of police and the mayor.
The plants grew beautifully in the open air of my
grandmother's garden. They lived pretty close to the center of
the city. As far as I know, there was no
attempt to obscure them from being seen. The plug was
pulled though, when my grandfather decided that come winter the world.
The grandmother said, we gotta bring him inside this winter,
(26:03):
and Granddad says, no, we're not bringing those inside. So
they went through the compost pod or that's what That's
what the kid was told. In her glaucoma got much
worse right yeah, well, thanks for that. Who wrote that,
km KM? Thank you k M for your cryptic email.
We appreciate that one. Um. If you have a story
(26:24):
about your grandmother breaking the law, we want to hear it. Uh,
send it in an email to Stuff podcast at how
stuff works dot com. Stuff you should Know is a
production of iHeart Radios. How stuff Works for more podcasts
for my heart Radio because at the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Good morning everyone. I hope you had a RESTful Friday
night's sleep, so you can listen to your Saturday Select
episode on sleep walking. I myself was a bit of
a sleepwalker when I was younger, and I talked about
it in this very episode from August. Welcome to Stuff
You Should Know, a production of My Heart Radios How
(00:22):
Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles w Chuck Bryant. It makes this Stuff you
should know. Um the late night edition. It's late. Let's
(00:43):
go and Chuck great, awesome, it could be better. How
are you same? Just the same? So, Chuck, I got
a story for you. Let's hear it. Back in eight
in a little town called Weymouth, Massachusetts, although Massachusetts they
probably pronounced it in some radically different way than it
(01:03):
would be spelled woman or Worcester or something weird like that. Um,
there was a woman named um Maria Ann Bickford, and
she was a prostitute. And she was discovered on October
that year, murdered and brutally murdered. Actually uh. And it
(01:25):
was quickly traced back to a guy by the name
of Albert Terrell. Jack the ripper. No, but it was
ripper asque. Her head was severed or almost completely severed. Yeah,
and it was with the knife. Um. But the the
reason everybody knew it was Albert Terrell was because that
was her boyfriend and he had left his wife for her.
(01:48):
He was a wealthy guy in Massachusetts and he left
his wife to be with Maria Anne Bickford. Um. And
he wanted her to quit the quit the job. I
guess you could call it. I would say that too. Well,
she didn't. She liked having a an income because she
didn't have to depend on any man for um, whatever
(02:09):
she wanted, and she refused. And ironic though, because she
was depending on men. Yeah, that is very ironic actually. Um.
She uh ultimately died, was murdered, and it was Albert
Terrell who who admitted to doing it, but he was sleepwalking.
He said it was pretty thin case. But he was
(02:30):
ultimately acquitted, even though he had set three fires in
the brothel in an obvious attempt to cover up what
he had done while he was still supposedly sleepwalking. But
the jury bought it, and one of the reasons they
bought it was because it was a jury of wealthy
white men who weren't about to put one of their
own behind bars as big of a crook as he was.
But secondly, because in eighteen forty five, we didn't really
(02:54):
understand sleepwalking. We didn't understand what people were capable of,
we didn't understand how so walking worked. And I know
you sent me an article as recently as a month
or so ago a guy in Arizona was acquitted of
sexual assault because he was sleepwalking. Right, yeah, it was Illinois,
but um, that was today. The news articles from today
(03:18):
even better, even more recent, which makes my point even
more thorough, which is we don't understand sleepwalking too terribly
much more than we did in eighteen five as far
as explaining why it happens, right, abstely, But there are
some really interesting aspects of this, uh, this sleep disorder
which is called the paras omnia. Right, yes, it's that's
(03:39):
one of many, but it's called somnambulism. Specifically sleepwalking is
and not to be confused with batum, no, not at all. Uh.
And there's an official definition if you want to look
in a mental health professional handbook called M four. Uh.
You leave your bed while you're sleeping and you find it.
(04:02):
Others find it difficult to wake you. When you're sleep sleepwalking,
you can't remember what happened afterward. Uh, you're confused when
you wake up. You aren't suffering from dementia or anything
else physical. That's a big one. And it impairs your
social life, or work life, or your life. And that's
for straight up sleepwalking. There are sleepwalking can be a
(04:23):
symptom of things like dementia or Parkinson's or something like that.
But that's um kind of significant, and I should think
that it's found in the d S M four, which
is the psychological Bible. Right, So it's it's considered a disorder,
a disorder of arousal, I think is what it's called. Right, Yes,
(04:44):
so chuck while you're sleeping. Um, when does this occur?
When does it take place? Uh, if you're an adult
or actually kids too, I think it occurs in the
first third of your sleep, which is the non r
M sleep, which is when your body is, uh, you're
in your deepest state of sleep, but your body is
(05:05):
kind of awake, so you're tossing and turning a lot,
but your brain is shut down. So it's sort of
the opposite of rim sleep, right, you've got non r
E M in R E M sleep right, and um,
usually sleepwalking occurs during the deepest part, which is what
I think phase three or four or possibly three and
four when as Kitty Lambert, who wrote this article put it, um,
(05:29):
with R E M sleep, your brains active but your
body is not. With non r EM sleep, which is
when sleepwalking occurs, your brain is just dead to the world,
but your body is still moving around, which accounts for sleepwalking. Right,
perfect recap, thanks a lot. Uh. And you know your
brain is also resistant to arousal when you're asleep, so
(05:51):
that explains why it's hard to wake somebody up when
you're sleepwalking. But it's not dangerous necessarily. No, And that's
a question that we should probably just go ahead. And
or should you wake a sleepwalker? You've you've heard warnings
against that kind of thing, I think on everything from
the Brady Bunch to Hawaii five. Oh. Let's say, okay, uh,
(06:12):
myth Yes, you can wake a sleepwalker. But the rule
I put in is wake a sleepwalker like you would
want to be awakened just from bed. Don't go shaking
them or anything. You wouldn't do that to somebody laying
in bed asleep either they'll probably have a heart attack,
so be gentle and try and guide them back to
the bed. If they wake up, that's fine, but it's
(06:33):
not it's not like a danger they're gonna have a
heart attack if they and die if they're awaked from sleepwalking. No,
but you could aroused their startle response, and um, they
are going to be confused and not know what's going on. That's,
like you said, one of the symptoms of sleepwalking. Um.
But if you do manage to get the sleepwalker back
to bed and they lie back down and that's it,
(06:53):
you can pretty much rest assured that there's not going
to be another incident like that because most people sleepwalk
only wants per night. Interestingly, that's what they say, and
thirty seconds to a half hour. I've heard it even
longer than that, because it very much depends on what's
going on or maybe what you feel like you have
to get done while you're walking around in your sleep.
(07:14):
You're gonna be sort of zombiefied, but you're not gonna
be walking around with your arms out in front of
you like in the movies. That's a bunch of bunk
um and you're probably gonna be pretty clumsy, but you
can still perform activities, which is kind of the weird
thing about it. One of the weird things about it, Right,
you just perform them clumsily or you get oddly, I
guess is another way to put it. Yeah, um, and
(07:36):
sleepwalking is one of these. It's a hilarious disorder really
because it's not generally that dangerous. It doesn't have to
be that dangerous, although it can put you in dangerous
situations and people have been hurt um in sleepwalking. But
the idea of just, you know, interacting with somebody with
a glassy eyed look on their face who's clumsily playing
the guitar, right, It's that's a funny disorder. It's even chance.
(08:01):
I haven't either. I've never been much of a sleepwalker.
I don't think I've ever sleepwalked. I've sleepwalked, but I've
never interacted with someone who was sleepwalking. So yeah, I've
done it myself. Though. It's good. It's a lot of fun.
But it's one of these conditions where we have all
this evidence, in all this data, we just haven't been
able to fully put it together, to figure it out
once and for all, which makes for a better podcast
(08:23):
for us. Right. Um, A little bit more data that
we have on at Chuck is that UM sleepwalking tends
to run in families. Children sleepwalk more than adults by far. Yeah,
you're ten times more likely if your family, uh, if
you have a family member who has sleptwalked to be
a sleepwalker yourself. So is it slept walked or sleepwalked
(08:47):
slept walk? Sure, that sounds good to me. We'll just
call it s W past tense. Uh, it's more often
is founding kids. Obviously, it's something you usually outgrow. Uh,
more often identical twins, which I thought was pretty interesting. Yeah, well,
gene expression at all. And uh, I think they said
adults two point five to four percent of adults sleepwalk,
(09:10):
and this is they're almost always uh, adults who slept
walked as children. And if you start sleepwalking for the
first time as an adult, you might want to like
get that checked out. You definitely want to get that
checked out, because again, it can be a symptom of
another another problem like UM Parkinson's, Alzheimer's UM. Severe stress
I think has been associated with it, not just in
(09:32):
children or not adults, but children too, which I'm I
was kind of like, if you have a child who's
suffering from sleepwalking and it's stress related, what are you
doing to your poor kid? To where the kids suffering
from such stress that he's running around at night? Absolutely,
I wonder what I was stressed about. I don't know, man.
I find it odd that you haven't asked me about
(09:53):
sleepwalking yet, even though I said three times that have
slept walked. And I'm trying to drum up the tension. Uh.
They used to think that, um, it was like an
epileptic thing or hysteria. Well, it still is associated with epilepsy. Actually,
hysteria is kind of out the window though. Yeah, they
still think it's caused by epilepsy though it's associated with
it still. Yeah, I did not know that we should
(10:16):
change this article. Uh. And like you said, no one
knows exactly why it's happening, um, but they can just
say kind of what goes on when it does happen, right, Right,
We have all this information that hasn't been fully put together,
which again I find fascinating. Yeah, absolutely so, chuck. Um,
what are some of the I guess competing theories for
(10:38):
why we sleepwalk? Uh? Well, it's a lot of people
think it's just like you're in a transition stage between
being awake and being asleep. So if you've got a
dead brain, we'll not dead. If you've got a very
sleepy brain and a very wired body, uh, you could
potentially get triggered, they think a lot of times. I
saw this one study where um, they took ten sleepwalkers
(11:01):
and um they kept them awake for more than twenty
four hours and then allow them to sleep, and they
found that a buzzer going off. All ten people got
up and slept walked when they heard this buzzer. Weird.
After sleep deprivation and before during just regular sleep, three
out of ten were triggered by the buzzer. So they
(11:21):
think that like any noise like a dog barking outside
could like wake you up, wake your body up, and
send you doing whatever. Good yea uh, And sleep deprivation
is a magic term as far as sleepwalking goes. They
found that um sleepwalking increases dramatically and in studies when
(11:42):
they're sleep deprived, when the person sleep deprived first. And
they recommend also that if your kid um is sleepwalking,
you should not only decrease their stress somehow maybe let
them give up the trumpet if they really hate it, right, um,
But also to get them on like a regular sleep
schedule too, that that could be part of it as well,
(12:02):
that they may just be sleep deprived and stressed out
adults to little kids show. Um. Another theory with the
kids is that there's all kinds of crazy hormones being
shot about the body during the night and that that
may disrupt the kid And that's why that would explain
why it like tapers off after puberty. Yes, Um, have
you ever liked done something to say, driving or walking
(12:27):
or doing anything where you realized you got somewhere and
you hadn't been paying attention. You didn't really It wasn't
like you're blacked out or you're drunk or impaired or anything,
but you were just distracted or doing something else daydreaming. Absolutely,
So I would imagine that that has a lot to
do with how we could possibly sleepwalk. It's like maybe
more basic part of our brain is activated, like the
(12:49):
brainstem with that controls like breathing, walking, that kind of stuff. Correct,
So maybe it's all brainstem makes sense to me. Uh,
people have actually killed pepe bowl in their sleep. Like
you said the first guy, Uh, there was someone else
who And it kind of depends on the case. From
what I've seen, some of them get acquitted, some of
them get convicted. One guy stabbed his wife forty five
(13:11):
times and he was convicted. Another guy I murdered his
father and he was acquitted. So I guess it's sort
of a crap shoot. There hasn't been any You can't
go to a law book and say, well, we gotta
we have the sleepwalking defense, like the insanity plea. No,
but um, I think that, uh, you could probably find
the same um state witness or defense witness in the
(13:37):
acquittals or or um convictions. But there's some like great
professional witness out there, like can convince any jury that actually,
if you're sleepwalking, can't you can't possibly know what you're
doing right. Well, the guy from Illinois last week that
was acquitted was I think they proved that he had
a long history of sleepwalking. And this was some friend
(13:59):
of his. He like went out to rinking with her
and slept crashed on her couch and then he said
he woke up to some guy punching him in the face.
She said that guy was the guy I called because
you were assaulting me in my sleep and he was like,
I didn't mean it, and they said, okay. Yeah. It
took him like a couple of hours or something to decide. Yeah,
the jury, Yeah that was really fast. I thought so too.
(14:20):
That's what I'm saying. There has to have been somebody
who convinced them and just laid it all out for him,
because it's not like the average juror knows a lot
about sleepwalking. It's all you know, the cabinet of Dr
Kelgary or right again, the Brady Bunch. Yeah, who Who's
who was that? I don't remember. I just remember there
was a sleepwalking episode and seems like I could be
making it up. You talked about injury and U I
(14:43):
saw a study in England that eleven percent of people
that responded sleepwalkers said they have been injured. And it's
usually like bruising or cuts, but I think eleven percent
of that eleven percent actually broke bones well, which is
not a happy way to wake up out with night.
(15:13):
That's why skaff you shouldn't chuck. Sleepwalking is not the
only paras omnia. Remember we called it paras omnia. It's
a sleep disorder. There are other paras omnias, And the
(15:35):
first then I think we should talk about, is called
somnambulistic sexual behavior inexplicably UM, abbreviated as SPS. Yeah, that's weird.
I wonder what the BE stands for. I guess that's
part of the ballistic Maybe that's the Spanish UM, the
Spanish abbreviation. It's some nambulistic behavior sex you all. Yeah,
(15:58):
so sleep sex or sex insomnia is UM, Like Katie
says in here, it's pretty much what you think. It's
being asleep in the middle of the night and either
you know, masturbating or doing something to whoever is nearby, right, sexually, yes,
and again that can lead you to an assault conviction,
or you can wake up very happy, depending on the situation. Right.
(16:23):
And then of course there's the very very famous sleep eating,
which one generally associates these days with the sleep aid ambient, right, Yeah,
eating all kinds of crazy things with ambient cigarettes and
raw meat. I think we've talked about it before. It
seems like, yeah, we've talked about it. Kristen congerrote article
on it, and um, apparently the chemical zolpidem in ambient
(16:46):
like crosses the eating and the sleeping wires and like
one in a thousand people and they don't know why.
But I also found another stat that said one in
one percent of people have sleep eating disorders anyway, so
I can't you know, Well, there's reports of people who
have been on ambient and then switched to another similar
drug and it said that it all went away. There,
(17:07):
sleep eating, abnormal sleep behavior. And then there was the
first case of well the first documented case of a
woman who was on ambient UM who sleep emailed. And
I can't stand the um the term the media gave it,
but Z mailing with three Z people. Yeah, it's completely awful.
(17:28):
Uh yeah, that was pretty cool because she emailed. She
fired up her computer in the middle of the night,
logged in to the internet. Onto the internet, she had
to UM use her password to use her password, and
sent several emails that apparently were a random mix of
upper and lower cases, and they were written in some
strange language, although when I read the first email, it
(17:50):
didn't seem very strange to me at all. Uh No,
it said, um, this is a quote. Come tomorrow and
sort this hellhole out. Dinner and drinks four pm. Bring
wine and keV Are only it seems like a very
normal email to me. I've sent that same very same
email before. What about the second one? Yeah, one said
(18:11):
what the dot dot dot I think, but it was
the mix of all caps in lower case that really
just kinda that had to be a little off putting
to see that. It looks like brain damage, you know,
it's like brain damage and text form. She's probably seen
a doctor by this point, I would say, although she
was on ambient right, Yeah, okay, well that probably explains
(18:32):
that zolpi um like you said. And then also this week,
very sadly, a guy fell. He basically walked off of
his third story hotel room in Majorca and just like
broke a leg. Hit his head too, and hit his
head and his girlfriend just like this, she woke up
to find her boyfriend had gone out the window. Awful.
(18:57):
That's more than a bruise, my friend. And if you
like connecting podcasts, there was a guy um in England
in hart old Pool right and on um Holy Island
at the Crown and Anchor on Holy Island off north
the Northumberland coast. He woke up in quicksand actually he's
(19:21):
sleep He drank too much. But then he he sleepwalked.
He s w pass tensed um into the marsh land
and found himself waking up in the sinking and quicksandard
and trapped in quicksand And the guy was smart enough
to know that you stopped struggling and lie flat and
(19:42):
he would listen. Was a fan. Wouldn't that be something?
It's possible check because this just happened, right, it was,
um August eleven. I wonder so, as sleepwalker Stephen Rook,
if you listen to this podcast, let us know if
we saved your life and put the bottle down. Yeah, well,
he said he did. He said he spent the next
day in bed and uh, he was avoiding alcohol for
(20:03):
a long time and wants to thank everyone. A friend said, yeah,
he'll be back on the sauce this weekend. Totally. I've
said that before too. Uh. My uncle actually was a
famous sleepwalker in my family. He um, my uncle Steve,
who you know as the guy who's helped us out
before with some stuff, the guy we bought Scotch four
a k a h. He had a few incidents is
(20:26):
when he was young, and one time they found tracks
in the snow leading from his house, so he went.
Apparently he said he went outside see if it was snowing.
Another time, he fell asleep on the couch after school,
got up an eate dinner, and then later on woke
up and said, hey, what's for dinner tonight? And they're like,
(20:47):
you just had scallops. And another time specifically, that's what
he said, I asked him today. Uh. And then another
time he was going to the store with my grandfather
and he fell asleep in the car on the way
to the store and then woke up like in the
shop that they were going to, like, at the counter
paying for something weird. What was he buying? I think
he said tickets to like a Danny Thomas benefit show
(21:10):
or something. It's like the early sixties. Yeah, pretty much
everybody was sleep walking in that line. Yeah that's a
hot ticket in MEMPHISO back in the day. Oh yeah, yeah,
oh yeah, And I used to sleep walk, all right.
Let's hear well. A couple of times I'd gotten up
and just gone out to my We had a split level,
so I'd go out to the banister overlooking our den
and just start yelling things. And um. Another time I
(21:34):
specifically remember I got up I mean I remember after it, obviously,
I got up and I got ready for school and
took a shower and got dressed, and then I woke
up the next morning. I was like, that was weird.
I must have dreamt that. And I saw like the
wet towel in my clothes on the floor, down your head,
your saddle, shoes on your like I was like clutching shampoo.
So I don't sleep walk anymore. Them I sleep talk, though,
(21:57):
do you? So? It's Emily. It's a lot of people
sleep talk. That's no big deal. Yeah, what are you
say in your sleep? Um? You? Me actually likes to
use her iPhone to record me sleep talking, and she
loves to share it with everybody who will listen. Has
actually emailed the soundclips to people before. But there's this
one of me like just muttering and all of a sudden,
(22:19):
I go to real pop and that was it. I
have no idea. Why why am I not on that email?
That's disappointing. I don't know. I'm sure I could get
it for you. Chuck, lastic Chuck. There's one a point
(22:52):
that I found fascinating, which is people have always thought
and still probably think because we're dumb that, um, you
act out your dreams while you're sleepwalking. Not true. The
point that Katie Lambert makes is your brain is not
really active. It's it's in the slow delta wave that
you couldn't possibly be dreaming in, so you're not actually
(23:14):
acting out your dreams. But there is a disorder called
R E M sleep disorder where you actually are acting
out your dreams. It's the it's a sleepwalking that occurs
in that in that phase of sleep, the R E
M phase where your brains active but your body is
not supposed to be, so you are really wound up.
If you have the R A M sleep disorder, you
really need to give up the trumpet immediately. Yeah, that's
(23:36):
when you wake up in your your dreaming that you're
you know, cutting wood for the fire, and you're like
chopping your wife's leg with your hand exactly, and she guess,
what are you doing? That's not what she's saying, Sam,
cutting wood, babe, You say, I'm correcting you. All right,
Well that's it for sleepwalking. UM. I can virtually guarantee
you guys will email us your sleepwalking story, so please do.
(23:58):
If you want to learn more about sleep walking and
read a page that didn't make it into this podcast
at all about sleepwalking in the organically did not make
it in. I guess you could call it organic. Well
we didn't say let's not include that. Just go ahead
and type in sleep walking that's one word, or try
(24:18):
s w past tense and see what happens. Um into
the handy search bar at how stuff first dot Com
and I said I wasn't going to use handy anymore
either way. This we arrived at listener mail. That's right, Josh,
gonna call this uh pot growing Granny And this is
(24:39):
from k M Yes cryptic. Hi guys, I literally just
finished listening to your how grow houses work and I
couldn't resist sending in this story. My grandmother has always
been an avid gardener and avid gardener. She was very
interested in pretty plants and had learned at some point
that marijuana was a very beautiful plant. Uh So she
(25:00):
decided she wanted to grow some just for the sole
purpose of seeing what it looked like firsthand. Now where
would a middle aged woman in eastern Pennsylvania get seeds
to grow pot from my college age mother? Of course?
My mom, though, was not a smoker by any means,
so when she asked to find she was asked to
find pot seeds. She of course pawned the task off
to to her frat frat member boyfriend, who later would
(25:22):
become my father. My father was also not a smoker,
but he had a frat brother that was known to
partake in this particular lifestyle, and he has always only
been known as bob Oh in my family, which I
think is pretty cryptic. So Babo got him some seeds
for the grandmother. She planted him began growing pot in
her yard, to the dismay of my grandfather, who was
(25:43):
good friends with the chief of police and the mayor.
The plants grew beautifully in the open air of my
grandmother's garden. They lived pretty close to the center of
the city. As far as I know, there was no
attempt to obscure them from being seen. The plug was
pulled though, when my grandfather decided that come winter the world.
The grandmother said, we gotta bring him inside this winter,
(26:03):
and Granddad says, no, we're not bringing those inside. So
they went through the compost pod or that's what That's
what the kid was told. In her glaucoma got much
worse right yeah, well, thanks for that. Who wrote that,
km KM? Thank you k M for your cryptic email.
We appreciate that one. Um. If you have a story
(26:24):
about your grandmother breaking the law, we want to hear it. Uh,
send it in an email to Stuff podcast at how
stuff works dot com. Stuff you should Know is a
production of iHeart Radios. How stuff Works for more podcasts
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