Sleepwalking is a disease that can be fatal to others. Because a person who falls into oblivion sometimes commits crimes
The full moon has nothing to do with
this nightmare is played out in many literary works - a person, completely decent and respectable, suddenly learns with horror that last night he was out of his mind and killed a man …
But this is not a fiction of mystics with rich imaginations like Stephen King, but reality …
In the history of mankind, there are many crimes committed by lunatics: strangled or shot wives, killed in a dream by their sincerely loving husbands, children thrown out of the window, whose mothers thought that there was a fire in the house and a child was in danger, passers-by, shot down to death by a lunatic driver who fell asleep behind the wheel…
Canada, a country with a very low crime rate, was once rocked by a heinous crime. A 23-year-old man stabbed his stepmother and father with a knife. At the same time, the killer did not remember at all how it happened, because he acted in a deep sleep …
Not long before that, he lost his job and, moreover, trying to make a living by playing a card game, lost large sums. These circumstances completely deprived him of sleep. Once he nevertheless fell asleep, but the awakening was terrible - his hands were covered in blood, and a knife lay next to him …
It turned out that in a dream he got into the car and drove to the house where his father and his new wife lived, with whom the young man had wonderful relations. After killing them, he got back into the car and went home …
The young man spent several years in prison, but observations of him showed that he no longer had strange bouts of sleepwalking.
What is this disease - sleepwalking? It used to be believed that it is closely related to the moon - it is she who causes clouding of the mind. Doctors of the past believed that it was during the full moon that the disease reached its peak. But it turned out that the moon had nothing to do with it. And even the disease itself was renamed - now it is called somnambulism (from the Latin "som-nus" - sleep and "ambulo" - I walk).
Its symptoms are as follows - a person in a dream loses control over his mind and performs actions that are usually not inherent in him in the usual state. Many somnambulists have unusual dexterity, flexibility, which in their normal form are by no means characteristic of them.
This is due to the fact that during an attack, internal stress is removed, fear disappears, and the person is “without brakes” and the instinct of self-preservation.
Having fallen asleep after an attack of somnambulism, patients forget about everything, and in the morning they are surprised to listen to eyewitness stories about their exploits - that they climbed trees, jumped from roof to roof, and so on.
Spacey Strangler
But these are harmless feats. Sometimes sleepwalkers do terrible things in their sleep. One morning, an American sleepwalker named Simon Spacey woke up in his room. A murdered wife lay nearby. And in the children's room is the corpse of their five-year-old son. They were both shot with Simon's pistol, which was lying beside his bed. The police arrived, took prints from the weapons, and it turned out that they belong to Simon.
The police were looking for witnesses and interviewing neighbors. And the curious old woman, after long hesitation, said that she saw yesterday through the loosely closed blinds how Spacey walked around the apartment with a pistol, after which she heard shots. The neighbor did not declare to the police, as she lived according to the principle: "My house is on the edge", but nevertheless decided to tell the law enforcement officers about these events.
Spacey was arrested and awaiting trial in jail. He sincerely believed that he was wrongly accused after someone set him up. In addition, he was very painfully worried about the loss of his beloved wife and only son.
One night, a prison guard heard the screams of inmate Spacey. He went to the cell and saw that he was strangling his neighbor with his bare hands. Spacey was stunned with a truncheon and sent to solitary confinement. The next morning he did not remember at all what happened at night. Then the prison administration called a doctor, and he diagnosed somnambulism.
A story similar to a fictional detective happened with a French detective. He was being treated in a sanatorium for a nervous breakdown, and heard that a murder had been committed on a nearby beach. The detective closely followed the progress of the investigation through the newspapers, tried to solve the murder himself, and the evidence he found said that he had committed the crime … he himself was in a fit of sleepwalking!
The detective was acquitted - as a rule, somnambulists do not pass harsh sentences. It is believed that such a person does not act out of malice, but as a result of his illness, and therefore deserves not punishment, but treatment.
In addition, killer sleepwalkers, having learned about the crimes they have committed, experience shock, terrible remorse, which sometimes causes new terrible attacks of the disease.
Aggressive somnambulists
Some psychiatrists do not consider somnambulism a disease at all. Emotional problems, subconscious stress, traces of stress, and the person stops sleeping, and instead, falling into oblivion, creates terrible things. But as soon as he starts taking tranquilizers and other medications, it will pass - without a trace for himself and others …
Doctors conducted studies in which they tried to find out the percentage of aggressive sleepwalkers among those suffering from this disease.
Dr. Harry Moldavski and his colleagues at the University of Toronto took more than fifty people with somnambulism at random and found twenty-six people among them who committed acts in their dreams that could be considered violent. There were only three women among them. Compared to the peace-loving lunatics, the aggressive ones leaned uncontrollably on coffee, loved all kinds of pills, because they did not get out of stressful situations.
And Dr. Eric Nostinger, a psychiatrist at the Sleep Research Center at the University of Pittsburgh, fears that a person who has committed a crime in his right mind and sober memory may then pretend to be a lunatic. As an example, he cites the story of a thirty-seven-year-old American who killed his wife and later said that he did not remember anything because he was a lunatic. But the court, relying on the testimony of witnesses, did not believe him, because they claimed that he often beat and humiliated his wife.
The same court acquitted the man who killed his wife in a fit of sleepwalking. He loved her very much, but one day their neighbors woke up from terrible screams - the lunatic beat his wife hard with his head on the asphalt. While the neighbors called the police, he managed to kill her, climb into the car and sleep peacefully.
Comparing both cases, Dr. Nostinger says that the most difficult thing is to know the truth, and sometimes it is impossible. Except for those moments when a person harms himself.
“It's strange,” he notes, “if a person injures himself, falls down a ladder, for example, people willingly believe it. If in a dream he lowers his neighbor down the stairs and claims that he does not remember anything, he is dragged to court. But maybe they are right, because we always love ourselves more than those around us."