Professor Antonio Zadra and colleagues at the University of Montreal, Canada, have reviewed the work on somnambulism over the past fifteen years and have concluded that some of the perceptions of this intriguing sleep disorder are myths.
For example, it is believed that only children 6–12 years old suffer from somnambulism, and cases when this disorder manifests itself in adults are a rare exception. That is, the formation of the brain, which occurs during puberty, seems to relieve a person from walking in a dream.
Episodes of somnambulism are usually too short for the person to harm themselves
But, it turns out, this is not entirely true: with age, the likelihood of manifestation of somnambulism really decreases, but in 25% of cases, a person continues to walk in a dream after puberty. Researchers associate the disappearance of somnambulism in adults with the fact that with age, we have a reduction in the proportion of deep slow-wave sleep, during which just pulls to wander around.
Somnambulism in both children and adults has the same symptoms: part of the brain is asleep, and part is awake. The waking part is responsible for the appropriate behavior: a person opens and closes doors, washes his hands, goes up or down stairs, his eyes are open, he can even recognize people. However, self-awareness is changed, and reactions to the environment are unusual and illogical.
In general, the authors of the work believe that partial sleep, when the brain does not completely fall asleep, is the essence of somnambulism. And this, by the way, allows us to explain the partial amnesia of somnambulists: a person really does not remember what he was doing at that time, but something in his memory still remains.
Moreover, some can even remember what they thought or felt at that moment, although such an improvement in memory in somnambulists occurs again with age. And this is strongly at odds with the generally accepted view that somnambulists never remember anything of their nocturnal adventures.
Researchers also absolutely disagree with the fact that everything done by somnambulists is done “automatically”. That is, during his, as it seems, completely unconscious wandering, a person fully understands the causes and consequences of his actions and then can explain why he did this and not that. The usual logic in his actions may not work, but his own cause-and-effect relationship, no matter how bizarre, is still there in the actions and thoughts of the somnambulist.
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For example, a person gets up in a dream, takes a dog that is sleeping nearby, goes to the bathroom and dips the dog into the water. The act seems senseless, but then an explanation is still found: it seemed to the sleeping man that the dog was on fire! That is, as we can see, its own logic was present here.
At the same time, episodes of somnambulism in most cases are very short, so that a person does not have time to harm himself or others. (Although there are exceptions: once a person got into a car in a dream and drove off, and therefore also killed a couple of pedestrians!)
Another common misconception is that somnambulism is not related to how a person feels while awake. In reality, about half of the somnambulists feel extremely sleepy during the day. Younger people can successfully mask it, but in special tests their reaction is still much worse than that of those who do not suffer from somnambulism.
As for the mechanisms and causes of somnambulism, the authors of the work believe that the reason is not so much in the difficulties of the transition from wakefulness to sleep, but in the features of the structure of sleep itself. Slow-wave sleep in somnambulists is fragmented by short (3–10 s) episodes of increased activity, like micro-awakenings.
Because of this, the restorative function of sleep is also reduced, and therefore people suffering from somnambulism want to sleep at inopportune hours. Well, and, of course, this is not without a genetic predisposition: in 80% of cases when a person walks in a dream, his family has a rich history of somnambulism. True, usually the genes of somnambulism by themselves cannot turn on, for this they need stress or, for example, chronic lack of sleep.
