Sleeping and at the same time doing housework - what housewife does not dream about it? However, a Chinese resident named Xu, who lives in Wuhan, Hubei province, does not need to dream - she perfectly manages to combine sleep and work. During bouts of sleepwalking at night, she washes clothes
A 46-year-old woman has been suffering from a mysterious illness for ten years. But this absolutely does not bother her or her loved ones, but, on the contrary, is beneficial.
“She walks in her sleep at least 10 times a year and every time she does the same thing - she does the laundry for our whole family. When she wakes up the next morning, she doesn't remember anything and thanks me for doing so much around the house,”says Xu's husband.”
According to the spouse, he installed special locks in the house so that in the event of a stronger labor impulse, his wife would not go to the neighbors to wash at night.
In medical literature, walking in a dream is called somnambulism, and in common parlance, sleepwalking. Somnambulism is a fairly common phenomenon in the modern world. Periodically, millions of people (approximately 2.5% of the world's population) walk in their sleep. Moreover, about 25% of sleepwalkers inflict various injuries on themselves during night wanderings. It happens that somnambulists fall out of the windows, mistaking them for doors.
So, in September last year in one of the dormitories of the University of Chicago, Illinois, a sophomore student had an accident. 19-year-old Jonathan Patek, suffering from somnambulism, wandered around the room in his sleep and fell out of the 4th floor window.
The student survived, although he was badly hurt. His kidney, lung, spleen were damaged, and eight ribs were broken. But given the height of the fall, we can say that he got off easily. The "traveler" himself, naturally, did not remember anything about the incident.
Sometimes you can hear stories about how, in a state of somnambulism, people drove cars, flew airplanes and performed other complex activities, but, according to doctors, these are just idle fictions. In fact, although the sleepwalker is able to get into the car and start the engine, he will not be able to drive it normally, since his reflexes are inhibited. The somnambulist will immediately have an accident.
However, the stories that sleepwalkers love to roam the rooftops are quite authentic. The last such case, officially recorded by law enforcement officers in Moscow.
Residents of the Russian capital, who were walking along Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya Street at about 1 am, witnessed a strange sight: a man in a dressing gown climbed onto the roof of the house and slowly walked there.
When the lunatic stopped at the edge of the roof of the seven-story building, the assembled people shuddered and gasped. Someone from the passers-by decided not to risk the life of an eccentric and called the rescue service.
However, the rescuers who arrived could not wake up the night gulena, and did not dare to drag him off the roof by force: you never know what could be on the mind of the sleeping man! Only an hour later, the lunatic woke up and independently descended from the roof to his apartment.
They love somnambulists and walk the streets. Last fall, a resident of the Chinese province of Zhejiang by the name of Lin, while in a state of sleep, walked 30 kilometers!
Lin had covered considerable distances in his sleep before, but this was the first time he had ever made such a “record”. In the end, apparently tired from walking, the sleepwalker climbed onto the roof of a private house, where he lay down to fill up by the cornice. In the morning he was found there by the lawful owner of the house, who called the police.
As noted by the local press, although there are no statistics on "somnambulistic walking", it is possible that Lin has set a record worthy of being included in the Guinness Book of Records.
Jennifer Aniston's Secret
Sleepwalking occurs in children, but usually goes away with age. Most often, children begin to suffer from sleepwalking during periods of stress and anxiety, while mentally they are completely healthy. The causes of adult sleepwalking are considered to be stress, anxiety, various kinds of strong experiences.
For example, family disappointments did not have the best effect on the health of Hollywood movie star Jennifer Aniston. Friends of the actress claim that she often wanders around her home in Los Angeles in a dream, and waking up, cannot understand where she is.
After her divorce from Brad Pitt, Jennifer became interested in her partner in the movie "American Divorce" Vince Bon and was even going to marry him. However, this couple broke up. It was the break with her beloved, according to the actress's acquaintances, that caused Aniston to feel unwell.
“She had the same problem when she started having problems with Pitt,” said one of Jennifer's friends. “Once she wandered in her sleep for about an hour and a half, scaring him in earnest.”
“During the annual summit, held under the auspices of the American Academy of Neurology in Denver, scientists concluded that the development of sleepwalking is associated with specific changes in certain genes. It is the activation of the altered genes that causes a condition close to a kind of paralysis of the nervous system, which prevents people from waking up from sleep. However, it has not yet been possible to determine which genes are responsible for a person's tendency to walk at night, how genes should be transformed. However, after conducting a number of studies among patients diagnosed with sleepwalking, it became obvious that this disease can be safely classified as genetically determined."
Australian psychiatrists have recently been given the opportunity to study an unusual mental disorder. A sleepwalking woman who turned into a nymphomaniac in her sleep turned to the Royal Prince Albert Hospital for help.
The alarm was raised by her constant sexual partner, who one day, waking up in the middle of the night, saw that his mistress was not in the bedroom. He went in search and found that she was having sex with a stranger in the courtyard of the house. As it turned out, his girlfriend suffers from sleepwalking. And often, without waking up, she went outside at night and seduced passers-by. And after waking up I did not remember anything.
According to Peter Buchenin, a specialist at the Royal Hospital for the Study of Human Behavior in Sleep, this phenomenon is still poorly understood and has no scientific name.
According to Buchenin, people with this disorder usually experience a terrible shock when they are told what they did at night. Such actions can threaten the health of the sleepwalker and his family life, and they can also cause legal proceedings - anyone has the right to complain about harassment from a stranger.
Horror on a full moon
By the way, although modern medicine does not consider the moon itself to be the cause of sleepwalking, it does not completely deny this, since it is on the full moon that somnambulists begin to aggravate.
Back in the 16th century, the physician Paracelsus noticed that during the full moon, cases of madness increased. Why? Until recently, no one could say anything intelligible about this. However, today scientists have found that the influence of the moon is especially strongly felt by people working underground. On a full moon, something terrible, inexplicable often begins to happen to them. More than once the miners who stayed underground for a longer period than it was planned, left there mentally handicapped, and sometimes even died. And everyone who was found dead in the face had a frozen expression of horror indescribable on their faces.
Having discovered this strange pattern, French scientists decided to conduct an unusual experiment. Three days before the full moon, they placed two pairs of volunteers at the age of thirty in underground bunkers.
“The result of this experiment was sensational. In a closed, isolated space, the biological clock of the volunteers automatically tuned in to 24.8 hours a day, that is, to the time during which the moon makes a full revolution around the Earth. In addition, the organisms of the test subjects began to respond to the magnetic waves of the moon. And, in particular, they influenced dreams. All four volunteers reported having constant nightmares. They dreamed of dead relatives and friends who called them to themselves.
At the moment of awakening, all subjects had a feeling of unconscious fear, and after leaving the bunkers after the experiment, they stated that after such nightmares they believed in the existence of hell.
Continuing and in the future to observe people who had passed through a difficult, from a psychological point of view, test of people, French scientists noticed a certain oddity: the participants in the experiments began to believe that they were led in the bunker … from the other world. Some events from dreams either then exactly happened in reality, or the words of the heroes from nightmares subsequently played a decisive role in the lives of those who dreamed about them.
Parapsychologists associate this phenomenon with the fact that, being far from familiar conditions and experiencing the powerful power of the full moon, people lose the ability to perceive ordinary external signals and react sharply only to those that in normal life are felt only at the subconscious level.
The court acquitted the lunatic
Neurologists have determined that nerve cells in the human brain respond to magnetic deflection by changing electrical voltage.
Nerve cells are associated with the pineal gland - the "third eye" of a person, - which controls the phases of sleep and wakefulness. During the full moon, electrical activity increases greatly. Choleric people become more active, melancholic people become depressed, cheerful people develop even more vigorous activity, but in patients with somnambulism seizures become more frequent, during which, without knowing it, they can do anything.
For example, the Briton Richard Griffith, during full moon periods, sends hundreds of SMS messages to all his friends. One night he sent an SMS to a friend, in which he asked for help When a friend called back, it turned out that Richard was asleep. Another time Griffith sent a message to a friend: "Baloo, have you seen Bagheera?" In the morning it turned out that the day before he had watched the movie The Jungle Book.
In order to protect the patient from various injuries that he may receive while walking in a dream, experts advise to do the following: equip the bedroom windows with strong bars, do not leave electrical wires, glass tables and fragile jewelry lying and standing in their possible way.
“A unique decision was made just recently by the court of Manchester. He acquitted American Airlines pilot James Yates, who was about to fly from this English city to Chicago, to put it mildly, not too sober. When he underwent a medical examination before flying a Boeing 767 with 181 passengers on board across the Atlantic, alcohol detectors went off the charts.”
The test showed that the dose of alcohol in Yates' body exceeds the maximum permissible almost eight times. Naturally, the American was removed from the flight, and since he had severely violated the official code, it seemed that the pilot could not escape responsibility.
However, Yates filed a complaint with the court and at one of the meetings admitted that he was not going to drink on the day of the flight, but consumed exactly a third of a bottle of whiskey … in a dream, that is, he had committed an offense unconsciously.
To top it off, the pilot's lawyers brought Yates' relatives before the court, who swore them down that they had repeatedly faced James doing strange things at night. For example, he fell asleep in one place at home, and woke up in another.
Gennady Fedotov
Interesting newspaper. Psi Factor 2010