Can dreams actually kill you? Has anyone
ever dreamed exactly what will happen in the future? Or, did you hear about the
guy who brutally axe-murdered his wife and mother-in-law and blamed ostriches and dreams?
These are just some of the fantastic things we’ll talk about today in a video that will cover
every facet of the wonderful and often wacky world of sleep.
50. Unlike many of the dreams we’ll discuss today,
people who’ve had so-called “wet dreams” don’t usually complain about them when they wake
up from their never-world sexual adventure. Wet dreams are actually very common. The Journal
of Sexual Medicine said about 83% of males will have one in their lives, that is, one ending
with what’s called nocturnal emission. Men of all ages have them, but puberty is a common
time since a boy’s sexual hormones are raging. Studies show in some countries, boys
have them more, such as in Indonesia, where 97% of guys in the study said they’d had at
least one mission emission dream before they were 24. In another study titled “Frequency
of nocturnal emissions and masturbation habits among virgin male religious teenagers,” it
was shown that some boys refrained from spanking the monkey due to religious concerns. Still, of
those boys that said they were against such DIY, about 70% of them had a wet dream. Like
it or not, at some point in a male’s life, nature will likely run its course during the
night. Why? Your brain and body want it to happen. What about women?
49. Women, too, will feel the delights of imagined
sex during slumber. It was reported in the Journal of Sex Research that 85% of women had had
a nocturnal orgasm by the age of 21. While women don’t produce semen, there can still be discharge,
so it’s still a wet dream – just not as messy. Around 8% of male and female dreams at any age
have a sexual theme in them. A study showed that 4% of sex dreams for men and women ended
with an orgasm. Still, research shows males tend to have wet dreams more than females.
It’s been happening since history was first recorded.
48. In the Book of Deuteronomy, there’s a passage
about soldiers having wet dreams. It says, “When you are encamped against your enemies, then
you shall keep yourself from every evil thing. If any man among you becomes unclean because of a
nocturnal emission, he shall go outside the camp.” Poor guy. He was told he’d have to go
outside and clean himself and not come back until morning. In many religions back
in the day, wet dreams were seen as a kind of impurity. Ancient Buddhist scripture talks about
how “demons who either suck your energy or make love to you in your dreams.” In the medieval
bestseller on witches and all things evil, Malleus Maleficarum, the author issued grave
warnings to the people of the 15th century. He talked about “succubi,” female demons that
liked to collect the semen of men they’d seduced while the guys were sleeping. The male equivalent
is incubi, which the author said could make women pregnant. As some of you probably know, during the
European witch trials between the 14th and 17th centuries, many thousands of women were tortured
for allegedly being witches. It’s thought between 200,000 and 500,000 were executed.
In some cases, the women became pregnant and were accused of having sex with an
incubus. That happened in Ireland in the 14th century to a woman named Dame Alice Kyteler.
The records show she was accused of mixing up rooster’s blood and mixing the intestines with
“spiders and other black worms like scorpions.” The text says, “She had boiled this mixture
in a pot with the brains and clothes of a boy who had died without baptism and with the
head of a robber who had been decapitated.” It says she summoned demons, with whom, says
the text, “she permitted herself to be known carnally and that he appeared to her either as
a cat, a shaggy black dog or as a black man.” She escaped to England, but her
servant, Petronilla de Meath, who could also apparently fly and summon up
demons, was tortured and burned at the stake. To sum up, at certain times in history,
sleeping and what happens during sleep have been related to all things evil. More dark
stories later, but here are a few fast facts. 47.
The average person has about three to five dreams per night. Even if you think you
never dream, you do, but you don’t remember them. 46.
Dreams might last just five minutes, but they might also last 20 minutes. As we spend
about one-third of our lives sleeping, dreaming really is a huge feature of our lives. Researchers
have said on average, we will spend about six years of life dreaming if we live to old age.
45. One of the annoying things with dreams is even
if they are action-packed and we wake up with some parts of them in our heads, we forget them
very easily. This is all about brain chemicals. Studies have said that when we’re dreaming,
there’s a lack of the hormone norepinephrine in the cerebral cortex part of the brain, and this
might be why we forget our dreams so fast. Other studies showed it might also have something to do
with the density of the medial prefrontal cortex. It’s all a bit complicated, and the
science isn’t set, but basically, chemical changes during sleep matter. There’s
also the fact that the hippocampus, a part of the brain crucial for making long-term memories,
is not fully switched on when we wake up. But, if you try really hard to remember the dream as
soon as you awake, the hippocampus might spring into action, and you’ll remember the dream for
a long time to come. In those first few seconds, you have to recount the dream to yourself.
Otherwise, it might just drift from your memory. 44.
We have our deepest dreams during a period of sleep called REM, which means rapid
eye movement. When we sleep, we start with light sleep. We then move on to deep sleep and, after
that, to full deep sleep. Stage 4 is REM sleep. Your eyes start to move rapidly. Your breathing
becomes irregular, and your heart rate rises. A full cycle is between 90 to 120 minutes.
43. In studies, when people have been awoken
during REM sleep, they usually say they have been dreaming in color, but in one study,
12% of people stated all their dreams were in black and white. People over the age of 55
seem to dream in black and white more often. The researchers said this might be because
they watched black-and-white TV as kids. 42.
Blind people dream. This was put to the test when a study featuring 15 blind adults
and their 372 dreams over a two-month period was recorded. They dreamed a lot about animals,
especially their service dogs. They also dreamed a lot about eating. A bad dream for them was often
about movement or travel, which is not surprising, given how difficult getting around can be.
Blind folks’ dreams are normally less visual. If they’ve been blind all their lives, they only
dream about taste, smell, sound, and touch. A blind film critic named Tommy Edison explained,
“If I were to meet you in a dream, what I would know is your voice, maybe what perfume you’re
wearing.” He said he might dream about someone by how they felt when he touched them.
41. Animals also dream, or at least many of them do.
A recent scientific study scanned the brains of rats while they were asleep and also while
they were awake, enjoying a spin on the rat wheel. The researchers noted how the same brain
patterns on the wheel were sometimes present in dreams. Another rat study revealed, “Rats dream
about their tasks during slow wave sleep.” One of the best studies done
on dreams was with cats. As you might know, when we dream, we are basically
paralyzed. That’s to protect us, as you really don’t want to act out your dream of, say, having
a fight or making love. Your brain switches off the receptors that make your muscles kick into
action to stop you from doing anything stupid. Scientists in the cat study removed part
of the cats’ brain that switches off muscles in their sleep. When the cats were
asleep, instead of lying there paralyzed, they started fighting whatever enemy they were up
against in the dream. They also made movements as if they were jumping, hunting, and grooming.
Talking about sleep paralysis, this next story is scary.
40. One of the Infographics Show researchers
said he often thinks he’s woken up. He can hear the fan go woosh, woosh, woosh. He can
sense his girlfriend. He knows he’s awake, but he can’t move at all. He panics, shouts, and
tries to grab his girlfriend, and nothing happens. That’s sleep paralysis. The worse thing is since
your frontal lobes, the so-called executive suite, isn’t working, you tend to panic. You think
it’s real. Between eight and fifty percent of people will experience this in their lives.
Maybe five percent will have it often. It can happen because of medications, anxiety, or
stress, although it’s not always certain why people have it. As you’ll see soon, not long
ago, people were blaming sleep paralysis for killing people who had no obvious health problems.
In short, it happens when REM sleep and waking up cross over, so you’re dreaming and awake
at the same time. What’s even more trippy is it can come with sounds, like screaming,
talking, or roaring sounds. But the worst is when people feel like someone is in the
room with them, sometimes sitting on their chest. They can’t move, can’t shout, and some
horrible incubus or succubus is on top of them. People have been having such experiences
for centuries. They’re well reported, and while scientists don’t believe in entities
coming to sit on people at night, 500 years ago, things were different. Sleep paralysis entities
were called demons, or in some cultures, the night hag or old hag. In just about
every nation on Earth, there are stories about these things that come in the night.
Scientists say it’s just your brain acting up. Since you’re partly awake, your motor
cortex fires off signals to move. Obviously, you can’t move because you’re still paralyzed in
sleep. But other parts of your brain are expecting movement, so, say the scientists, your brain fills
in the blanks and creates a movement. Hence, you see someone else in the room. That someone else is
you. That’s one theory, anyway. Many people still believe those entities are real.
39. In the US, 2-6% of people live with nightmare
disorders of some type, women more so than men. Between 8 and 30% of adults have nightmares,
compared to 20 and 30% of children aged 5 to 12. But fewer people have the frightening
experiences we’ll talk about next. 38.
Night terrors tend to happen during the transition from non-REM sleep to lighter REM sleep, sometimes
making the person shout and scream and even become violent. Because they move, these dreams
are classified as an arousal disorder. Kids tend to grow out of them, but maybe
2 percent of adults have regular night terrors. Thankfully, after 60, only
about 1% of the population gets them. 37.
People with PTSD can have violent night terrors. They don’t want to hurt
anyone, but they might by accident. Here are a few night terror testimonies we found online:
“Typically, Cas will toss and turn, sometimes curling up/becoming very tense, but
recently they've become rougher and more verbal, even occasionally pushing/pulling me.”
“I punched my husband in my sleep and screamed, ‘I'm going to BLEEPING kill you…I have
been violent on more than one occasion.” “I just remove myself from being in
bed with anyone I don’t want to kill by accident if I’m sleeping with someone.”
And the BBC in 2017, “When Liz's husband, John, attacked her in his sleep and
drew blood, she finally realized she could no longer share a bed with him.”
Ok, but why do these things happen? 36.
The BBC’s story about John and Liz described John as a gentle giant, but at some point, he kept
going to bed and having violent dreams. John had no idea he was moving around when he was having
dreams of fighting off tigers or, in some cases, snakes biting onto his leg. Fighting was the
natural thing to do, of course, but the problem for John is he, like many others in the world, has
a disorder that means his brain stem doesn’t fully make his body paralyzed in sleep.
Now for some more fast facts. 35.
You can dream in absolutely any position, but if you don’t want
sleep paralysis, perhaps don’t sleep on your back. 34.
If you play video games or eat or watch TV right before
bed, you’re more likely to have an intense dream. 33.
People have actually murdered other people in their dreams.
We’ll take more about this later. 32.
If you’ve ever woken up and felt really content for some reason, and you know it’s the
dream you just had that made you feel that way, there’s a name for it: Euneirophrenia. The term
was coined by an American psychologist named Dr. Mark Blechner.
31. If you want better dreams that make you feel good,
try and lose the stress. Stress is one of the main factors behind crappy dreams.
30. It probably won’t come as a surprise that men tend
to have more violent dreams than women. Men also dream more about other men, while women tend to
have just as many dreams about both sexes. Men have more confrontations in their dreams, while
women tend to have more dreams about relationships and interpersonal interactions.
29. Studies have shown that 65% of men and 70%
of women report they’ve had recurring dreams. 28.
We often incorporate the sounds around us into our dreams. We’re
sure you’ve all dreamed your alarm clock was a different noise in your dream. Being hot or cold
can also influence what kind of dream you have. 27.
You don’t invent people in your dreams. All the folks that appear in your dreams are
people you know or have seen before, maybe on TV, in the train station, or people you know.
26. Scientists say there’s a substance that
can make you dream while you’re awake: DMT. The longer word is Dimethyltryptamine. As
a part of a brew called ayahuasca, Amazonian tribes have been using DMT during ceremonies for
hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Only in the past few decades have Westerners, including techy
people wanting inspiration and soldiers with PTSD, been going to the Amazon to take part in
those sessions. The results are remarkable. But why?
25. Scientists who’ve worked with DMT explained,
“We found that the states of deep immersion induced by DMT—often described by users as a
'breakthrough experience'—were paralleled by decreases in alpha brain waves as well as
increases in delta and theta brain waves. This is very intriguing because we find similar
changes in brain waves when people are dreaming.” If you’ve ever taken DMT, you’ll know that even
though you’re awake, you can blast off to space, or you might find yourself surrounded by
cartoon animals. You can talk to toadstools or tunnel down to a hell that will scare the
life out of you. These are of your own making, as are your dreams.
24. People who’ve taken ayahuasca trips have
talked about overcoming years of depression or anxiety. Some of them have seen the light,
even though they’ve had scary experiences. They’ve been cured. It’s hard to say how
this happened. Still, it’s probably related to the same reason why researchers at Johns
Hopkins said another psychedelic substance, psilocybin (magic mushrooms), also helped
people to overcome chronic depression. The same thing has happened in UK studies
when chronically depressed study participants talked about having “spiritually significant
experiences.” A researcher in the UK said it seems as if during these trips, the brain rewires.
Depression is often like going around and around, having the same negative fears and thoughts.
So, if these ‘waking’ dream states can help people, does it mean our dreams can unhook us
from negative thoughts? It seems so. A professor in the US said dreams can take a “painful
sting out of difficult, even traumatic, emotional episodes experienced during the day.”
The New Scientist wrote in 2018, “For the first time, researchers have got evidence that dreams
help soothe the impact of emotional events in our lives, acting like overnight therapy.”
It might not feel like it at times, but your dreams are your friend.
23. In yet another study, this time in the US,
people’s nightmares were recorded. The most common nightmare in the group of 2,000 people
was falling. Next up was being chased. Then came death, feeling lost, feeling trapped,
being attacked, missing an important event, waking up late, someone dying, getting injured,
teeth falling out, and natural disasters. 22.
We don’t know exactly what these dreams mean, but we do know they’re universal. People from
New Zealand to Nigeria, from Italy to India, dream about their teeth falling out. All
we can do is guess regarding the meaning, but the answer is very likely insecurity.
It might not sound like therapy, but at least when you wake up, you know there is something you
need to resolve. You should always try to examine weird dreams. As you’ll see later, Ted Bundy’s
best friend once learned a lot from a highly symbolic dream.
21. 55% of people at one point in their lives
will have what is called a lucid dream, and around 20 percent of people have them
quite often. These happen during REM sleep when you suddenly become aware you’re dreaming.
That’s very different from sleep paralysis since, in sleep paralysis, you think you’ve woken up. In
lucid dreams, you’re not awake, and you know it. In a lucid dream, you could be being chased
by a gorilla with 12-inch fangs that looks strangely like your grandmother. You’re scared,
but then just say to yourself, “Wait a minute, why am I running? This is a dream?” And
then you wake up. Sometimes you allow the dream to continue, but you won’t be scared
anymore since you have control of the story. Why lucid dreams happen is another uncertainty.
Scientists have talked about brain chemical changes, brain wave activity changes,
and the possibility of hybrid sleep. 20.
A scary kind of lucid dream is a false awakening. These Nightmare on Elm Street-type dreams are
unforgettable. There are certain levels. One is you just think you’ve woken up, and maybe you
head to the bathroom to relieve yourself. A second later, you wake up for real with a warm patch
of pee in your bed. Sometimes you might get up and think damn, I’m late for work, and then wake
up for real and see it's Sunday…Ah, sweet relief! Those aren’t too scary. The other type is. In
these dreams, you really think you’ve gotten up. You might walk downstairs and open the fridge,
but all the time, you figure something isn’t quite right. You can’t put your finger on it, though.
There’s just something ominous happening. Then someone comes out from behind a door, or you
realize you don’t have a fridge in the kitchen. You wake up with a jolt. It was a dream, but by
God, it felt real. One guy said it happened to him twice, so he woke up with a jolt, told himself
it was just a dream, and went downstairs again, but that was also a dream! Maybe this
is what inspired the movie Inception. 19.
There is also something called pre-lucid dreams. This is just when you ask
yourself the question: “Am I asleep and dreaming?” 18.
There is very little brain activity when people are in comas, but people
who’ve come out of comas have explained that they dreamed. Some of them said they were stuck
in long nightmares. A coma can mean many things, so it all depends on which part of the brain
is damaged as to how much you’ll dream. 17.
Writing on the Psychology Today website, a woman said when she was in a coma, she lived a
whole different life. She said when she woke up, “it felt like someone had pulled me violently
from one world I knew to another as if I had stepped from one room to another.”
She lived in a different town, with lots of stores she frequented. She had lots
of friends in the town. Life just went on until she was rudely awakened and was in a hospital bed.
What’s stranger is that from then on, she’d return to this town in many of her dreams. It was like
going back to see old friends she’d abandoned. That’s cool, but not as cool as this next
story about a man we’ll call a pandemic hero. 16.
A guy from England possibly had the funniest new life dream ever…well, funny
for us, maybe not for him. During the pandemic, he became very sick. He had cancer, and
after contracting the virus, he was put on a ventilator. He wasn’t expected to live.
In his coma, instead of finding a new world full of possibilities, he found himself working
as a delivery guy for the Tesco supermarket. He later told the press that for 11 days, he was
“forced to be a Tesco delivery driver with a really crap van.” In his new life, which he felt
was totally real, a gang in London kidnapped him. They took him to a garage with a wet floor and
tortured him with a defibrillator, after which they made him deliver groceries for a living.
This was an 11-day epic, which is so good you need to hear some of it in his own words. He
explained, “The leader of the gang was a dwarf who kept demanding 'I want more money.' I then
also started selling acid tabs…They wanted me to look after a prostitute. My job was to protect
her…She worked with other hackers to find out who Banksy was as he was trying to kill the queen.
There was a big event in London next to the Thames that had two giant pyramids…There was a film
showing that night next to the pyramids that had three words displayed ‘YOU ARE DEAD’”.
We wonder how many acid tabs he’d taken in his life prior to the pandemic. Anyway, the good
news is he returned home in much better health. 15.
Many people have lucid dream superpowers. One guy said when he turns around
and runs backward, he is faster than anyone on the planet. Other people have been able to fly
at will. People writing on Reddit said in their dreams, they’d harnessed fire, shapeshifted,
walked through walls, breathed underwater, controlled time, and spat out laser beams.
It’s a pity the Tesco worker couldn’t do those things. He could have
saved himself a lot of stress. 14.
Native Americans or First Nation cultures might use what are called
dreamcatchers, a web to collect bad dreams. The legend states that a spider woman
once told an Ojibwe tribe grandmother, “I will spin you a web that hangs between you
and the moon so that when you dream, it will snare the bad thoughts and keep them from you.”
This spider woman protected the tribe, but the tribe expanded, and the spider woman couldn’t
protect everyone. That’s why the dreamcatcher was invented. It later became popular in other tribes,
including the Cherokee, Lakota, and Navajo. Here’s a good example of when a dream
helped someone to discover the truth. 13. We’re sure you all know the serial killer
named Ted Bundy, a nightmare of a human being. Back when he was a free man, he worked
with a woman named Anne Rule, ironically, on a crisis hotline that gave advice to people on
the edge. For $2 an hour, psychopath Ted helped people who were thinking about hurting themselves.
He was good at it. He was also smart and friendly, so Anne Rule became close friends with
him. He told her his deepest secrets, and she told him hers. So, when he was charged
with horrific crimes against women, despite the evidence stacking up against him, she couldn’t
believe he was guilty…until she had a dream. On April 1, 1976, after she’d just visited
Ted in prison, she dreamed of a car accident in which a baby was severely hurt. She
picked it up and swaddled it in her arms, screaming at bystanders that the baby needed help.
They all turned away. Even an ambulance crew, nurses, and doctors refused to help, as she was
screaming, “It’s going to die if you don’t help!” In her book about Ted, she wrote, “And then
I looked down at it. It wasn’t an innocent baby but a demon. Even as I held it, it
sunk its teeth into my hand and bit me.” When she awoke, she understood that the baby
was Ted. She’d been fooling herself about his innocence. The dream was so powerful
that she changed her mind about him. That’s one of the great things about dreams. They
can bring us closer to a truth hidden deep in the subconscious.
12. The venerated American President
Abraham Lincoln would have agreed. He believed in the power of dreams, and
he let it be known. Back in his day, many people took dreams seriously.
On April 11, 1865, Lincoln was feeling downcast. He turned to his friend and
bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon, and explained why. He said he’d just had a dream where he saw a
corpse lying atop a catafalque in the White House’s East Room. He said, “the subdued sobs of
mourners” filled his ears. He then asked a soldier who was in the coffin, and the soldier replied,
“The President. He was killed by an assassin.” A few days later, while watching the play “Our
American Cousin,” at Ford’s theater, Lincoln was shot by an assassin. He died the next day.
11. In those days, the dreams of famous people were
published in newspapers. It was believed that dreams could tell us about the future, especially
recurring dreams. According to the Sleep Foundation, between 60% and 75% of American adults
have recurring dreams. 77% of those recurring dreams are negative.
10. Before Dr. James Watson came up with
the double helix structure of DNA, he had dreams about a double-sided
staircase or, according to other accounts, intertwined serpents. The guy that created
the modern periodic table in the 19th century, Dimitry Mendeleev, talked about dream inspiration,
saying, “I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening,
I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper.” In 1816, a teenager named Mary Shelly was visiting
the poet Lord Byron in Geneva when she dreamed of “a hideous phantasm of a man, stretched out,
and then, on working of some powerful machine, show signs of life.” She then got to work on her
novel Frankenstein. James Cameron said he had a fever and dreamed of an “image of a chrome-like
skeleton emerging from a fire,” which he said had “a metallic torso holding kitchen knives.” That’s
where the idea for The Terminator came from. But can dreams become dangerous?
9. You’ll be pleased to know that dreams can’t
kill you, never mind how scary they get. You can die in your dream, just as Lincoln was dead in
his. You can be killed in a dream though, which, again, is likely related to fears in your
waking life. Still, dreams won’t kill you. 8.
That’s not what you might have heard, though. In the 1980s, after
the US had bombed the hell out of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, a lot people from those countries
went to live in the US – many carrying extreme trauma from all the chaos they’d seen. Then
something strange happened. About 100 young Hmong men just died in their sleep. Physicians
said there didn’t seem to be an underlying cause. The men had gone to bed healthy and didn’t
wake up. Scientists gave it a name: Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome, or SUNDS.
It should be noted that this part of the world is super superstitious when it comes to spirits and
ghosts. So, when all those Hmomg guys, many in their early 30s, just started kicking the bucket,
people believed it might be related to spirits. Many of the Hmong said these men had been visited
by a spirit that sits on the chest, which you know is called sleep paralysis in the West. The Hmong
call this malign ghost dab tsuam (dah chua). So, the question for US scientists was related to
if there was a connection between sleep paralysis and SUNDS. Meanwhile, Hmong men were scared out
of their wits, not knowing if the evil spirit woman was going to get them in their sleep.
US scientists didn’t think there were any ghost-related deaths. They said that in the
Green-Hmong subgroup, there were many cases of sudden death and also non-fatal sleep
disturbances. They said Hmong men were predisposed to a type of genetic heart arrhythmia
that can get worse at night when the heart is beating slowly. One doctor later said that heart
arrhythmia and sleep paralysis are connected. Hmong people were told rather than placate the
spirits with offerings, they should see a doctor. 7.
Despite what you might have heard, you can turn lights on or off in dreams. Not
being able to turn one on might just mean you are insecure about something. Turning one on could
be positive; possibly you feel good news is on the way, or you’ve had a breakthrough in work or life.
6. 50% of all your night’s dreams will usually
happen during the last two hours of sleep. These are the witching hours and the time
you really want control of your dreams. 5.
According to dream researchers, lucid dreaming can be learned. They say that one
trick is to purposefully wake yourself up about two hours before you intend to get up fully.
This is called the wake-up-back-to-bed (WBTB) technique, which can be used with the mnemonic
induction of lucid dreams (MILD) technique. The latter means saying something over and over
in your head for about five minutes before you go back to sleep for another two hours. This
could be the phrase, “Next time I’m dreaming, I will remember I’m dreaming.”
If you think this sounds like hogwash, scientists in 2020 put it to the test. Not only
did 18% of people have a lucid dream on nights when they used the techniques, but five out
of ten people who’d never had a lucid dream in their lives had at least one lucid dream in the
five-week period they practiced the techniques. 4.
Sleepwalking, otherwise known as somnambulism, happens during the Non-Rapid Eye Movement
(NREM) stage of sleep. It happens to kids more, but in general, about 7 percent of people
will sleepwalk at some point in their lives. 3.
There is also sleep-talking, otherwise known as somniloquy. It’s thought this often happens
during REM sleep and also during light sleep. It’s usually pretty harmless. In fact, one
study showed about half of all kids between 3 and 10 talk in their sleep, often just a
blast of speech that lasts about 30 seconds. Adults tend to do it less; maybe only about 5%
of adults regularly sleep talk. 66% of people of adults have done it at least once, according
to Sleep Medicine Research, and 17% of adults had done it for a three-month or more period. What
comes out is often nonsensical or incoherent. What’s quite amusing is that the Sleep
Foundation said people often get really rude and offensive when they talk in their
sleep or perhaps say embarrassing sexual stuff. Studies have shown that “no” is often a word
of choice for sleepers, and in a French study, the curse word “putain” was said a lot.
It’s really only a problem when it turns into screaming and shouting, which happens during
those night terrors we’ve already discussed. People with PTSD are more likely to talk or shout
in their sleep than people that don’t have PTSD. 2.
There is also a nocturnal sleep-related eating disorder (NSRED).
This means people sleepwalk to the fridge or another food source. Studies have shown that they
will often eat anything, so ice cream with a pizza covered in custard and curry is just fine.
One study said, “Injuries resulted from the careless cutting of food or opening of cans;
consumption of scalding fluids (coffee) or solids (hot oatmeal); and frenzied running into walls,
kitchen counters, and furniture.” Even worse, people have eaten toxic substances,
including cleaning agents and glue. Thankfully, this is very rare. NSRED
happens to only 1 to 5 percent of adults. It’s usually connected to other sleep disorders,
eating disorders, and may be related to major depression and severe anxiety. It can also be
embarrassing since people and families wake up to find what looks like a family of bears have
been through the kitchen in the night. One guy said he did it all the time, explaining
that every other night he’ll “wake up in a bed filled with food, a Hansel-esque trail of
crumbs littering my bedroom and kitchen floors.” Ok, last one, the weirdest one,
even after what you’ve just heard. 1.
If you see someone sleepwalking, don’t shock them with a slap or shout at them. Be gentle. Lead them
back to bed. The reason is they might do something dangerous. They could hurt you or hurt themselves.
In 2005, a 15-year-old girl climbed 130 feet to the top of a crane near her house outside
London, UK. When firemen got to her, they discovered she was fast asleep. She had no
idea she’d walked out of her house and climbed that crane – an incredibly risky adventure.
Also, in 2005, the British press talked about a man that had just been cleared of killing his
83-year-old father. The old man had been kicked and punched and jumped on, giving him 90 injuries.
When the son woke up, his father was in the house driveway looking like he’d gone 12 rounds with
an escaped Chimpanzee on Xanax. The son was later subjected to what was called “the most detailed
scientific tests in British legal history,” and he got off, even though he had a history of violence.
Scott Falater in the US was not so lucky after, in the 1990s, he claimed he was sleepwalking
when he stabbed his wife dozens of times and dumped her body in a swimming pool. In 2021,
still in prison for murder, Falater said, “All I can say is I do not know what happened.
I do know for sure I never planned it. There was nothing for me to gain from it.”
In Spain in 2001, a man who murdered his wife and mother-in-law with an axe said
he was dreaming about fighting ostriches when he was chopping the two women up. This excuse
didn’t work in the courts, but surprisingly, the so-called sleepwalking defense has
worked a few times throughout modern history. Now you need to watch this gruesome tale,
“Russian Sleep Experiment – EXPLAINED.” Or, have a look at “Human Sleep
Experiment That Went Horribly Wrong.”
