Somnambulism

Somnambulism

Imagine waking up and finding your girlfriend beaten to death and then later discovering that you were the culprit. This is what allegedly happened to a man named Stephen Reitz who claims that he was sleepwalking when this event took place while the couple was on vacation on Catalina Island . Although this is an extremely

severe case sleepwalking does affect millions of people. It is estimated that 15% of all people suffer from the parasomnia known as somnabulism or sleepwalking, mostly prepubescent children(Lippincott Williams &Wilkins, 842). Sleepwalking consists of movements that are related to ambulation such as walking, sitting, or running.

I have been told by my parents that I used to sleepwalk on a regular basis. As a child I would often wonder the house on some unknown mission. Through some sort of luck or good parenting(or a combination of both) I was never injured in any of my night time adventures. These events in my childhood seemed to be, more than anything else, just harmless ambling. . I had never really given it much thought as I was never told that it was anything out of the ordinary. I had always thought that sleepwalking was a way of acting out what you were dreaming about(although I have since found this to be false). This course has peaked my interest on this phenominon and has been very interesting to find out how I have been wrong, where I was right, and all the correlations with other symptoms that I had thought were completely unrelated.

Until about forty years ago psychiatrists usually considered somnabulism to be a dissociative disorder such as multiple personality, characterized by sudden temporary alteration in consciencness, or motor behavior(Webster's Dictionary), and neurologists claimed that it was a form of epilepsy. Sleepwalking, in the past, was also thought to be a person acting out their dreams. Neither of these diagnoses turned out to be correct. It seems that sleepwalking occurs when the brain has trouble making the transition from non-REM sleep to REM sleep.

Works Cited

"Sleepwalking and Night Terrors: Psychopathological and psychophysiological correlates"

International Review of Psychiatry, August 2005; 17(4) 263-270

"Sleepwalking