Extreme Sleep: Parasomnia

little uh bit of the exploding head syndrome. I did, yeah, yeah, which was terrifying because it sounded like a door just shutting in my head really loud, and I thought for sure someone had entered the house and it was about

to hack meat a bits. But no, yeah, because I mean, one of the key things about dreams is that to the dream or the dream is generally real, our mind completely buys its reality, and so it's a really telling thing on on a larger level about how our brains can believe anything, and it can be a you know, and you can argue that well of our brains can believe this is a dream. Then what's to say that everything going on right now is not a dream. Well, and dreams in the in the brain are is still

one of those areas of research that's pretty untapped. And and just now are people really starting to understand what's going on with our brains when we're sleeping and why we do the things we do and think the things we think are happening to us and a general like generally for my part, I have pretty normal sleep. So I tend to have nights where I have like a good night's sleep or a bad night's sleep, or I have um no dreams, stupid dreams, really cool dreams, or

sometimes like stress dreams or nightmares. But that's pretty much it. But there is we're going to discuss in this podcast. There's a whole world of extreme sleep out there, of crazy and sometimes very tragic um sleep disorders that can occur and plague people for years. Yeah. Yeah, And the sleep paralysis, which we have mentioned in the alien abductions. That is pretty much the sleep paralysis. This feeling that that you know you're being tied down in your muscles,

are are you're not working basically, but you're awake. That sort of brief moment that's really responsible for a lot of people trying to square what's happening to them and coming out on the other end thinking they've been abducted by aliens, by the way, because their muscles are still locked down. Like the basis here is when you when

you're sleeping, UH, we're having uh. You know, our bodies arresting for the most part, and we need a we're we have all this mental activity that's still going on, so we the brain shuts down the rest of the body so that if in your dream you are karate chop and zombies, you won't actually be throwing karate chops. And then when you wake up, they the idea is to release these constraints, unlock everything, and let you carry on. But in sleep paralysis, somebody forgot to undo under the locks.

You know what you're a but I'm awake. I should be able to control my muscles now, but I'm not. So it's very confusing. And then with other para so omnias, you have the the opposite going on, where you know the safety should be on and you're sleeping, and yet your local motor part of your brain is directing you in all sorts of places and you're you're running a muck in the neighborhood. I think yesterday I was trying to do like an elaborate Jurassic Park electric tarance dinosaurs

kind of analogy. But I think the more apt analogy would be roller coasters. Like sleep paralysis is the roller coaster has come to a stop, but you're still locked into the roller coaster harness, and you're like, why is this not releasing? And then uh, some of these other situations we're talking about are the roller coaster is moving and the harness is not locked down. Yeah, and you're just you know, you're going down the hill and you're

trying to float out of your seat. Yes, that's the feeling, and that's the analogy. UM, as far as statistics to go, sleep paralysis actually pretty common, and surveys from different countries show a wide range of estimates anywhere from twenty to six of that particular population experiencing sleep paralysis. So, you know, we're not going to really talk about sleep paralysis, but

we'll talk a little bit more about a parasomnia. And we're when we're talking about a parasomnia, it's anything that happens that sort of out of the ordinary parasomnia, abnormal sleep basically right, yeah, yeah, And some examples are eating disorders, you know, sleep eating sleep, sleepwalking, night terrors. So we're not talking like midnight snack. We're talking you get up in you you are stuffing your pie hole with a

table butter. That's what we're talking about. Something that you normally wouldn't do, right, um, and then hopefully you wouldn't be doing that. And then rem sleep behavior disorders and sleep aggression. And then there's them, say the cherry on the top six omnia which is sometimes called sleep sex. Yeah, and that refers to actual acts they're carried out by a person who is sleeping. This is this is real. Yeah.

Actually went to a panel at the World Science Festival about sleep and Dr Carlo Shank was one of the panelists, and he says that parasomnia is represent extreme states of mixed sleep wakefulness and that brain research has shown that when the brain is globally asleep, there are still parts of the brain that are awake. With parasonnia's release of behavior is not accompanied by proper judgment, and sleep behavior is non culpable behavior, which is important in your judgment

is still in the dream world. That your movements are in the real world. So yeah, yeah, And we can talk a little bit more about this later. But there have been people who have had a sleep disorder defense for murders and have gotten off because they could prove that what they did while they were sleeping really wasn't intentional by their waking self. You know, I feel like I have some sort of a sleep disorder now that we're talking about it is I'll be having a dream

and well, this is an example. I'll have the dream and then suddenly a guy will come to me in the dream and be like, Hey, I have this pegasus here. Would you like to ride this pegasus around and fly around and experience unbridled you know, joy. And I will be like, I don't know, this sounds kind of scary. I have something I need to do, like like, I don't embrace like I'm bringing too much real world judgment

into my dreams. Was this guy Harry Hamlin? Um No, I don't think it was because of the yeah, clash the touch. Okay, so you can't really turn off that part of your brain that's see the judgment to to sort of let yourself go with it, right, Like if I'm in the dream personally, it seems like crazy things don't really happen. Sometimes weird things too, but it's it's only when I'm like a third person perspective, when it's

like a movie dream, then things will be awesome. But if it's just me, it's like I'll pass on the pegasus, you know, and and other things will occur and I'll be like, oh, I'm not really into that, whereas and then I'll wake up and be like, well, that was a dream. I could have done anything. Well. I wonder, like, I know that sleep patterns are now being connected to genetics.

I wonder if your dreaming patterns could be as well. Yeah. Yeah, And this is actually from Wired dot com Sleep Disorders Trace to Genes that says researchers only began to seriously explore the genetics asleep in the mid ninety nineties, and they're far from determining which genes are in charge of

the body clock. Even so, there appears to be general consensus that many of us don't voluntarily choose to be short sleepers or long sleepers, or morning people or night people, which is kind of interesting because you know, independently of this, the researchers have found that people with a certain gene are more likely to feel sleepy or fatigued, but have difficulties sleeping after only four hours of sleep compared to people without this gene. And this gene is associated with narcolepsy.

So's there's certainly underlying factors going on here when we talk about sleep disorders, um or even diseases like something called the fatal familial insomnia. Oh now this one's yeah, this is a brutal it's awful. Um again, it's another it's it's a type of sleep disorder. Although it's it's a bit of a disease. It runs in families, and Pierre Luigi Gambetti, one of the discoveries of the condition, claims that it is the worst disease that you could get. Yeah,

and he's not overstating this. Our own Josh Clark wrote a little bit about this and what do I think? It was ten amazing things your brain can do, which you can just find just a search for fatal insomnia on the House of Works home page and you'll find this a particular article. But yeah, it's actually a prion disease, which is a kin to like curu. The disease among human animals. Yeah, and then also akin to mad cow disease as well. So it's a it's a it's an

abnormal like protein encoding thing. Only twenty eight families worldwide so far have they discovered have this. But yeah, I mean it's it's brute like. There was this this one who had and I mean it's like months of not being able to sleep, like just falling into the resulting that comes with this. And uh, I mean they eventually like tried to shut his brain down and put him in an artificial comma, but his brain was still awake in there. Yeah, this is this is the case of Um,

it's a Chicago music teacher, Michael Cork. Yeah. Yeah, and at the age of forty, he just had an awful bout of insomnia. You're right, completely quit sleeping, which is the marker of this disease. You quit sleeping, your your brain and your body begin to shut down. He deteriorated into dementia, and doctors actually even induced the coma in in him, hoping that that would help shut down that part of the brain. But no, this is his brain

continued to be active. Um, and so I believe it was six months after the initial onset of insomnia that he died. So this is fatal um. In some cases, people can live up to three years, but they will die UM. And what's unusual about this is that it doesn't really come into existence until and that's something like the forties fifties. UM, that's when it's going to show up. And because it's an autosomal dominant gene mutation, there's a fifty percent chance that you can pass this along to

your kid. So it's relatively um new to us in terms of its discovery, and it's very rare. And again it's very hard to spot because if your kid doesn't develop this until they're an adult, you know, they're forty fifty years old, then you know, prior to us even knowing about it, you would just not you would assume that it was some sort of freak accident that you're

you know, that your child expired from. So it's a It is awful because you're wasting away in your mind is wasting away, and you're not sleeping, and you just shut down, your body shuts down. You know. Insomnia is one of these things that I think it's difficult for people to imagine if you've never suffered through it, because I mean, if for people with normal sleep patterns, you might think like, well, I wouldn't be able to sleep. Oh, I guess I'll have to play video games all night

or a while. I'd get so much work done or reading done. Is sometimes it's especially in a busy life or life full of a lot of hobbies. Um, you think, well, sleep's kind of in the way. It's kind of like eating. It's if I didn't have to do this, it would free up a lot of time. But but but when you have insomnia, when you have trouble sleeping, Um, it's it's not like you have a gift of usable time on your hands, you do know, I mean yeah, I mean basically, insanity sets in the longer amount of time

that you know you're sleep deprived. Um. And we've talked about this before. You've had a couple of all night ers maybe, Um, you know, whether you're studying or you were doing something else, a couple of days after you were seriously debilitated in your ability to think critically. And that's just a couple of nights. Can you imagine six months of not sleeping? Um? You know that and and that would make sense why he descended into dementia. Yeah,

there is. I mean this is fiction. But Stephen King's book Insomnia um, which that's the title implies, has to do with insomnia, but it it ultimately involves, of course some stup for natural elements and ties into the whole Dark Tower series. But there are some great chapters as this. The lead characters an older man and he's he's gradually developing insomnia where it's like each night he's getting less

and less sleep. And King does a really great job of in these these early chapters, especially really making you feel the frustration and weariness of someone who is having uh, who is suffering from insomnia. Yeah, it's grueling, right. Um. So, I mean I've had it several times in my life and I cannot imagine having having it just im perpetuity. How do you fix it? I mean, eventually my body could just got so tired that I, you know, fell asleep.

But it really is one of those things that your brain can drive you insane because you're constantly thinking and and and and most of the time it's not deep thoughts or interesting thing. This is a very Buddhist idea there, How's that well, it's constantly thinking, right, and you need to be able to clear your mind right, Yeah, yeah, which is where meditation comes. Right. Um, So let's let's

talk about something called REM sleep behavior disorder. This is something that Dr Shank talked about a lot, and this is particularly um interesting because people are acting out their aggressions and and oftentimes it can actually be dangerous to partners, spouses who have to live with someone who has what's called an rb D, the rem sleep behavior disorder. And

it's actually cultural as well. So you can see in every different culture there there are going to be examples of r b D, and um, those aggressions, these dreams that are very violent are going to be playing out

and whatever sort of cultural story that they're telling. Uh. We saw a clip again at this panel at the World Science Festival of this Japanese man who was having a dream about a Samurai sword which he was wielding around and then plunging into his opponent yuse I guess lying in repose on the on the floor, and it was this very allowed britt uh movement that he was doing that was I mean, you could practically see the Samurai sword in his hand. It was that convincing he

did not actually have a sword. No, no, no, he was dreaming about this. Did not let that man sleep with the sword, right, And you probably don't want to cuddle up next to someone like this, right. Um, You've heard plenty of other accounts of I think it was my great grandfather, I want to say, um, like he had a little of this where he would like start

kicking and punching his sleep. Or you've heard of accounts of people who like strangle somebody in their sleep, you know, yeah, yeah, And that's actually it's male dominant this RBD, which is interesting and Dr Shank has said that a lot of his RBD patients were just mild mannered folks during the day, really nice people, but they would have these terrifyingly aggressive dreams at night and their spouses would say, please help me, because you know, my my husband tried to come me

last night. And in fact, there was an example mel Abel, again mild mannered retiree, who almost strangled his wife Harriet to death one night while dreaming that he was finishing off a deer that he had just shot in his dream, and in his dream, the deer would not die, and so he took it by the jaw and he started to twist it and try to snap its neck and that wasn't working, so then he started to strangle the deer while the deer was his wife, and his wife

was screaming, you know, blood curling screams, and thankfully it woke him up right before he he almost killed her. And that's, of course when he went to go seek help. And all of this is like, it's it's sensational, it's it's nuts, but um and I think one one of the things that's pointing to is that there are underlying factors going on here. And what Dr Shank found is that of rbd UH disorder sufferers will then convert into

Parkinson's disease, Yeah, which is crazy. And he thinks that this is it's definitely a lot of insight and an opportunity to have insight into Parkinson's and try to intervene early. Uh. So, you know, you think that these things are going on your head and that it's just some sort of anomaly. Well, in fact, you know, there's some sort of physical basis uh for your for your your emotions, your mind, your body reacting to all of this and playing out you know,

an aggression. So it'll be interesting to see what sort of extrapolations they make with Parkinson's in rb D. But now let's get back to that tub of butter. Oh but before we get to that, to a butter Oh yeah, we guess we're take a quick break. This presentation is brought to you by Intel Sponsors of Tomorrow, and we're back tub of butter. Sleep eating. Let's do this all right.

We have a great article on our site called the House Sleepwalking More exply Katie Lambert, and uh, you might associate sleep eating with ambient right right, Yeah, that's typically that's the whole story, all these nightmare scenarios where someone gets a prescription for ambient and uh, and then all their friends him, Oh, well, I I know a friend

who blah blah blah. They you know, ate a pack of cigarettes where they or they got up and they cooked dinner or they did something crazy or they saw something crazy and then they don't take the ambiance that was prescribed to them by a doctor. Well, but Katie's article points out that as the drug groom popularity, you had more of these instances of sleep eating happening. Interesting fact, Katie wrote that article while sleep typing and sleep eating at the same time. Yeah, and uh. In fact of

this is the first person to count here. And she says they ate from tubs of margarine that some of the subjects, um, I'm just kidding. Of course, Kati wouldn't do that. Uh. And they ate cigarettes and raw meat. And again, what you're seeing, what you're seeing here are are hopefully hallmarks of what they would not be doing right in daytime activities. And people would wake up with rumbs all over the bed and have no idea, you know, why the crumbs were there. They'd start gaining weight and

they'd say, I don't understand why I'm gaining weight. Well, I understand sometimes too, it would be even if they're eating something normal, there'd be something abnormal about the way they were doing it, Like like there was some account where somebody who's doing something weird with their pinky finger while eating. Oh yeah, yeah. Dr Schunky talks about that and he says that, um, he said he showed a video actually in this panel of the woman eating a brownie.

In each bite, she would put her pinky at the entrance of her mouth and then she'd nibble at her pinky, and she'd do other little weird things while she was eating. It was it was pretty curious. Um. And of course she would never eat that way during the day. Um. And that was a good indicator that her mind and her brain were still in this weird sleep mode. And um and and and yet she had this motor activity

going on. And this is interesting too that that sleep eating is usually considered a final common pathway disorder, meaning that a variety of other sleep problems could be at So you've got sleepwalking, restless leg syndrome, or even sleep apnea, which the sleep athnia. Is it the same one who was punching? No, No, that was I think that was the That was his wife's father. Okay, yeah, I was gonna say, because that could have that could have been what sort of tipped the scale in terms of activity

at night when he slept he had like an air mask. Okay, all right. So I mean we do see we see these ambient induced sleep eating things, and then we also see where it's not ambient induced, it just happens to be sort of a byproduct of other sleep disorders. And I should I really want to stress. Having gone through this with a member of my family. Uh, if your doctor prescribes ambient too, you don't listen to all your crazy friends about like some encounter they had with somebody

who had some sort of crazy thing. Listen to your doctor for you know, you know you say that, and then I'm going to be honest and say to you that I'm not necessary. Well, I don't take a lot of stuff like that anyway, so it's it's just not

sort of my thing. But I take medicine when I need it, but I don't necessarily seek out sleep aids, and even though I probably should sometimes, but I do have this fear that if you make it sound like like rifling through everyone's desk when they go home in the evening to look for sleeping No, no, no, I'm talking about like if someone if you're prescribed it by your doctor. Yes, I know, but you have to understand

that it is. There's just part of of people who say, I really don't want to wake up having, you know, finding myself having a urinated on a policeman after stuffing ten donuts into my mouth in the middle of nowhere. I know nobody wants that. Who wants to bring that upon them, even if it happens to like one person out of and I'm really hurt that you keep bringing this up because that was an isolated incident for me

to donut and the urination thing on the cop. But you say you say that, yeah, but we just did a podcast about lying, So how can I how can I be sure you just look me straight in the eye and said that. I UM. But anyway, so s yes, sleepingting is definitely one of those. Um that is is brought on by other disorders, as is sexomnia. Alright, so yeah, this is the main event. This is I hope people I mean, I hope they didn't you didn't fast forward to this part, but get to the sexomnia. Yeah, people

with sexomnia tend to be sleepwalkers and have other parasomnias. Again, and that makes sense because the locomotive system is activated. So there are kind of two different scenarios for sexomnia. UM, if you've had a long history of multiple parasomnias, some of them beginning in childhood, or if you've got obstrictive

sleep apnea. And I should also stress that, um and for anyone who wasn't aware, uh, sexual arousal during sleep is normal generally happened, especially in men, like happens every night. Like um, lack of an erection during sleep tends to um uh be a telling factor in there being other like erectile this functions going on. So, I mean the very the medieval idea that you're being visited by a

demon at night. Yeah, succubus are an incubus that are causing you to have these these you know, erotic fantasies in your head. Um. No, it's just we're talking about something purely biological here. Well, in the case of sleep, ap near where you're you know, you could be snoring, um and you sort of wakes you up, except you're not quite awake, yeah, just enough to Like we we keep talking about about how it's like these lockdowns that

are released in these different parasomnia encounters. And now I've got a different metaphor in mine, and that is of a like a cell block in a prison, lockdown at night. But and so in some in this cell you've got sex in this cell, you've got eating in this cell, you've got um, samurai sword usage and uh. And in some of these encounters, everything locks down, but oh the sex cell is open and then uh and it's free

to wander the halls at night and it's snoring. Yeah, and it's snoring and Dr Schenk is now calling it snoregasm. That's actually what here before referred to with the sleep apnea. I looked it up and it has other um usages as well. But yeah, oh yeah, yeah, Like, well, I don't know if I can mention any of them. They're they're all significantly less scientific. Bird alert. Well, you put this on the outline and I'm like, well, let me look this up, and I'm just got that I didn't

do a Google image search. Well, we'll leave that to you guys out there. Uh. The good news though about this, I mean, some of this is actually pretty tragic, but um, particularly the familial Yeah, but most of this can be diagnosed and then treated with something like the clonazepam, which has really been very effective. So if you've got an rb D or you've got sleep eating or even sleepwalking as a child at slip box, so um, I mean

I can attest to how terrifying that can be to parents. Um, of course, I don't think they would give me clonaza pam and they just they just locked me in my room. Um, but there are things that you can do about it, which is great. Oh well, now I will add that when we were researching, I ended up running across confusional arousals, which I thought was going to be tied in with the sex thing, or at the very least I thought maybe it was referring to like odd occurrences like when

your grandmother's cat sitting in your lap or something. But but no, it's just this is when a person wakes from a deep sleep during the first part of the night and uh, and they just they have excessive sleep in our show, or sleep drunkenness, so they just come out of it. They're just like a zombie. So they just roams the house like a zombie. Like, yeah, pretty much.

I mean, it's just people experiencing confusional arousal. They react slowly, they have trouble understanding questions, um, problems with short term memory and have and they and they have no memory of this later in the day. So I guess it would be like if if you if you have like a spouse that wakes up in the night and they're just like a zombie and you're like, whoa crazy to get back to bed and go to sleep and then the next art they're like, well, I don't remember that

at all. That's confusional arousing. Yeah. I should also mentioned too that um, alcohol can definitely exascerbate a lot of these conditions, and particularly night terrors. Yeah. Yeah, And if you are going through a lot of emotional distress, you know, all this can sort of be the perfect cocktail for for a sleep disorder, or at least experiencing it. Yeah, if you're if you're experiencing any sleep problems. Um, first of all, you can come to house Stuff Works and

type insomnia into the into the search bar. We have an article and there with a number of tips and a lot of it's really common sense that like, you know, maybe cut down the alcohol in the evening, don't you know, don't have coffee afternoon and things of that nature. But certainly consider consulting a doctor if you're having yeah, trick with the RBD. Yeah, yeah, especially if it's something that

is extremely out of the out of the ordinary. So if you're punching around in the middle of the night, get that checked out. Cool. Well, let's check out some listener mail. As luck would have it, we received two emails related to dreams. Uh. Prior to this recording, completely un called for, but welcome we heard from Don, and Don says, Hello, Robert and Julie. I'm a little behind since I'm relatively recent listener, but Tetris and PTSD reminded me of the way my brain operates after I've seen

a horror movie. Uh. Not always, but sometimes after a movie has particularly frightened me. Candy Man and Blair Witch, all of these things, I experienced very vivid counting dreams. During the dreams, I see numbers almost exclusively, and any horrifying images are conspicuously absent. I can also only guess it's my brain's version of copying. I think in the future I shall try Tetris after a scary movie to potentially avoid the number dreams, as they also frequently weighted

me up. Thanks for the great podcast. Let's see now that there are a number of awesome things going on in that that. I mean, on one hand, you know, it's like the idea of someone having scary dreams after his watching a movie that's you know, every day, but she's having like nightmare number dreams. That's amazing. It's almost it's like a form of synaesthesia in a way. You know, yeah, the now, the the the tetris pocket. That may have been an old one. I think that may have been.

It may have been like a step in the science lab one. But but it's some pretty internet. The idea being that, um, when traumatic things happening happened, there's a stage afterwards where we we start building this story about what happened. That the the idea that it's like, all right, I say a dog chase me, and then afterwards I'm like, oh my goodness, I was chased by a dog. A dog chased me. I was walking down the street and a dog chased me? You know what was that all about?

How dare he? You know? And all and then all these connotations come with it. I like, I am at risk of being chased by a dog every day? Um, how dare a dog chase me? I should be unchasable? You know. It depends on this situation. But there's that period where we formed that story and it and it in it and it forms the trauma, it like entrenches it in our memory. And so if you could interrupt that process, it's like so instead of the set of performing that story, you're chased by a dog and then

you whip out your smartphone and are playing Tetris. Tetris has been found to like interfere with that the formation of the traumatic memory. Tetris has been used a lot in uh in sleep research, right, yeah, because I believe it's been using dreams too to see how people learn. Yeah, they dream about Tetris to see the patterns. And it's not just people loving Tetris and being like I got to incorporate this into my words, get away with it. But yeah, so that was a fascinating email. It was

that was it was interesting to hear about. We also heard from Mario. Mario right in and says, hello, Robert and Julie. I was currently listening to the episode you did in January, a dream podcast. You talked about how dreams can help solve problems. To me, dreams are becoming more important to me every night. I don't know if they helped me solve problems, but they sometimes give me problems to solve in the dream, and it's sort of a role playing dream. I treat dreams like totally different

world and it's its own thing. They're not real, but they exist. Keep up the great podcast. Your thirteen year

old listener. Oh, very cool. One of the things that I learned on that World Science Festival panel is that, um, we do dream in non rem and when we dream in non rem it's more about UM it's less like a cohesive story and it's sort of a little bit more like just raw data sitting there that you sipped through, which I thought was very interesting in terms of trying to um, you know, figure out all the information the stimulants that you amass that day and going through it

and categorizing it. Well, Hey, if you want to share your dreams with us or share in the dream that is stuff to blow your mind, then you can find us on Facebook and Twitter. We are blow the Mind on both of those and you know, if you're fan of the show, check them out. Each feed is a a little differently, but like every day, we're switching through all sorts of like cool cool articles online, different studies, and we'll pop some of those up, whether they're related to

something we're covering or not. We'll keep you in touch with what we're what we're recording, what we're thinking about recording, and uh, we do in fact take requests, so and the stuff that you're writing to which is very cool. Yeah, and you can also drop us a line if you want to keep in touch at below the Mind at how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out

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