A lifelong habit has landed Decca Aitkenhead in some awkward night-time fixes.
The bedroom resembled a crime scene. I sat up in bed, bewildered. Bloodied footprints led to the bathroom, where on tiles around the toilet lay pools of blood. Getting up to investigate, I fell to my knees and screamed. Both feet had been cut to ribbons. “Oh no,” I groaned. “Not again.” I didn’t have to wonder what had happened.
Ever since early childhood I have sleepwalked. The first occasion I can recall, I woke to find myself urinating into a cup in the kitchen. The rest of the family always found it funny. Other than one brother, who used to commentate to imaginary football matches, no one else did anything weird in their sleep. “You’ll grow out of it,” my mother assured me. I didn’t.
In my twenties my editor sent me to Somerset in 1998 to interview the Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown. I checked into a grand old country house hotel and got to bed early, to be fresh for an early-morning start. With hindsight it would have been wiser to stay up for supper.
The fridge I woke up peering into, looking for food, seemed oddly unfamiliar. It was enormous, much bigger than mine. Looking around, I realised I was standing in an empty hotel kitchen — stark naked.
“Oh well,” I told myself, “here we go again.” I wasn’t particularly alarmed: it was 3am and the hotel was deserted, so I retraced my steps (“Thank goodness no one’s on reception!”) to my room. The situation became less straightforward when I found the door had locked behind me.
Back downstairs, I clambered over the front desk to call my boyfriend in London: “What do I do?” He said he’d phone the hotel for help. “But there’s no one here to answer this phone except me,” I wailed when it rang. He thought the police must have a number for the manager.
“Sorry, they hung up on me the first time,” he said when he eventually called back. “They thought it was a prank call. They don’t have any emergency numbers, so they’re coming to get you.”
He had to be joking. “No. Taunton police are on their way.”
I found a roll of blue hand towel in the ladies’ loo, fashioned a bikini out of it and waited for the police to arrive, unsure whether to laugh or cry.
“Are you all right, dear?” Suddenly, out of nowhere, a receptionist appeared. “Do I look all right to you?” She studied me. “No, not really. Shall we get you back to your room?”
The next time I stayed in a hotel, this time in central Bristol, I made a mental note to wear pyjamas and keep the keycard in my pocket. My room was in a building opposite the hotel’s reception, on the other side of a busy main road. Evidently I must have removed the pyjamas in my sleep, because when I woke up past midnight I was naked and keyless again — only this time on the pavement.
Fortunately, a night receptionist was on duty. I crossed the road to the hotel lobby, she found a towel to wrap around me and escorted me back to my room.
If you are a sleepwalker, hotels can be a minefield. Early one morning after an overnight stay in Kent, my husband had to race down a corridor to grab me — stark naked again — just feet from the threshold of the restaurant, which was packed with American tourists eating breakfast. One night, in a San Francisco hotel, he awoke to find me trying to climb out of the window.
“What are you doing?” he exclaimed.
“Going to the loo, obviously. What does it look like?”
“That’s the window.”
“Oh! Oh yes, so it is.”
Assuming I must by now be awake, he steered me out of our bedroom, pointed to the bathroom along the corridor and got back into bed. When someone knocked on the door a few minutes later, he opened it to find a man in boxer shorts.
“Would you mind coming to get your wife out of my bed, please? I tried to wake her, but she just kicked me.”
I have no memory of the San Francisco incident and had to hear it from my husband over breakfast. In my sleep I’ve smashed things to pieces I would never have the strength to destroy awake. I have ripped toilet seats off their hinges and broken them into little bits. I woke up one morning to find a much-loved antique wooden chest in the living room in splinters. In my thirties I went through a phase of emptying the contents of our bins all over the kitchen floor.
Up to 4 per cent of adults are believed to experience non-REM parasomnia, meaning they exhibit unusual behaviours during the first stages of the sleep cycle (four to six rounds of the cycle in a night is typical). These can take bizarre forms. Professor Guy Leschziner, a consultant neurologist at Guy’s and St Thomas’, runs one of the UK’s leading sleep clinics and had a patient who had no idea she rode her motorbike in her sleep until her landlady asked where she kept going on it at night. One morning her neighbours also mentioned seeing her drive off in her car at 2am. She thought they must be mistaken; her car was still parked where she’d left it the previous day. She had parallel parked into the same spot in her sleep. After that, she bought a time-locked safe in which to store her keys overnight.
How is this possible? Contrary to popular belief, Leschziner explains, asleep and awake are not binary states: “Even when we think we are fully awake, pockets of the brain can dip in and out of sleep.” Certain species of bird can fly while partly asleep, while dolphins and whales can swim in the same state. This explains how a person can parallel park in their sleep.
Dr Sofia Eriksson is a consultant neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London. When she monitors the brain of a patient during a non-REM parasomnia event, she says, “parts of the brain appear to be active, but not others”. The occipital lobes appear to wake up, enabling the sleepwalker to see, and the limbic system — just below the temporal lobes and responsible for emotions — is often active. This might account for my physical strength while sleepwalking. “If you feel very strongly about something, you might put more effort into it,” she says.
Leschziner draws a parallel between my brawn while sleepwalking with a phenomenon known as “hysterical strength”. When fully awake, under conditions of extreme emotional motivation, ordinary humans have lifted cars or fought off bears to save their child’s life. People with Parkinson’s disease, he says, can sometimes move their bodies fluidly while acting out their dreams. “It’s not uncommon to see people do stuff in their sleep that they can’t do in normal waking times.” But during a non-REM parasomnia event the frontal lobe — responsible for rational thinking — remains asleep, which explains why some sleepwalkers sometimes do things they would never want to do if awake.
There is a very serious form of non-REM parasomnia called sexsomnia, which sounds made-up but isn’t. One of Leschziner’s patients had been convicted of rape many years before presenting at his sleep clinic. The man had shared a bed with his ex while visiting his young son, was woken by her screaming and sent to prison. He thought he’d been falsely accused until years later, when a new girlfriend told him he’d been “animalistic” in the night, fumbling and pawing at her.
There have even been several cases of homicidal parasomnia. In 2009 a “decent and devoted” British man, Brian Thomas, 59, walked free after convincing a court he had been asleep when he strangled his wife of almost 40 years. Jules Lowe, 32, from Manchester, was acquitted of murder in 2005 by a jury persuaded that he’d been sleepwalking when he beat his 83-year-old father to death. In 1987 Kenneth Parks, 23, drove 25km across Ontario to his in-laws’ house, beat and stabbed his mother-in-law to death and attempted to strangle his father-in-law. Parks pleaded not guilty on the grounds he had been in a “deep sleep”. Prosecutors called his defence “ludicrous”, but jurors believed and acquitted him.
There is no known cure for non-REM parasomnia. Some people find that certain antidepressants help and some try hypnotherapy, with varying results. The causes are equally unclear. It often runs in families, so there can clearly be a genetic predisposition, but neurologists’ search for the gene responsible remains ongoing. For many sleepwalkers, poor sleep hygiene, alcohol, stress and sleep deprivation or apnoea are all triggers, which, when addressed, can solve the problem.
In my case the trigger seems to be the urge to eat or pee. At a friend’s wedding in a castle in Wales I woke up in the bar, wrapped in a bedspread, peeing into a pint glass. The noise of the splash on the floor often wakes me, but by then it’s too late. I once had to launder half my dresses after waking up in the wardrobe.
There are many 24-hour periods when I consume more calories in my sleep than awake. I often awake in the morning to find my fingernails clogged with food. “Oh no, what have I eaten this time?” I wonder, padding downstairs to find the evidence. The kitchen can resemble a bombsite, the fridge door left wide open. I have considered fitting a lock to it but worry about what that would look like to my kids’ friends.
I eat food in my sleep that I don’t even like — an entire coffee-walnut cake, once. Leschziner has had vegetarian patients horrified after eating “vast quantities” of meat in their sleep. I’ve also eaten food that doesn’t belong to me. Convincing sceptical student flatmates that I’d been fast asleep when I polished off half their week’s groceries wasn’t easy, and my children have learnt to take precautions. After the egg hunt on Easter Sunday they always carefully re-hide all their chocolate. They learnt the hard way that any left lying about would be gone by Monday morning.
Perhaps because I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t a sleepwalker, it has never particularly bothered me. Though often inconvenient, it feels more comical than concerning; if anything, it makes life more interesting. To have a side of oneself that has a life of its own, over which one has no control and no memory can be rather intriguing. It amuses my children, neither of whom sleepwalk, and by nature I’m not an anxious person. The possibility that I might actually hurt myself in my sleep didn’t occur to me — until I did.
I was in Jamaica in August when I woke up to the crime scene. An incriminating empty plate on the dressing table confirmed I’d gone looking for food in my sleep, before knocking over a glass and walking all over broken shards. According to the pools of blood on the floor, I’d then gone to the loo before getting back into bed. The sheets, unsurprisingly, were ruined.
We were over an hour from the nearest hospital, so a friend cleaned up my feet and we hoped for the best. I was able to walk again after three days, but by the autumn something didn’t feel right. A podiatrist referred me for an ultrasound, which found 2mm of glass buried deep in my foot.
I am writing this while laid up in bed after surgery, post-general anaesthetic, staring at a heavily bandaged foot. The surgeon was very firm: “You must not walk on it for two weeks.” Very good, I agreed — before a possible snag occurred.
“But what if I go walking in my sleep?”
“Well,” he said, “just don’t.”
If only it were that simple.
Written by: Decca Aitkenhead
© The Times of London