Here are some of the strangest things that could happen while you sleep!
9 - Parasomnia
Broadly speaking, Parasomnia just describes odd sleep behavior.
Under this umbrella of disorders include things such as sleepwalking, sleep talking, restless
leg syndrome, night terrors, and sleep related eating disorders, just to name a few.
Even sleep driving has been reported.
I’d be keeping my keys locked in a drawer if I ever slept drove!
For sleepwalking, we’re talking a range of completely safe to absolutely dangerous.
If you’re just doing something like, sit up in bed, or maybe walking to the bathroom,
you pretty much have nothing to worry about.
But, there are some instances where people have been known to try and cook in the kitchen,
which is starting to push it.
Some people are EVEN known to operate dangerous power tools or like I mentioned earlier, even
drive a car!
Another type of behavior, Night Terrors, have caused people to get up and run around as
well, except I imagine it’s much worse.
People have been known to scream during these horrific episodes and any attempt at calming
someone experiencing a night terror usually just doesn’t work.
It’s worth noting that nightmares and night terrors are different things.
During a night terror episode, people are known to bolt upright.
Often their eyes will pop open, and they have a seriously terrified look on their face.
They also experience rapid eye movement, which is what helps distinguishes the episode as
being just a regular old nightmare.
In the case of Sleep related eating disorders, people have been known to eat while they sleep.
On the surface this doesn’t sound all that bad, but it’s not like people are whipping
up nutritious meals during their sleep.
Usually they eat in a very uncontrolled manner, and will even eat inedible things, such as
wood or glue.
Sleep eating disorders are actually pretty rare.
Since the first reported case back in 1955, only a few dozen cases have been reported
since.
8 - Sexsomnia
So we’ve discussed Parasomnias, and it should be noted that Sexsomnia falls under that broad
category.
But I figured what the h*ll, let’s give it it’s own entry cuz c’mon, y’all know
you wanted it!
Also known as “sleep sex”, Sexsomnia is pretty much what it sounds like.
People doing sexual things while they’re sleeping.
As is usually the case with any sort of parasomnia, anyone who engages in sleep sex doesn’t
remember doing it.
Research on this bizarre phenomenon is pretty new.
The first real study was done in 1996 at the University of Toronto and the University of
Ottawa…..you know what, I’m surprised it was the Canadians first !!!
It usually involves one person trying to fondle their sleeping partner, though it can also
include someone trying to mast#rbate in their sleep.
Like I said, the person doing this has no clue what’s going on, and it usually takes
their partner to recognize it.
So in theory, if you sleep alone, you could be pleasuring yourself while sleep.
Wait…...hold up…..uhhhh…...let’s just move on!!
Anyway, as it is with other forms of parasomnia, sleep sex occurs when the brain is caught
in no man’s land, somewhere between being awake and asleep.
Doctors aren’t 100 percent sure what causes this.
They do know that people who suffer from other sleep disorders are more likely to perform
sleep sex than those who don’t.
No surprise there I guess.
Sleep deprivation and excessive drug and alcohol use might also be triggers.
I actually have a super crazy sexsomnia story later for you guys.
Oddly enough, the fact that Sexsomnia is a well accepted sleep disorder, has made it
an excuse used by the defense in a few rape and molestation cases.
Now that’s a whole new can of worms.
7 - Exploding Head Syndrome
Have you ever been trying to fall asleep and all of a sudden...BANG!
You hear a loud noise?
But you can’t figure out what it was?
Yeah me neither.
But if you did, maybe it’s a phenomenon known as Exploding Head Syndrome.
Oddly enough, there doesn’t seem to be much of a consensus as to what causes the exploding
sensation.
Doctors have speculated that it can be caused by stress, and that it can occur infrequently,
or on the opposite end, consistently over a number of years.
It’s classified as a parasomnia and sleep-related dissociative disorder and is an unusual type
of auditory hallucination which occurs in people who aren’t fully awake.
Exploding Head Syndrome has been described as sounding like a bomb, like clashing symbols
or even like a loud bang, such as a gunshot.
The perception of a flashing light is sometimes associated with this odd occurrence.
However, as unpleasant as all of this sounds, don’t worry, Exploding Head Syndrome is
a painless endeavor, even if it’s weird as h*ll and not actually happening.
6 - Sleep Paralysis
This is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.
Sleep paralysis, if you’re unlucky enough to suffer from it, temporarily prevents you
from moving while you sleep and sometimes right after you wake up.
People who suffer from Sleep Paralysis have also reported experiencing intense hallucinations,
often hearing voices, buzzing, hissing, static, and humming noises.
In some cases, you might feel a ton of pressure on your chest and have a hard time breathing.
In really bizarre cases, hallucinations might be so intense that the person will imagine
having extra limbs, or have some sort of out of body experience.
Understandably, lots of people get really scared and start to panic during a sleep paralysis
episode.
I mean, if you can’t move or breathe and are under the impression that you’re growing
new limbs, I can imagine that isn’t exactly like a day at the spa!
The episodes only last for a few seconds or a few minutes tops.
Wait, a few minutes?!
That’s a long time to not be able to move!!
The cause of sleep paralysis is often genetic...so you have your grandparents to thank if you’re
having issues with sleep paralysis.
5 - Hypnagogic Jerk
You’ve probably experienced this before.
So you know how sometimes just as you’re about to drift off into a nice peaceful sleep,
you’re suddenly jolted awake, feeling as though you’re falling?
There’s actually a scientific reason behind this one.
This sensation is what sleep experts and doctors refer to scientifically as a Hypnagogic Jerk.
I think this is one disorder almost everyone has experienced before.
Actually, according to sleep.org, about 70 percent of the population experience these
involuntary muscle movements, including yours truly.
These jerks are also referred to as “sleep starts”.
The root cause of these jerks is actually a bit of a mystery.
Pffft, Shocker, right?
Another thing science can’t explain!
There are a few popular theories out there.
One is that it’s the result of the body’s temperature dropping, along with the heart
rate, breathing and a shift in muscle tone.
The weird sensation you feel is simply your body shifting into sleep mode.
There’s also a school of thought that suggests it’s a false alarm from your brain.
Because your muscles start to relax, your brain, which is generally pretty smart, misinterprets
this shift to mean that you might actually be falling.
So it’s like “Oh sh*t dude wake up!”
And that’s when you jerk awake and you’re like, “what the f*ck!
Then you roll over and go back to sleep.
So for the most part, Hypnagogic Jerks are pretty much just a mild nuisance.
4 - Bodily changes
I’m sure you’ve figured this out by yourself.
You need to sleep.
It’s really good for you for all sorts of reasons.
When you doze off for the night, your body does some amazing things that help you feel
rejuvenated and rested the next day.
Part of this is due to the changes your body experiences while you sleep.
In the early stages of sleep, your muscles start to relax.
Remember the Hypnagogic Jerk we discussed?
Your brain waves start to slow down and you begin to lose sense of your surroundings,
which are all good things.
Then your eye movement stops and your body temperature begins to drop along with your
heart rate.
As your muscles relax even more, blood flows to the muscles.
This allows your muscle tissues to repair.
Pretty cool, huh?
Then your body starts to produce Human Growth Hormone, an extremely important hormone for
repair on the body.
Unfortunately, as your body gets older, it produces less and less HGH.
Then there’s the final stage of sleep, known as the REM cycle, the stage of sleep where
you have very vivid dreams.
REM stands for “rapid eye movement.”
And indeed, your eyes dart around like crazy during this cycle.
In this final stage of sleep, your muscles become paralyzed, which is one contributing
factor to sleep paralysis, and people often experience irregular heartbeat and breathing.
While you sleep, your body also does other important things, such as regulate your appetite.
It also is a time to clean house.
The human brain has something called the glymphatic system, which is a mechanism that flushes
out unnecessary information.This system is super active during sleep, largely because
brain cells shrink by 60 percent.
This is based off a study by Maiken Nedergaard at the University of Rochester.
“The restorative nature of sleep appears to be the result of the active clearance of
the by-products of neural activity that accumulate during wakefulness” Nedergaard said.
In other words, your brain needs rest too, and flushing out a bunch of useless information
helps you feel mentally restored as well.
3 - Sleep Talking
Somniloquy.
That’s a weird word.
But really, it’s just fancy medical jargon for “sleep talk.”
We’ll make it easy on you and just go with “sleep talk” for the purposes of our discussion.
Sleep talking can be triggered by stress, depression, sleep deprivation, and so on and
so on.
There’s also some indications that sleep talking could be genetic.
Most of the time, sleep talking is mostly non sense.
It’s either gibberish, or statements made completely out of context.
However, in the earlier stages of sleep, the sleep talking is a bit more intelligible since
the brain is still partially awake.
But for the most part, don’t plan on having any enlightened conversations with a sleep
talker.
For some people it only occurs sporadically, while for others it’s a nightly thing.
As weird as it is, most medical experts don’t see this as a serious enough problem to seek
medical treatment.
I don’t know what’s worse, someone talking or someone snoring!
2 - Weird Dreams
Dreams have been a topic of intrigue, fascination, and general confusion for thousands of years.
I’m still trying to figure out what MY own crazy dreams mean, if anything at all.
The exact purpose of dreams is still unknown, but over the centuries, we’ve at least learned
a bit more about them.
People have been documenting their dreams for thousands of years.
In Mesopotamia they would write about their dreams on clay tablets.
Back then they believed that people’s souls would leave their bodies during sleep and
actually visit the places they were dreaming about.
In Ancient Egypt, people with vivid dreams were thought to have special powers.
The Hebrews thought that dreams were God’s way of communicating with them.
Sigmund Freud came along and theorized that dreams are a representation of our deepest
desires and anxieties and are often the product of some kind of childhood obsession.
Of course Freud also theorized that dreams were sexual in nature…...leave it to Freud.
More contemporary studies on dreams, known officially as Oneirology are still trying
to find a correlation between dreams and the functions of the brain.
In other words, we’re still trying to figure out what purpose dreams serve.
1 - Random acts of Weirdness
Now here’s are a few random things that people have done while sleeping, and because
the stories are unique in their own right, take these stories with a grain of salt, but
they’re definitely too entertaining to ignore.
Think about some of the conditions we’ve discussed and decide for yourself if any of
them apply to the behavior.
The first story pretty much those crazy Russian daredevil antics.
One night, London police were called about a possible suicide attempt on the counterweight
of a crane at a construction project, where a young girl was perched precariously 130
feet in the air.
A fireman climbed the crane to try to talk her down, only to find her sleeping.
Sleeping!!
He was afraid of waking her up just in case she would panic and fall.
He decided to secure her in position and conducted a body search, finding a mobile phone.
He found a number for her parents in the phone, and he called them to tell them that their
daughter was sleepwalking on a crane.
They then decided to call her on her phone to wake her up once she was secured and able
to be carried down on a hydraulic ladder.
Now that’s just insane…..I’d start chaining myself to my bed!!
I think you guys can quickly figure out the condition this lady has in this next story.
In Australia, a middle-aged woman had an extremely strange habit.
Basically, she’d wake up in the middle of the night, leave her house, annnnnnd sleep
with random dudes.
And by sleep, I mean f*ck.
Uhhh...yeah…...after months of her husband waking up to find their home littered with
used condoms and once again finding his snoring spouse actively having sex with a stranger,
the wife and the world's most trusting husband decided to get medical help.
Seriously, that has to be the greatest trick…...just start snoring!!!!
Doctors were no doubt reluctant to believe the story, most likely thinking instead that
the husband was suffering from one of the world's worst cases of gullible retardation.
She was assessed by psychiatrists, and also checked for physical problems such as brain
tumours, which may cause unusual behaviour.
Neither of those examinations could find a cause.
However, she was found to have a history of talking in her sleep as a teenager and when
monitored in the sleep laboratory, she was found to have a higher number of arousals
from deep sleep than is usual.
Both of these factors might indicate a susceptibility to abnormal sleep behaviour.
However, Roger Allen, a sleep specialist at a private practice in Brisbane, Australia
was skeptical.
He said quote, “Sex is a primal behaviour so it’s not impossible – men have erections
in their sleep after all – but this case involved such complex behaviour it seems less
likely.”
He also points out that eliminating psychiatric conditions as a cause of the behaviour would
be difficult.
Yeah…..what do you guys think?!
What would you do?!
The last story, is just completely insane to me.
On an early morning in May 1987, Kenneth Parks drove from his wife’s parent’s house.
He attacked both of them with a tire iron, killing the mother and leaving the father
seriously injured.
Following the attack, Parks went to a police station and turned himself in.
At trial, from the doctor's evidence, it was determined that Parks was sleepwalking at
the time of the incident, and that he was suffering from a disorder of sleep rather
than neurological, psychiatric, or other illness.
Five neurological experts also confirmed that he was sleepwalking during the time of the
incident.
The jury then acquitted Parks.
There are many cases of homicidal sleepwalking, and Parks’s case isn’t the only one.
I can only hope that once people like Parks get acquitted, there’s at least some sort
of provision where they need to take special precautions when they sleep…..
Here’s what’s next!