To anyone looking at you, you are just a person sleeping normally- although it seems your
eyes are moving rapidly under their shutters and your body is jerking around a bit.
What’s actually going on in your head is a different matter altogether.
You’ve just fought off your own family after returning home and finding your nearest and
dearest have all become the living dead.
If that isn’t bad enough, during the bloody melee the neighbors, zombies themselves, turn
up at the back door.
You manage to sneak out the front door and get in the car.
Blasting down the highway you take a corner just a little bit too fast.
The car spins out of control and you are flung out of the window.
As you lie in the street, bones broken, a truck is coming right at you.
You are done.
The question is, can dying in a dream mean you die in real life?
Could dreaming kill you?
It’s a bit of a complicated question, since dreaming presents some dangers but they are
not all alike.
Let’s take for instance the scary dream we just talked about.
Could the shock of lying in the street and seeing a huge truck drive right into your
body finish you off in real life?
If you’ve seen our show about literally being scared to death then you would think
the answer would be yes.
If you didn’t see that show, it was mainly about people experiencing so much fear that
their body produced too much adrenaline and that led to heart failure.
This has happened to quite a lot of people, but that was when they were not sleeping.
We found some sources that told us that heart function might be stressed during sleep and
especially during the stage called REM or rapid eye movement, and this is when we dream.
The problem is, we cannot find any cases which describe a person dying solely because of
dreaming.
Nonetheless, people do have heart attacks in their sleep.
That’s a fact.
Could the dream have caused it though- that’s the question.
Well, REM sleep does make us breathe faster; out heart rate increases and so does our blood
pressure, so if you already have heart problems then it would make sense that a dream could
send a person over the edge.
One doctor said this, “REM sleep is a stressor because it is stimulating your amygdala, the
part of your brain responsible for emotions.
Combine this overactive amygdala with poor cardiac health, and you are much more vulnerable
to having a heart attack.”
The National Institutes of Health looked into this matter, and actually found four cases
of people who had no history of heart problems who suffered what NIH called.
“deadly dreams.”
It wrote that in those cases intense nightmares caused life-threatening cardiac events, although
the people didn’t die.
It’s just hard to find out how many deadly heart attacks have been brought on by nightmares
because there doesn’t seem to be many studies about this.
One doctor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York said it would be
a rare thing for someone to have a heart attack brought on by a nightmare, but there is indeed
a potential for them being life-threatening given what happens to our bodies when we are
dreaming.
If the last thing on a person’s mind before they died was being chased by zombies, though,
we just wouldn’t know about it.
Then there is something called “REM behavior disorder.”
When we dream during that stage called REM we are usually in a state of paralysis.
That’s good, because you wouldn’t want to be acting out what you are dreaming.
The problem for some people, though, is that for them the paralysis can be incomplete or
not there at all.
We looked at some cases described by Psychology Today detailing what happened to people who
often experienced REM behavior disorder.
The article explained that when it happened to these people the part of the brain that
controls muscles woke up, but the dreamer remained asleep.
The results were sometimes frightening.
One man said his wife had a recurring dream about being attacked.
She would get up in bed, still asleep, and start throwing punches.
She even occasionally hit him during these episodes.
She also moved her head from side to side as if she was being hit herself.
This had been going on for 28 years.
The couple were afraid to travel or stay at friends’ houses because the woman might
experience this kind of sleep aggression.
In another case a former military man would get up and just start lashing out as if he
were in a fight.
He would sometimes hit things in the room and this would on occasion lead to an injury.
When he woke up he would say that he had been dreaming about combat.
In yet another case a man, a physician of all things, would sometimes just start hitting
his sleeping wife in the face in the morning.
Once he had awoken he would say he had absolutely no recollection about what had taken place.
No doubt he felt terrible, but he had no idea why he had done it and didn’t mention anything
he had dreamed that might have been the cause.
And no, it wasn’t because the two had marital problems.
This was a healthy, loving relationship.
Why he did it was a mystery, but with medication it thankfully stopped.
In these cases no one was killed, but medical sources say the problem with these dreams
is the possibility of injury.
A person might just fall out of bed, hit their head, and die.
It’s very rare, but people every year do die from falling out of bed.
So, with that in mind, a bad dream mixed with some REM behavior disorder could result in
death.
We must now talk about something called parasomnias.
The meaning of this is basically unusual things happening to someone when they are sleeping.
Sleep paralysis is one, so is the aforementioned REM sleep behavior disorder, and so is sleepwalking.
Some sources say about 10 percent of Americans will occasionally have some kind of parasomnia,
and we guess quite a few of you have witnessed someone doing something weird while they are
sleeping.
It’s usually not something to worry about, but there are extreme cases.
We already know some people might exhibit what is called sleep aggression, which can
come as a bit of a shock for the person on the other side of the violence.
In the extreme people have actually done very, very bad things while asleep.
There is something in the law world known as the, “sleep-walking defense.”
We found a bunch of cases when this was used.
They cases involved people who had killed people in their sleep.
Just listen to the description of this case: “On the night of the death, he arose from
bed, drove 14 miles to the house of his in-laws—with whom he was said to be close—and strangled
his father-in-law until the man passed out.
He bludgeoned his mother-in-law with a tire iron and stabbed them both with a kitchen
knife.”
This man, in the case known as “Regina v. Parks”, almost died himself in the attacks
since he had managed to sever tendons in his hands.
He woke up after doing what he had done, drove straight to a police station and said, “I
think I have just killed two people.”
He was found not guilty in the end after experts said the man had committed the act of violence
while he was sleepwalking.
If someone can do this while sleepwalking, surely they can do a lot more damage to themselves.
Sleepwalking doesn’t happen during REM, but what happens to them during the episode
might feel like a dream once they have fully awoken.
You might describe it as dreaming and being awake at the same time.
For instance, we found one case of a young man sleepwalking and he got up and saw his
pet dog.
The dog was asleep and fine, although the man was in dream mode and thought the dog
was on fire.
He picked up the animal and took it to the bathroom whereby he proceeded to hold it under
cold water.
We know this could be dangerous to other people and we now know it might disrupt the relationship
you have with your beloved pooch, but could it be bad news for you?
Well, if you have heard the story about the British 15-year old girl who woke up at the
top of a crane after climbing 130 feet (39.6 meters) you’ll know the answer is yes.
In one article published in the Journal of Forensic Science written by Mark Mahowald,
the director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center, he listed a bunch of cases
of people dying while sleepwalking.
An example included a guy running out into the street only to meet a truck.
Other cases he wrote about involved people with a history of sleepwalking falling from
windows and balconies in the night.
In such cases people might not have a history of depression but do have a history of somnambulism,
another word for sleepwalking.
There are quite a few other cases when people were stopped by police after driving erratically,
and the cops would later report the people seemed to be sleepwalking and not fully conscious.
This can be called a kind of dreaming because people who have awoken from sleepwalking have
reported having visions while in their somnambulistic state.
When they wake up they realize these visions make no sense at all, but when they were sleepwalking
they have no control over themselves.
Lastly, we must talk about something called “parasomnia pseudo-suicide””, which
the National Institutes of Health says is when a person seems to have killed themselves
consciously but the act actually happened while the person was asleep.
One of the more well-known cases of this involved a successful designer named Tobias Wong.
His death was ruled a suicide, but his family and friends didn’t think that was the case.
In 2010, the New York Times wrote about this man, saying, “For years, he had suffered
from a variety of sleep disorders known as parasomnias: in layman’s terms, he was a
serious, chronic sleepwalker.”
He would also often have sleep terrors, a kind of nightmare a person is having but can’t
quite wake up from.
These are not quite normal nightmares because they happen during non-rapid eye movement
sleep.
They have been called a kind of panic attack while in a state of half-deep sleep.
Sufferers might get up and scream, punch thin air, or worse.
They might seem awake, but they are actually sleep-walking.
While people can generally wake up from a nightmare, people might feel stuck in a night
terror.
Tobias Wong had no history of mental illness according to The Times, but he had those episodes
of night terrors and sleepwalking.
He had them often, too, and had tried all sorts of things to make them stop.
At times he had done things he wasn’t proud of during these episodes, such as pulling
a work of art from his house’s walls and throwing it across the room.
Then one night he went to sleep and his partner found him hanged the next morning.
The people close to him believed this happened during one of his episodes of sleep-walking.
We’ll finish with something we’d never heard of and we expect you’ll not have heard
of this, either.
It’s called “Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome”, which means people just
dying their sleep and the cause was unknown.
Some cultures have called this the “Dream Disease”, so we thought we’d talk a little
bit about it.
It seems to happen mostly in South East Asia, but there have been reports of it happening
to South East Asians that lived in the USA and beyond.
We also found cases of it happening to Thai people who were working in Singapore.
These folks were seemingly in good health but then just died in their sleep.
It has happened to young people, too.
Medical professionals have not stated a definitive cause, but they suspect these people had underlying
diseases.
Some people who might be called superstitious have said it’s not disease, but related
to something more out of this world.
In the Philippines for instance, some folks have said it might be the work of a sleep
demon, like something sometimes called a “night-hag.”
Some Hmong people might tell you the death is a result of a visiting bad spirit that
induces a nightmare and then sleep paralysis, and this is because the person had angered
something in the spirit world.
While most people will be skeptical, it’s another way some folks might tell you a dream
can kill.
What’s the worst dream you have had?
Or have you sleep-walked?
Tell us about it in the comments.
Now go watch our other video “Everything You Know About Sleep Is Wrong.”
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.