Night Terrors: Troubled Sleep and the Stories We Tell About It

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Now a lecturer in Creative Writing, Vernon set out to understand the history, science and culture of these strange and haunting experiences. NIGHT TERRORS, her startling and vivid debut, examines the history of our relationship with bad dreams: how we’ve tried to make sense of and treat them, from some decidedly odd ‘cures’ like magical ‘mare-stones’, to research on how video games might help people rewrite their dreams. Along the way she explores the Salem Witch Trials and sleep paralysis, Victorian ghost stories, and soldiers’ experiences of PTSD. By directly confronting her own strange and frightening nights for the first time, Vernon encourages us to think about the way troubled sleep has impacted our imaginations. Night Terrors is an impactful book, relatable, fascinating yet perhaps disturbing at times. The passion in which Vernon pursues discussion to be normalised surrounding our sleeping patterns is something that I think we can all take away from with a sense of positivity, as after all, we all have sleep. This was exactly the type of book I wish I had access to when I first started getting sleep paralysis. Night Terrors is Alice Vernon's attempt in demystifying and normalising the terrors around sleep, analysing how they've been interpreted and misinterpreted throughout history, while encouraging us to tell our own stories. Vernon's own testimony and experience with parasomnias is sprinkled throughout the book, and I want to applaud her bravery for being so open about such a vulnerable topic. Reviewer Carolina Ciucci Interviews Alice Vernon, Author of Night Terrors: Troubled Sleep and the Stories We Tell about It

In this landscape, Alice Vernon’s new book Night Terrors: Troubled Sleep and the Stories We Tell About It offers a breath of fresh air. Vernon highlights the need to widen our conversations around sleep beyond the anxious focus on maximising the number of hours we spend doing it. Her stories of troubled sleep purposefully steer well clear of the subject of insomnia – a condition that has been the core theme of a recent boom of memoirs, such as Marina Benjamin’s Insomnia (2018) and Samantha Harvey’s The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping (2020). Reviewer Carolina Ciucci Interviews Alice Vernon, Author of Night Terrors: Troubled Sleep and the Stories We Tell about It — ArticlesI love diving into archives and finding things I wasn’t expecting. Sometimes I get so involved in exploring collections and gathering bits of cool stuff that I forget I actually need to write something with it! I usually start quite broadly with research, and that points me down various avenues and helps me to make connections in terms of a chapter’s structure. Working along a timeline helps, too, but I’m always happy to change my plans once I’ve found something particularly fascinating! The dreams of the British public collected in World War II was something I stumbled across while down a research rabbit hole, and it’s one of my favourite sources in the book. I was intrigued by the potential of lucid dreaming to treat PTSD. Do you think it could also help other mental illnesses, such as depression or OCD? Night Terrors is an in-depth examination of the complicated relationship that we have with our sleep, how we try to understand it, and even try to "cure" it of some of its unwanted traits. Ever since she was a child, her nights have been haunted by nightmares of a figure from her adolescence, sinister hallucinations and episodes of sleepwalking. These are known as 'parasomnias' - and they're surprisingly common. The two things most of us know about nightmares, according to this fascinating book, are not true. First, they are not caused by indigestion. This pervasive folk belief, Alice Vernon says, was popularised by Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, who blamed his ghostly apparitions on “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato”. This week, we’re here with Alice Vernon, a woman long fascinated by what happens to our brains during sleep. Taking that interest one step further led Alice to begin research for her new book, Night Terrors, and that deep dive uncovered centuries worth of literature and analysis, some of it mind boggling.

At the moment, lucid dreaming can be used to help with nightmares associated with PTSD in that the phenomena can essentially “rewrite” the course of recurring, traumatic dreams. If other mental illnesses such as depression or OCD cause nightmares (and indeed, sometimes the medication for these conditions can affect a person’s dreams) then learning to lucid dream could help any symptoms manifesting through sleep. Where do you see the study of parasomnias going in the near future? The reader’s journey starts with the very first parasomnia that Vernon experienced as a child: sleepwalking. We then move on to hypnopompic hallucinations – primarily visual hallucinations that manifest moments after waking up; think spiders scuttling on your pillow. Later on, we explore sleep paralysis, night terrors and, finally, dreams and nightmares. I think there has definitely been a revival recently in terms of including parasomnias in psychological horror films. Last Night in Soho (2021) was quite notable in its depiction of nightmares and sleep paralysis (and triggered a particularly bad night for me!). Equally, though, I do see people dealing with their experiences through memes and internet humour—reacting to a picture of a haunted-looking Furby and saying that it’s their sleep paralysis demon, for example. Lucid dreaming and its therapeutic and creative possibilities seems to claim the biggest cultural interest at the moment, though. You draw up analysis and inferences from a multiplicity of sources: visual arts, literature, even newspapers and individual anecdotes. How did you go about collecting all of these into a cohesive whole?A thread running through the book is the story of Vernon’s claustrophobic and manipulative relationship with a former teacher, whom she calls Meredith after mara, “an Old Norse word for a witch who would lie on people’s chests and try to suffocate them”. The mara is what we now know to be sleep paralysis, a parasomnia where the body’s inability to move – preventing us from acting out our dreams and hurting ourselves or the people we sleep with – continues after waking up. The person is lying down, fully awake and conscious, and yet entirely unable to move. Even screaming is impossible. In my immediate future, I’m really hoping that my book gets people talking about their experiences of troubled sleep. I’ve already done a couple of events, and it has been wonderful to hear people come up and tell me about the things they’ve also suffered with at night. More broadly, though, I think there will be much more research undertaken in terms of lucid dreaming and the ways it could benefit people’s mental health. In fiction, I think parasomnias will always be a trope of the horror genre, but I also think we’ll start to see some of these “spooky” conditions appear in literary fiction, affecting the lives of everyday people who aren’t being chased by monsters or ghosts!