Sleep medicine needs to be an integral part of the medical school curriculum, and physicians as well as the general public should be aware that, unlike sleepwalking in children, somnambulism in adults is a potentially dangerous disorder. In this article, we explore current theories about both the causes and the management of adult sleepwalking, while seeking to increase awareness of its hidden dangers. But such accidents are not well known, because both the general public and physicians are uninformed about somnambulism. Had other people been seriously injured while sleepwalking? If so, were these random and rare events, or had we encountered the tip of an unexplored iceberg?īy searching the medical literature and interviewing other sleepwalkers, we found that sleepwalking accidents and injuries, more common than usually believed, are a definite health hazard for both the sleepwalker and other people. His potentially fatal experience with sleepwalking demanded a reexamination of this overlooked topic and raised many questions during his convalescence. But, until recently, published reports of injuries as a result of sleepwalking were rare, and somnambulism and other sleep disorders are frequently overlooked in the medical school curriculum.Īlthough I am a teacher of medical neuroscience, the dangers of sleepwalking would probably never have come to my attention had my son Stewart (who joins me in writing this article) not sleepwalked out a second-story window into an alley, sustaining serious injuries, on the night he arrived for a British Studies program at St. Any adult with a tendency to sleepwalk has the potential to experience an accident and can be at risk of real injury. Sleep deprivation, especially in combination with drugs and alcohol, is known to induce sleepwalking in some people, and behavior while sleepwalking is extremely unpredictable, particularly in a new environment. Many people resort to prescription (or nonprescription) drugs to induce sleep, but sometimes this only compounds the problem. Sleepwalking and other sleep disorders appear to be on the rise in our demanding and fast-paced society, in which getting a good night’s sleep seems to be increasingly difficult. More frighteningly, increasing numbers of so-called “sleepdriving” cases are being reported in which somnambulists get in their cars and drive sometimes long distances, disregarding lanes, stoplights, and stationary objects, and, after waking up, having no memory of what they did.Īlthough these nocturnal wanderings may seem extremely odd to nonsleepwalkers, such mechanistic and automatic activities are part of the spectrum of behavior associated with somnambulism, which is estimated to affect close to 2 percent of the adult population worldwide. Many adult sleepwalkers, with eyes open, perform purposeful acts such as eating half a bag of chips and putting the rest in the microwave, taking all their shoes from the closet and lining them on the windowsill, rearranging furniture, or climbing out a window in the middle of the night-activities that are essentially benign when a person is conscious but that, when they occur during somnambulism, are potentially dangerous to the sleepwalker or other people. But sleepwalking is not funny it is a sleep disorder known to specialists as somnambulism. The image that comes most readily to mind is a cartoon person, amiably and aimlessly wandering the hallway with arms outstretched and eyes closed. Sleepwalking generally occurs in the dark and has remained there, both literally and figuratively, for centuries.
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