Tag Archives: sleep

Sleep Walking

Sleep walking is a very interesting phenomenon. As the name suggests, sleep walking is the action of walking in your sleep, which typically occurs in stages 3 and 4 of the sleeping cycle. Sleepwalkers look as if they were awake, with their eyes wide open and with good sense of coordination. However, everything they do is completely unconscious to them, given that they are asleep. Once they wake up, sleepwalkers have little to no memory of what they did while they were walking around. Typically sleepwalkers perform very simple actions, but some cases have been reported where sleepwalkers have performed complex tasks such as cooking and driving. Waking up a sleepwalker is very difficult, since they are in a very deep stage of sleep. It can also be considered dangerous because the sleepwalker could get panicked and confused as to why he or she is standing up instead of being in a bed. It is very difficult to guess how many times you have sleepwalked, but sometimes the experience is so extreme that it automatically encodes in your memory. When I was eight years old, my family and I went to Brazil for the holidays. We stayed in a huge resort with wild animals such as monkeys and peacocks walking around. It was during that trip that I sleepwalked for the first time. I don’t remember the experience very well, but what I do remember is waking up in a random bench near a lake and having no idea how I had gotten there. I walked around for a while trying to locate myself, but everything was dark and scary for me. After walking for maybe thirty minutes, I finally came across the familiar hallway where our room was located. When I knocked on the door, I remember my mom freaking out because I was outside. I didn’t know I had sleepwalked until years later, so I couldn’t tell her exactly why I was outside. As far as I know that is the only time I ‘ve ever sleepwalked, and it was certainly one of the most mysterious experiences of my entire life. Nobody understands why sleepwalking happens, and it is important to take means about it since it can be very dangerous, especially if you do it in a foreign country while you’re eight years old.

 

Sources:

1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepwalking

2) The Book