My Nocturnal Nuisance
Stories of sleep terror, sleepwalking, sleeprunning, sleepdriving and, in rare cases, sleepkilling
I suffer from night terrors. Night terrors, along with sleep walking and sleep paralysis, are classified as a parasomnia. Parasomnia is a catchall term for any unusual or unwanted behavior people experience before sleep, during sleep, or just after sleep. Although there is an element of mental paralysis to night terror, it is not sleep paralysis because I am able to move during these episodes, even if being able to move is not necessarily a good thing when one is stuck in that strange land between sleep and awake. I visit that land far too often for comfort.
Matthew Good’s At Last There Is Nothing Left To Say contains a short story called “Between Sleep and Awake There Is A Taco Stand Called Nothing: Can I Take Your Order?” In the story, the narrator likes to go to parking lots at night and lie down. The narrator finds something comforting about lying down in a place where “during daylight hours, hundreds of people are usually running around.” One time the narrator falls asleep and wakes up beneath a Toyota 4-Runner. That’s not a parasomnia. That’s just good luck. However, I like the title of the story. For me, what lies between sleep and awake is dangerous.
Night terrors occur when a person gets stuck between sleep and awake. You might think that because sleep is ostensibly relaxing and regenerative, the state between sleep and awake would be a tranquil one, full of soft surfaces and healing turquoise wallpaper. But no. It is a land of sheer terror. What happens is this: I wake up with a sensation of mind-blanking terror. I don’t know what I am afraid of, I just know that I am afraid. The fear is physical as well as mental, like the way you get butterflies in your stomach when scared. I wake up like that, with fear sizzling in my stomach, my heart pounding, and adrenaline coursing through my veins. Adding to my disorientation is the fact that when I wake up in this state, I do not know who I am. I don’t know that I’m Danny Lindsay. I also don’t know who other people are.
A friend of mine once shook me awake while I was having a sleep terror episode and I shot out of bed like a cannon, grabbed my friend by the throat and shoved him against the bedroom wall while shouting “WHO ARE YOU!? WHO ARE YOU?!” After four or five seconds the spell passed and I let go of him, returned to bed and settled back peacefully on the pillow. I “woke up” just as I pulled the blanket back over myself. My friend was standing against the wall, rubbing his throat gingerly with an expression of confused terror on his face, mumbling “ohhhkay? That was weird.”
I sat up. “What happened?”
He told me. I explained to him the sleep terror thing but I’m not sure he bought it. He shot weird glances my way for a few days after that.
I don’t usually choke people. That was a one-off. What I do is run. According to my ex-wife, I spring out of bed and run down the hallway screaming “HELP ME! HELP ME!” with a look of unadulterated terror on my face. Sometimes I snap out of it before I careen into a wall, but sometimes I don’t and that’s how I get injured. I’ve sprained a lot of ankles and toes.
The “spell” typically lasts no more than five seconds. I have had a handful of prolonged events last up to ten seconds, and those are the dangerous ones. Stress can both trigger the episodes and make them more severe. I was in the midst of a painful (for me) divorce when I had a major sleep terror episode in August 2020, just a few days before I got my cat Cookie. I leapt off the ground (I had no bed at the time) and ran all the way to the back room of my apartment. I’d never made it that far before. I might’ve kept going if I hadn’t run into the wall, big toe first. That one hurt like hell. I limped for days. At least I didn’t break the damn toe.
The most severe incident came in summer 2013 when I dove through a glass window while in a state of sleep terror. I’d woken up with the usual symptoms: utter terror, disorientation and depersonalization. I was staying up north in an unfamiliar house. Unfamiliar locations can trigger sleep terror too, which makes those episodes more dangerous because you’re more likely to injure yourself running at full speed while half asleep in an unfamiliar environment. Case in point: me waking up and seeing only a glimmer of light out my bedroom window. I was so scared I dove right through it. I didn’t make it all the way, so when I fell back into the bedroom my back around my shoulder blades and just below my armpits, snagged the shards of glass which sliced the skin open. Luckily, I’d somehow gotten wrapped up in my bedsheet. I say lucky because I didn’t wake up at all during this incident. I simply went right back to bed. I didn’t realize what had happened until the morning when I woke up with glass in my back and blood all over the bed. The bedsheet had acted as a half-assed tourniquet which stopped the bleeding as I slept. If I hadn’t been wrapped in it, who knows what would’ve happened? I could’ve bled to death. The cuts were deep and I still have the scars.
Other major incidents include falling down stairs and the one time I put my hands on my wife. I didn’t hurt her. I simply didn’t recognize her when I sat up so I put my hands on her throat (not in a choking manner…more in the manner that one puts one’s hand on a keyboard). I woke up the instant I touched her, thank God, and she didn’t take it personally. She’d witnessed my regular sleep terrors and knew that usually I just jumped out of bed, screamed “HELP ME!” once or twice, then collapsed on the floor where I would immediately start apologizing because once I’d woken up, it was always embarrassing. My ex-wife said that watching me scream and flail was “heartbreaking,” but there was nothing she could do. She knew that shaking a person who is having a sleep terror episode could result in violence. I’d told her about the time I’d choked my friend. And there was a man in the United States acquitted of murdering his wife after he’d choked her death when she’d shaken him during a night terror. The jury concluded he was in a state of automatism at the time and therefore not responsible for the crime.
If you think that’s crazy, listen to this: A Canadian man named Kenneth Parks was acquitted of first-degree murder in 1989 after he drove to his in-law’s house while asleep and murdered his mother-in-law and almost murdered his father-in-law. Parks claimed that he “woke up” on the drive home from his in-law’s, saw that he was covered in blood, and immediately drove to a police station. That must have been confusing for the cops. “What did you do, sir?” “I don’t know!”
The case drew international attention and went all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court. Working in Parks’ favor was the fact that he “turned himself over to authorities after the crime” and that his “doctors determined that he was asleep when he drove from Pickering to his in-laws’ home in Scarborough and brutally attacked his wife’s parents.” Working against him was the violent nature of the assault. He beat his mother-in-law to death with a tire iron and he choked his father-in-law.
Here’s one thing I don’t understand about the case though. Check out this description from CTV News:
Parks got into his car, drove 20 kilometres to the home of his in-laws, entered their house with a key they’d given him and using a tire iron he brought with him, bludgeoned his mother-in-law to death. He then turned on her husband, attempting to choke him to death, but he managed to survive the attack. He got back in his car and, despite being covered with blood, drove straight to a nearby police station and confessed, turning himself in. “I think I have just killed two people,” he told the stunned cops.
But how did Parks know he’d just killed two people? Sleep terror sufferers are said to remember their episodes but sleepwalkers aren’t. And Parks was sleepwalking (not to mention sleepdriving and sleepkilling). Was there so much blood that he concluded he must have killed two people? How could someone who’d never killed anyone before know the difference between how much blood the murder of one person should yield versus two?
I’ve yet to find a satisfactory answer for this. Which is not to say I disbelieve Parks. I’m just not sure I believe him. He got busted for embezzling money around that same time, so there is a criminal element inside him somewhere, perhaps latent or dormant but there. After my episodes I remember everything, I remember the running and the screaming. But my episodes don’t last long enough for me to drive 20 kilometers.
Stress is a trigger for me. So is sleep deprivation. If I haven’t slept in days, I am much more likely to have an episode. I’ve never gone to a sleep clinic because there’s no treatment for my kind of problem and also because I’ve heard shitty stories about those places. I have a friend who went to a clinic to find out if he had sleep apnea. They put him in a dorm with a bunch of other people who had sleeping disorders. My friend couldn’t sleep a wink because the man beside him was snoring so loud. How dumb is that? Making it so patients at your sleep disorder clinic have to sleep in the same room as people with sleeping disorders? People who scream and snore and gasp and walk around? As Butthead once famously said: “some people are dumb.”
Anyway, during periods of stress my sleep terrors have occurred as often as twice a week. Never twice in the same night though. There’s usually a decent interval between episodes. My latest one happened two or three months ago. I stood up and ran all the way to the front door of my apartment. I don’t usually make it outside the bedroom because usually I’m tangled in blankets and they trip me and I wake up when I hit the ground. If I were to begin experiencing these episodes every night, or more severe episodes, I would simply handcuff myself to the bed each night. I’ve had too many close calls.
I also read a horror story recently about an American kid named Jarod Algood who was attending Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He was apparently under stress when, one night in February 1993 when the weather was at least ten below, he got out of bed wearing nothing but his boxers and ran out of the dormitory. According to a few witnesses who saw him, he was running at full tilt, the way a runner in a race would run, his expression one of blank terror. According to Unsolved Mysteries, who did a feature on sleepwalking, sleep terrors, and sleep paralysis, “his eyes were open, but he was not awake, and he began to run a mile. Somehow, Jarod was able to weave through parked cars and corners. While in his sleep, he ran into a semi-tractor trailer on Highway 30 and was killed instantly. Authorities initially believed that Jarod committed suicide, but Jarod’s family believe that his death was a result of sleepwalking. His mother learned from his roommate that Jarod had a recurring dream which involved him running a race with a man who was driving a car. Jarod’s death was ruled the first known death to have occurred in Iowa that was attributed to sleepwalking.”
I am very lucky that I haven’t been seriously injured while in a state of sleep terror. I’ve never even left my apartment save for the time I jumped through a window…I guess I only half left the house that time though, since half my body was outside and the other half was inside, with my stomach resting on the windowsill and my back catching shards of glass as I fell back into the room. But when I read about Jarod’s death my heart really went out to him. The poor kid. I think he was half-awake and probably terrified, hence the running. He likely didn’t know why he was scared, he only would have known that he was scared. That’s my theory anyway. Why else would his expression have been “one of blank terror?” That doesn’t sound like automatism or sleep walking. It sounds closer to sleep terror.
A few days ago I was chatting with the lady who lives in the apartment above me when the conversation turned to sleep terror. Turns out she has the exact same symptoms I do. She bolts out of bed screaming “HELP ME! HELP ME!” I was amazed. I’ve never met someone who has what I have. She told me she’s stubbed a lot of toes and sprained a lot of ankles too but she hasn’t broken any bones yet. We knocked on wood. She hasn’t launched herself through a window either.
Apparently she heard me screaming during my last episode a month or two or three ago. She spoke to my roommate about it and learned it was sleep terror. She didn’t mind the noise, she said. I told her I won’t either if I ever hear her screaming in her sleep. I won’t be able to help her, just as she won’t be able to help me, but we can at least understand and sympathize with each other.
Sleep well.