Night terrors: troubled sleep and the stories we tell about it
Description
** AS READ ON BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK IN DECEMBER 2022 **'Curious, lively, humble, utterly genuine ... a remarkable debut.' SUNDAY TIMESAlice Vernon often wakes up to find strangers in her bedroom.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. 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 aims to shine a light on the darkest parts of our sleeping lives, and to reassure sufferers from bad dreams that they are not alone.
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Publisher's Weekly Review
Vernon, a creative writing lecturer at Aberystwyth University, debuts with a vivid history of sleep disorders, both in general and in her own life. Citing surveys that show 70% of the population will experience parasomnias at some point, Vernon explores the neurological causes of sleep disorders ("micro-arousals in the brain's activity," for example, can lead to hallucinations) and describes the experimental therapies used as treatment (hypnosis among them). There's a rich history of research on sleep, she writes, including Sigmund Freud's influential thesis that "dreams communicate our deepest, darkest desires," and she reviews parasomnia in literature, identifying Dracula as "every parasomnia combined in the figure of a folkloric monster" and Jane Eyre as underscoring the importance of taking seriously children's fear of nighttime. Her research is diligent, but far more memorable are Vernon's accounts of her own sleep troubles, which began after a high school teacher's "messy emotional blackmail" manifested as blood-curdling nighttime hallucinations ("I woke up to a woman's disembodied head slowly turning into a teal-coloured tree trunk on the pillow next to me") and sleep paralysis (which felt like "razor-sharp ribbons sliding into incisions along my arms and legs... taking over"). The result is a candid, intense look at what keeps people up at night. (Nov.)
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Vernon, a creative writing lecturer at Aberystwyth University, debuts with a vivid history of sleep disorders, both in general and in her own life. Citing surveys that show 70% of the population will experience parasomnias at some point, Vernon explores the neurological causes of sleep disorders ("micro-arousals in the brain's activity," for example, can lead to hallucinations) and describes the experimental therapies used as treatment (hypnosis among them). There's a rich history of research on sleep, she writes, including Sigmund Freud's influential thesis that "dreams communicate our deepest, darkest desires," and she reviews parasomnia in literature, identifying Dracula as "every parasomnia combined in the figure of a folkloric monster" and Jane Eyre as underscoring the importance of taking seriously children's fear of nighttime. Her research is diligent, but far more memorable are Vernon's accounts of her own sleep troubles, which began after a high school teacher's "messy emotional blackmail" manifested as blood-curdling nighttime hallucinations ("I woke up to a woman's disembodied head slowly turning into a teal-coloured tree trunk on the pillow next to me") and sleep paralysis (which felt like "razor-sharp ribbons sliding into incisions along my arms and legs... taking over"). The result is a candid, intense look at what keeps people up at night. (Nov.)
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