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

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It is curious, lively, humble, utterly genuine – and, if you're a sufferer too, wonderfully reassuring. I am not a big non-fiction reader but I have been incredibly excited for this book ever since Alice mentioned she was writing it while I was her student at Aber Uni. In terms of sleepwalking, it seemed to be particularly romanticised in the nineteenth century—especially when the sleepwalker was a young woman. This concern over the number of hours people sleep, or fail to, has led to growing attempts at regimenting and optimising the night-time, be it through sleep-tracking, sleep-hygiene routines and sleep hacks, relaxation apps, or other assorted gadgets, from smart mattresses to smart light systems.

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.Fascinating and entertaining, I feel like this book nails unpicking the complexity of humans' relationship with sleep in a way that feels relevant and easy to read. But it’s not just that parasomnias can inspire creativity or that culture can help shed light on these strange sleep phenomena. 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”. We have a stair lift from the ground floor foyer to the first floor but are unable to install a through-floor lift due to the building’s historic status. He was not just a vampire, she concludes, but “every parasomnia combined in the figure of a folkloric monster”.

Looking at the historical records of the 17th-century Salem witch trials, for instance, Vernon learns how experiences of sleep paralysis generated several accusations of witchcraft in the trials.I particularly found the parts about dreams in remote tribes and the affect of the emergence of colour TV on dreams interesting. Now a lecturer in Creative Writing, Vernon set out to understand the history, science and culture of these strange and haunting experiences.

Vernon describes how, during sleep paralysis, she feels “crushed under the intense stare of Meredith, under her hands and her sharp nails”. Ever since Alice Vernon was a child, her nights have been haunted by nightmares of a figure from her adolescence, sinister hallucinations, and episodes of sleepwalking. IN HEADSPACE: HOW THE SEVENTIES LOST ITS MIND, FOUND ITSELF AND TAUGHT US TO BE WELL, by Dr James Riley, tells the story of the New Age Health movements of the 1970s, and how they formed the basis for today’s contemporary wellness industry. What we see during sleep paralysis,” Vernon explains, “has changed significantly as our cultural depiction of monsters has shifted”. 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.In response, the brain can conjure up images of sinister figures looming over the sleeper and weighing them down, to explain the sensation of being pinned to the bed and the feeling of pressure on one’s chest and limbs. Lucid dreaming and its therapeutic and creative possibilities seems to claim the biggest cultural interest at the moment, though.

The Leeds Library is committed to making its building and collections accessible to everyone in our current capital building works project The Next Chapter Project. These examples do not just point to an increased curiosity for an activity that, after all, makes up a third of our lives. Wearable devices and mobile apps monitor quality and quantity, nudging users to make adjustments to their bedtime routines. Mental illness and the maternal urge become nightmarishly entwined in this gutsy, gory mashup of domestic horror and dark humour.She liked to say that her only qualification was curiosity, but as this timely reissue of her bestselling 1941 memoir proves, she also had courage, tenacity and a flair for observation. Alice Vernon teaches Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University, Wales, where she also gained her PhD in 2018.