I have always wondered why you are not supposed to wake up a person who is sleepwalking. I have heard that they can have a heart attack, or go into a catatonic state. A friend of mine who did too much acid back in the 70s said that maybe the universe would implode.
Is this a myth (obviously not my weird friend’s imploding theory) or does it have some medical basis in fact?
My daughter sleepwalks all the time (at least one night per week). Usually a loud “Kal!!! What are you doing?!?!?” does the trick and she’s back to bed. She is well aware that she sleepwalks, so when I do wake her from it she understands what most likely happened.
According to this article, it sounds like you are better off helping them back to bed than letting them continue to wander. This one says the myth probably came from the reaction the sleepwalker had to being awakened.
I used to sleepwalk all the time. It won’t kill the person if you wake them up while sleepwalking but it can freak them out really badly and there is the remote possibility of something bad happening in the confusion. Sleepwalking is usually accompanied by deep, immersive dreams that aren’t that easy to snap out of.
Let’s see, I once jumped out of a window (1st floor thankfully) in the middle of a thunderstorm when I woke up quite confused while sleepwalking. I also fled into the woods once because I was fighting the Vietcong in my mind and didn’t know who I could trust at that point. All I knew was that enemy operative look-alikes to people I knew showed up suddenly and that was not something I wanted to stick around for. That is just the tip of the iceberg.
Usually nothing much happens but there is the possibility that the sleepwalker will freak do something completely unpredictable because they are still in a semi-dream state but able to act on it physically. A person’s body is normally partially paralyzed during deep sleep so that thoughts won’t be translated directly to actions but this doesn’t hold true for sleepwalkers, especially those that are partially awakened.
I used to sleepwalk a lot when I was a kid and I was woken up all the time if my parents were still awake. I was totally fine, it’s a stupid myth.
Now, was it a myth created out of actual folk medicine lore or a myth created out of a need to promote a comedic device in plays/tv shows/movies, etc (that is, sleepwalking is funny, so a reason is needed for the other characters to not just wake them up).
This is why I won’t try Ambien for my occasional sleep issues.
I’m a middle aged male who sleeps wearing only my briefs.
I’d probably wake up to the taser jolt as the cops took me down for wandering around in my underwear in the middle of the night and not responding to their orders.
That would be a bit of a shock.
This doesn’t relate to sleepwalking so much but when I saw this I wanted to mention the time I woke up to my alarm clock and tried to silence it by pulling the cord out of the back. It was powered straight from the wall (no wall wart) and if I had managed to rip the cord loose before my wife snapped me out of it I might have electrocuted myself. It never even occurred to me to just turn the thing off like I do every other morning.
Sleep does funny things to people.
No, the myth is that if you wake a sleepwalker, their legs fall off (Nanny Ogg in one of the Discworld novels.)
All advice I’ve read from Doctors is to please wake that person up before they harm themselves. Leading back into bed if possible is the gentlest solution, but if they are about to walk out of window, you wake them up even if it confuses them.
I’ve never heard of a reaction like Shagnasty describes; usually people are either children / teens where sleep cycle can apparently be easier disturbed, or stressed out people who know of their tendency to sleepwalk.
I wonder if the more severe effects are related to the more widespread sleep deprivation in the US?
If you ask me I’d prefer to be gently led back to my bed without waking me up (which happened the first time I became aware of my sleepwalking). Waking up in the middle of a walk is truly confusing and outright horrible.