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

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We then move on to hypnopompic hallucinations – primarily visual hallucinations that manifest moments after waking up; think spiders scuttling on your pillow.

More recently, this parasomnia is thought to be the origin of many reports of alien abductions that supposedly happened at night and were accompanied by a peculiar heavy feeling. It is curious, lively, humble, utterly genuine – and, if you're a sufferer too, wonderfully reassuring.Looking for Trouble author Virginia Cowles (second left) and fellow war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (second right) with members of the cast of their play, Love Goes to Press, in 1946. I’ve already done a couple of events, and it has been wonderful to hear people come up and tell me about the things they’ve also suffered with at night.

Since then, the idea that our society may be experiencing a “sleep crisis” has become more popular, with reports that people’s sleep debt – namely, the difference between the amount of sleep they need and the amount they actually get – has been rising in recent years. She is also interested in comics, especially regarding depictions of the body, and gave a talk on her work in this area at the Wellcome Collection in March 2020. Mental illness and the maternal urge become nightmarishly entwined in this gutsy, gory mashup of domestic horror and dark humour.Her stories of troubled sleep purposefully steer well clear of the subject of insomnia – a condition that has been the core theme of a recent boom of memoirs, such as Marina Benjamin’s Insomnia (2018) and Samantha Harvey’s The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping (2020). For insomniacs, the bed is a cruel tormentor; for those of us with parasomnias, the bed is a haunted crypt. The passion in which Vernon pursues discussion to be normalised surrounding our sleeping patterns is something that I think we can all take away from with a sense of positivity, as after all, we all have sleep. I think a lot of the cultural interest in lucid dreaming coincides with the rise of video games—games become more vivid and immersive, but it can never compare to the sheer reality of the experience of living out those game-like situations in a lucid dream. 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.

Now a lecturer in Creative Writing, Vernon set out to understand the history, science and culture of these strange and haunting experiences.

The reader’s journey starts with the very first parasomnia that Vernon experienced as a child: sleepwalking. What I was looking for in particular was how we’ve imagined and explained some of these phenomena throughout history, but I also wanted to encourage people to tell their own stories of troubled sleep.