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

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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. When aspiring foreign correspondent Virginia Cowles turned up to report on the Spanish civil war in 1937, she was a 26-year-old Boston debutante in heels.

A welcome addition to the vast library it cites and celebrates, Vernon's work is a compelling guide to the uncanny grammar of our dread and desire. The book encourages us all to change the way that we talk about sleep, arguing that there are many benefits to exchanging sleep stories – socially, culturally and in terms of our wellbeing.I was instantly drawn to the cover, and if you're not familiar with the image, it's the The Nightmare by Swedish painter Henry Fuseli. Vernon hasn’t experienced every type of parasomnia, but she gives detailed examples of the ones that are part of her sleep history, including sleepwalking, sleep paralysis, and hypnopompic hallucinations. Dracula’, ‘Jane Eyre’ and the Brother Cadfael mysteries all make reference to parasomnias, as does Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). On the other hand, it sometimes veers into unconfortably personal material that feels like a live therapy session happening in front of our eyes, with the author figuring things out as they come up.

She is now a Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Creative Writing in the department, teaching students the fundamentals of storytelling. In the course of the book, Vernon draws on her own long history of troubled sleep, as well as upon cultural and scientific resources, to show what such events say about people, time periods, and humanity as a whole. Maybe next time I have one of those really stressful dreams about owning multiple hamsters that have escaped into the garden, I'll lucid dream and imagine I'm in a giant hamster cage or something. Her anecdotes range from funny (while sleepwalking as a teenager, she told her mother that she needed to take a cake to Gwen Stefani) to terrifying (feeling phantom hands on her neck or dragging her out of bed by her ankles). The author grips the reader with the first page with her beautifully descriptive writing that remains engrossing until the end, and yet manages to balance with perfection emotions of humour, sadness and fear.

Some film analysis is underdeveloped compared to the literary analysis : for instance, concluding that Kon's Paprika and Nolan's Inception is about "the dilemma of technology intruding in our dreams" and "the existential crisis we might face when technology helps us to control our dreams too well" is a little bit weak and doesn't offer anything interesting or new to say about the way those movies talk about dreams and the things dreams can be metaphors of. We also use them to help detect unauthorized access or activity that violate our terms of service, as well as to analyze site traffic and performance for our own site improvement efforts. Parasomnias have also been the subject of extensive scientific investigations with many medical theories and treatments recommended over the centuries. This was exactly the type of book I wish I had access to when I first started getting sleep paralysis. Vernon expertly blends history with science, interweaving her own personal experiences with that of the terrible events of the Salem Witch Trials and the Victorian love affair with the macabre among others.

Is was really great to not only learn whilst reading but also be entertained and slightly creeped out as well. The book has left me feeling I need more answers about the workings of the human brain, which is a positive outcome. Dr Alice Vernon completed her PhD, investigating representations of insomnia in fiction, in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University under the supervision of Dr Jacqueline Yallop.By writing this gruelling, honest book, Alice Vernon has done her small bit to try to puncture the power of nightmares. It considers case studies, surveys, works of literature, paintings, and movies, with the knowledge that parasomnias tell stories about the people who experience them and about the sociocultural contexts they exist in. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer.

The style is eclectic, ranging from science journalism, to literary analysis of victorian novels, back to autobiographical writing.For insomniacs, the bed is a cruel tormentor; for those of us with parasomnias, the bed is a haunted crypt. 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. I particularly found the parts about dreams in remote tribes and the affect of the emergence of colour TV on dreams interesting. Such stories have their own practical uses, too, as with healing trauma and improving waking-hour skills in sports and video games.