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

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.)