Instant Genius - Sleep disorders, with Dr Alice Vernon

Episode Date: November 11, 2022

In this episode of Instant Genius, Dr Vernon speaks to us about sleep disorders, or parasomnias. She tells us how scientific attitudes towards sleep disorders have changed over the years, what the latest thinking on treatments is, and what she learnt about her own sleep disorders while writing her latest book – Night Terrors: Troubled sleep and the stories we tell about it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night, unable to move and notice a sinister presence in your bedroom? If so, it sounds like you've suffered from sleep paralysis, a kind of sleep disorder or parisomnia. In this week's episode, we speak to Dr. Alice Vernon, a lecturer in creative writing at Aberystwyth University. Her research focuses on representations of sleep in science and culture. She tells us how scientific attitudes towards sleep disorders have changed over the years, what the latest thinking on treatments is, and what she learned about her own sleep disorders while writing her latest book,

Night Terrorist, Troubled Sleep and the Stories We Tell About It. So, yeah, your book's all about something called Parasomnias. So first, by way of starting, what exactly are Parasomnias? Parasomnius is an umbrella term for any. sleep disorder that involves involuntary movement or hallucinations. So apart from things like insomnia and snoring, it's a very specific type that involves dreaming, REM disorders. It's sort of when your brain wakes up to some extent while you're still asleep and it forms these hallucinations and hallucinatory experiences. So I think most people listening will have either experienced these

themselves or they'll at least know somebody that's experienced them. But, you know, how common are they? Really common, actually. A survey was done a couple of years ago and they found that around about 70% of us will experience these at some point in our lives, even if it's just once. It's 70%. Although I have a feeling that it's actually much higher than that. And a lot of parisomni is because they're so stigmatized and have such a strong association with the supernatural and with madness to some extent, I think the amount of reporting that goes on is much lower than what we actually experience.

And to some extent, some people don't even know that what they've experienced is a sleep disorder. They think they've really been abducted by aliens or really seen a ghost or something like that. So I think it's much higher, but the figure that we have is 70%. So obviously, as you mentioned in the book, these parosomnias are fascinated scientists for centuries

and they continue to do so now. So I thought we could speak in turn about some of the sleep disorders or paracomers that you mentioned in the book. I think perhaps one of the most common ones is sleepwalking. So let's have a look at that. So what's exactly going on when somebody is sleepwalking? So a lot of parisomies are defined by what's known as a sort of micro arousal. And every night we have dozens of these and we don't even realize that we've had them. And so sleepwalking is that peculiar half-awake state,

where the brain waves, as we map them, the brain waves suddenly show this sort of conscious state, but also the brain is still asleep. And so the person will get up out of bed. So it's not associated with dreaming an REM, because when we're dreaming, the brain is actually paralyzing the body so that we're not acting out what we're dreaming.

dreaming. And so for people that have sleepwalking, night terrors and REM disorder, these are all parasolomies that involved in voluntary movement. So when a person is in that state, that paralysis isn't happening. It's not working. The brain is in a strange, half awake, half a sleep state, and a person will get up and be convinced of some sort of delusional event that's going on around them that only they know about, but they're awake enough to be able to navigate the house or people have been known to drive their car, drive a motorbike, which blows my mind. And what's associated often with things like sleepwalking and night terrors is that the person doesn't remember it in the morning. They have no idea. I remember when I was a child,

I used to sleepwalk, and my mum would say, you know, you got up in the middle of the night and you were telling me about all this weird stuff. And I had absolutely no. memory of it at all. So that's quite fascinating as well. Yeah, so you mentioned their REM and REM behaviour disorder. So for people who don't, perhaps don't know what that is, can we define those for me, please? Yeah, so REM, rapid eye movement. It is when we are dreaming, our brain is actually sending signals to our muscles depending on what we're dreaming about. So so we're dreaming that we're, I don't know, making a cup of tea. That's a really boring dream. but so we're making a cup of tea in our dream,

our brain will be sending signals to our arms to pick up the kettle, to get the mug down off the shelf, whatever that is. And obviously for evolutionary reasons, but also just for kind of social reasons as well, if we're acting out our dreams in bed, we're going to hurt ourselves, we're going to hurt other people,

we'll fall out of bed and injure ourselves, that kind of thing. So the brain then paralyzes the body. And so it's still sending signals to our muscles but because we're paralyzed, we can't actually do anything about it. Although we can still move our eyes, and it's actually been proven that the way our eyes move in REM sleep is actually where we're looking in the dream.

And people who lose a dream, who know that they're dreaming within the dream, can move their eyes in certain controlled patterns to kind of send a signal to people observing them to say, hey, I'm in a dream and I know what I'm doing and I'm looking in certain places, which I find really interesting. So that's what REM is. But REM disorder is when that paralysis doesn't happen at all. And so the person is dreaming and they are acting out everything in their dreams.

Although in people that have REM disorder, that's quite associated with early onset Alzheimer's and neurodegenerative diseases. So if you do have REM disorder, it's probably worth getting checked out for that. But you're essentially just acting out your dreams in bed every night and hurting your partner, hurting yourself as well. So you mentioned there that there are some examples of people driving a car or riding a motorcycle, but you also mention in the book some really extreme cases of people actually committing crimes? Yeah, I find that absolutely horrible.

I mean, for somebody who does sleepwalk, the fact that there is a side of me that gets up and does things that I don't know about. But yes, you can chart these cases. So in the Victorian era, people were starting to understand ideas and states of consciousness more. Experiments and theories were being put in place in terms of conscious automata theory, thinking about the mind in different ways. And there were cases being put through the old Bailey of people that had tried to murder people in their sleep or tried to do terrible things to other people in their sleep.

And suddenly we get a different look at these cases and whether these people are actually responsible for the things that they do in their sleep. And so we get this new verdict in the Victorian era called Not Guilty on Grounds of Unconsciousness, which was used towards the end of the 19th century. And that's still in place today, although it does tend to get a little bit problematic as well because, you know, you could murder somebody and say, oh, well, I did it in my sleep. you know, I wasn't responsible. So I think that's, it's interesting and I think, but also slightly problematic in some respects as well, because how can you really know, if you're looking at this from the outside, how can you really tell that the person was actually asleep unless they've had tests or they've had, you know, a history of sleep walking?

So going from one slightly terrifying thing to another, so a lot of us have hallucinations in our sleep. And these fall loosely into two categories, don't they? Like hypnagogic and hypnopompic. So could you explain what those are and what the differences are first, please? Yes, so hypnagogic comes from the Greek, I think, to mean as you're coming out, as you're going into sleep. So hypnagogic, you're going into sleep.

And you have, I mean, we all have these, and they don't seem to have any kind of stigma attached to them, so we're readily admitting that we have these. And so hypnagogic hallucinations are those little flashes, that you get just as you're drifting off to sleep, you have little flashes of light, or you might see faces just pop out, you know, in your mind's eye. Sometimes you get what's called a hypnagogic jerk, which I hate, where you're just falling asleep,

and you kind of see yourself walking or getting out of a car or just something like that, and suddenly you feel like you're falling, and you go, and you wake up, and you're up. So that's a hypnagogic jerk. So hypnagogic, as you're going into sleep, hypnipompic is the rarer form of this sort of, this sort of twinned hallucination. So hypnipompic, you're coming out of sleep. That's whether the name comes from. And so you wake up while your brain is still sort of dreaming and it projects all sorts of

horrible things into your bedroom. A lot of spiders and snakes, people tend to see insects, snakes, horrible things all over the bed sheets. But you can move with a hypnipomopic hallucination. you're able to move because you're still half awake. And so people will brush off these invisible spiders or they might see phantoms, ghosts, horrible goblin things in their bedroom. And so that's much more vivid because you think you're awake. With the hypnagogic hallucination,

you are falling asleep. But with the hypnophonic hallucination, you think you're awake and you see these horrible things appear in your bedroom. So some researchers have found a common root or place in the brain that's common in people that suffer from these hypnipompic hallucinations? Yeah, I think there's, well, I think it's quite subjective, and it's, from what I found in my research, is that there doesn't seem to be a particular

reason for, that's common to everybody. So it could be that it's a precursor to disease. So things like Alzheimer's, dementia, schizophrenia, Parkinson's is another one. If you're having sleep disorders, it could be that it's the early onset of Parkinson. So it could be something neurodegenerative. They found that it could just be that you have a really vivid imagination. And that makes you more prone to having hallucinations because you're able to see things in your mind's eye really clearly or remember sounds, remember smells really vividly. And so you're more prone just to have a hallucination.

The other thing is expectation. So if you go to a hotel and someone tells you, oh, that's a haunted hotel, that gets in your brain then and you're more prone to actually have a hallucination or sleep paralysis because you're expecting it to happen. Trauma can affect dreams quite badly as well. It's not a case of eating cheese before bed. I think that's the only thing we can rule out. But other than that, you know, it's dependent on lifestyle. It's dependent on your history. It's dependent on, you know, whether there are sounds that you can hear all the time, you know, that are disrupting your sleep, or because of some sort of neurodegenerative disease that might be, you know, in its early stages.

So you mentioned there, sleep paralysis, and this is something that I've never had, but sounds particularly dreadful. So can you make, I mean, I understand that you've experienced this yourself. It sounds horrific. Can you explain, first of all, what it is and how it feels like? Yeah, I mean, if you've never had it. before, you're probably quite lucky, although now that we're having this conversation, you're probably going to have it tonight because of expectation. So good look. But sleep paralysis. So it goes back to what I was talking about before in terms of REM disorder. So the brain paralyzes the body so that we're not acting out our dreams. And usually in a healthy night's sleep, we wake up just as that paralysis is worn off. And we don't even know that we've been paralyzed at all.

Most people don't know that this actually goes on at night, you don't realize that you've been paralyzed at all. So for those of us lucky enough to have sleep paralysis, we wake up before that paralysis has worn off. It usually happens kind of in the middle of the night, you know. And so you wake up while your body is still paralyzed. And it feels immensely heavy. You feel incredibly heavy.

You feel that something is actually pinning you down. It's not paralysis in a kind of literal sense. it feels like something is pinning you down and you can't move at all. But it seems to be concentrated on the chest area. You feel this immense weight on your chest. But because the brain is still in that sort of dreaming state, you have a hypnipompic hallucination that the brain projects something and tries to come up with a reason as to why you can't move,

why you feel like there's something on your chest. And it's never something nice, like, you know, a nice cat or I don't know, like a big basket of crisps or something. I don't know. It's having something really nice, you know, it's always something really horrible, like a hag or a witch, a demon, a burglar that's coming in and strangling you. And the thing about sleep paralysis is that it's very tactile as well. You feel, so you see something horrible, but you also feel something. So for me, I often feel disembodied hands. It was very horror movie where I just feel hands all in my hair, around my neck. had some particularly weird ones where I felt as though hands have grabbed me by the ankle,

yanked me down the bed, very, the horror movie, but then I've woken up properly and I've not moved at all. And that's quite odd. But the way that sleep paralysis lifts is that, so you've had this immense weight on your chest. And then suddenly that weight lifts. And you feel as though you've levitating. It's really weird. You have this sudden weightlessness and you feel this sort of rush upwards. And I've had it sometimes where I've thought that I've stuck to the ceiling or that I've kind of levitated up and I'm about to crash over the side of my bed. They found that a lot of people's stories of alien abduction, they think they've been abducted by aliens in the middle of the night. They describe this feeling of very heavy weight on them

as so they've been pinned down by the aliens. And then they feel this rush upwards, which they say is zero gravity or is being be beamed up or down from the ship. So if you read a lot of, you know, people saying that they've been abducted by aliens, it sounds a lot like sleep paralysis. And studies have been done to try and explain, you know, whether it's a cultural thing that because we're thinking about aliens and thinking about UFOs and it's a big part of science fiction, if that is actually influencing what our sleep paralysis looks like now. So yeah, this rush is how it ends, this rush upwards, which is very much. a very strange sensation.

Yeah, you mentioned there about the aliens and the cultural influence on dreams. I thought that was a really interesting thread that's running through your book. You mentioned a lot of really fascinating Victorian studies on, you know, exactly as you'd imagine on like pretty waiflight young ladies, sleepwalking and things.

And their explanations are, you know, they go from the obsession with the occult and witchcraft and feeding through to now with aliens and science fiction. So there's a really, really big influence on our dreams from the outside world and I lived experience. You even mentioned the tribe. Yeah, so there's a tribe in in Brazil and an anthropologist was doing some research there and found that the things they were dreaming about were split in terms of gender, depending on what both genders felt was a threat to them. So it's part of something called

threat rehearsal theory, which is a fairly recent. theory about where dreams have come from because classically we still don't know what dreams are, what they do, why we have them. And so this threat rehearsal theory proposes that it's an evolutionary thing where whatever threatens us during the day or might threaten us during the day, we dream about it so that we practice essentially how to deal with these things. So kind of an evolutionary point of view, you know, if we dreamt about being attacked by a predator, maybe in our dream we grab a rock and we try and smash it. And then if we encounter that in real life, we'd know how to deal with it.

But obviously nowadays, you know, we have recurring dreams about sitting our GCSE maths exam again, which hopefully I'll never have to do. But if I do, I've had a dream about it, so I'll know, I'll be prepared. But yeah, this Brazilian tribe, they found that this spread rehearsal theory seemed to be quite prevalent with them. And so they found that the men were dreaming about threats that they couldn't defend themselves from. So they were used to defending themselves from physical predators, leopards, jaguaries, big cats, those kinds of predators using weapons. And what they feared were dangers that they couldn't use weapons on.

So things like insect, fatal insect bites and snake bites. Those were the things that the men were dreaming about. the women, on the other hand, who weren't used to using big weapons and physical force to defend themselves, were dreaming about big cats and big predators and being confronted by them and having no means to defend themselves. And they also found that as this tribe was being or having more contact with wider Brazilian communities, people from the city coming into this tribe, people who were very different to them, they were having nightmares about these people being aggressive to them because they didn't know how to react to them. It was different to any threat that they'd experienced before. And so they didn't

know how to react and respond to them. And so their dreams seemed to be aligned to this threat rehearsal theory that they were dreaming about real dangers to them so that they might be able to practice a way of defending themselves from a snake bite or a big cat or something like. that. Yeah, I've heard another sleep research is saying that something like nightmares of the mother of dreams, which I thought was an interesting phrase. So let's move on to speaking about nightmares then. So what there's one specific, which is a title of your book actually, a form of parisominy is that my brother used to have and were young and it's horrible. It's a night terror. So what's the difference between a

nightmare and a night terror? Well, the word nightmare is quite interesting actually because we use it very differently to how it used to be used. So nowadays, nightmare, we just say that that's a bad dream. You know, if we've had a dream that's not very pleasant, we call it a nightmare. But the word nightmare actually used to mean sleep paralysis very specifically. And the mayor part of nightmare was associated with a demonic horse. So, you know, mare means horse. It's kind of an old word for horse.

and so people thought that a horse would be possessed by a witch and would come into your bedroom through the window somehow, I guess, and trample the sleeper. So they thought that this weight on their chest was a horse trampling them that had been possessed by a devil. And people used to hang things in stables and little charms and burn little marks in stables to try and prevent horses from getting possessed and trampling people. So that's the nightmare. But nowadays, we just seem to say it's a bad dream. You know, it's a dream where you're sitting your GCSE maths exam 15 years after the fact or whatever. Night terror is very similar to sleepwalking, but the clue is in the name in that it's characterized by screaming, by the person having some sort of delusion, some sort of thing that they think is going on,

but it's characterized by fear. With sleepwalking, you're just sort of walking around the house, maybe making a sandwich. My mum found me once with my hands cupped in front of me because I wanted to give take to Gwen Stefani. That was my classic sleepwalking example. But it's sleepwalking, apart from when people murder each other, obviously, murder somebody in their sleep. Sleepwalking tends to be fairly mundane in terms of what people are doing, but a night terror, it is characterized by the need to flee. Whatever the person thinks is going on is usually a really catastrophic, potentially fatal, and they've got to run away as fast as they can, and they scream.

But again, people don't remember that they've done it in the morning. So I talk about my cousin, who has them really badly, and she records her phone on her phone. She's got a sound recorder, and she can just play them and be like, oh, that was in a travel lodge, and it's just an ear-splitting scream. You're like, oh, my God. So obviously, these are most commonly talked about as occurring in childhood, but they can persist into adulthood,

And there was some research that started in earnest during the First World War about things about post-traumatic stress disorder in night terrors. Yeah, so a doctor called McCurdy was on a ward with a lot of soldiers, a lot of men from the First World War who had been discharged on medical grounds. And he wrote this book called War Neurosies, where he was talking about shell shock. And that was something that was really not. being looked at very much. And so he's really at the forefront. He's not the first, obviously, but he's certainly at the forefront of taking these things seriously. And he says in this book,

you know, we need to take these neurological disorders and symptoms as seriously as if they've, you know, been shot through the arm or something like that. So he's, you know, really pushing this forward. But he charts all these really quite tragic cases of men. Some of them have had a history of sleep disorder. So he will say, you know, you used to sleepwalk as a child, and then that had gone away, but come back now suddenly as a result of trauma. But there are cases where he's put, you know, no history of troubled sleep. And then suddenly, because of what they've experienced, they are waking up from sleep and screaming and thinking that they are back on the front and trying to get away. There's this one where the man could actually remember what he'd been dreaming

about, which is quite rare really with the night terror, but he could remember being at the balcony of the hospital and all these bombs falling on on them. And it was like they were back there and that terror was refreshed. Although what McCurdy does say is that, you know, it can be, just as, you know, a bullet wound can be treated and sewn up and stitched back together. He thought that it would be easy for the soldiers to get over these night terrors and these post-traumatic stress symptoms and then you could just send them back out to the front which is quite a cruel way of seeing it but even though he was at the forefront of trying to get these symptoms accepted as just as important as physical wounds there is a sense where he's treating them too much

like physical wounds and being like they'll heal in the same way and then we can send them back out into the front but yes the world war one i think that was a real turning point in terms of seeing sleep disorders and parisomies are something resulting from trauma. Yeah, so as you say, we're still so much for us to learn about parisomnias and sleep disorders. But what's the current research now, you know, do we have any current treatments that are effective in treating these conditions? Yeah, well, just as they are different for everybody, in terms of their causes, there are different treatments as well,

depending on, you know, what might be, what might be causing it. Somebody recently told me that their daughter had dreadful night terrors and they found that it was because of an artificial sweetener called aspartane. And as soon as they cut that out of her diet, the night terrors just stopped completely. But there's things like hypnotherapy, medication, but it doesn't seem to work for everybody. And I think it is dependent on what is actually causing the parisomies themselves. But one thing that is being looked at is actually using a type of parisomia as a form of therapy. So lucid dreaming, which I mentioned briefly, is where you're in a dream and realize you're dreaming and they've been able to chart the brain waves during a lucid dream and they've found

that in a normal dream we have a very kind of primary form of consciousness. It's very primitive. It's very in the moment. This is happening. We're just going to move forward and see where we go. With a lucid dream, that secondary consciousness, which can look forward. can look back at the past, can access, you know, all our memories and think about things more logically and more rationally, that comes into play in a lucid dream. So we can control the dream to some extent, which is a very strange feeling. And so we found that lucid dreaming can be a learned skill. You can learn it, you can practice it and you can, you know, develop it as a skill and use it more often and more reliably. And so if you are having recurring nightmares, say you've had some sort of traumatic experience, the example I give quite a lot, is if you've been in a car crash and you have nightmares that you're in the car and that you're about to crash into a tree. If that's the dream that you have every night, these researchers have found that using kind of creative writing, essentially,

I'm a creative writing lecturer, so this is why I find it quite interesting. Using creative writing, the patient will write down their dream and then change the ending and say, instead of crashing into the tree, I drive successfully around the tree, or the tree sprouts legs and walks off or something like that. I mean, it's a weird dream. The tree is probably more likely to sprout legs. So they changed the ending so that that normal ending of crashing into the tree doesn't happen.

And they learn that and they read it over and over again while they're learning to lose a dream. And then when they find themselves in that dream again, they'll know then, oh, this is a dream. And I know that I've got a new ending for this, which is that the tree sprouts legs and walks off. And they found that this technique is actually having a really beneficial effect. And that even if the patient didn't learn to lose a dream successfully, that practice of actually writing the dream down and changing the ending and sort of reading that over and over again and learning that does actually help lessen the fear of going to bear,

lessen the severity of the nightmare itself. So even if you don't manage to lose a dream, this practice of writing dreams down and kind of changing the ending has had measurable therapeutic benefits. There are some other studies as well, aren't there, that you mentioned, specifically with training motor skills. The one that you mentioned with throwing darts, I thought was absolutely hilarious. Yeah, yeah.

So there was a really fascinating study. There's quite a few study themed done, actually, in terms of whether lucid dreams can help us develop physical skills, motor skills, because, you know, as I said, the brain is actually sending signals to our muscles, depending on what we're dreaming about. So surely there's muscle memory going on and the training in terms of dexterity and that kind of thing. And so there was really fully studied done

of people playing darts, and they had a group of professional dance players, and then they had a group of people who've never really played darts before. But what was common to both groups was that they could lucid dream fairly reliably and fairly often. And they found that there was no particular measurable benefit. So they got both groups to play some darts and then go to bed. And then when they were dreaming, they were given the task of practicing playing darts in their dream.

And quite a funny bit of like the darts turning into pencils or getting really wobbly and not work. Because that's what a lucid dream is like. You try and control it. And it's just stupid. You know, you can control it to an extent, but it's still just like, oh, you want to play darts? There's a snake instead. This is really silly. But they found that after the lucid dreams, the people,

professional darts players hadn't really had any sort of, it didn't really change their skill. But for those who had never played darts before in any sort of way, they found that they did actually improve because they were dreaming about playing darts and because they were kind of starting from scratch in terms of their darts playing, the signals that the brain was sending to the muscles

and the idea of, you know, practicing, lining up with the dart board and practicing their balance and all that kind of stuff did actually have a measurable benefit. So they got better at playing darts because they were practicing it in their sleep, which is fascinating. Yeah, it gives new meaning to the phrase I can do that in my sleep. Yeah, absolutely. But I suppose in the other side of that, it does kind of mean, you know, are we going to start, you know, hacking into sleep and trying to use lucid dreams as a way of being more productive?

Yeah, so you mentioned that this is a big area of research and that you can learn how to lucid dream. So how do you learn to lucid dream? Well, I think the first thing is that you have to increase your dream recall. So if you're somebody that never remembers their dream, you're kind of starting from scratch, really. And so the best thing to do is to actually write down your dream in a morning, even if it's just, I remember the color blue or I remember feeling scared or if it's just a feeling or if it's just a color, anything at all that you can remember from your dream, write it down. and you'll find that over the days, just that habit of writing down your dream and taking a moment of being a bit self-reflective, makes your dreams longer, makes them more vivid, makes you better at being able to remember them. And the more that you're able to remember them and write them down, the more you start to notice patterns. So maybe you dream about cats a lot. I dream about trains a lot because I'm a nerd and I love trains, but I seem to dream about trains all the time. And so for me, that's kind of like a symbol. You know, if I'm on a train, am I dreaming? And so if you encounter some of these symbols in waking life, you then have to ask yourself constantly, am I dreaming? So while you're writing down these dreams, you also need to get

into the habit of asking yourself and being absolutely sure. How am I absolutely sure that I am not dreaming right now? One of the things I do is I pinch my nose and close my mouth. And if I can't breathe, then I'm not dreaming. But in a dream, if I do that, it's really weird. I feel like I'm still breathing through my nose. It's very peculiar. And so that's how I tell whether I'm, so something weird happens to me, and I pinch my nose, it's because I'm not entirely sure if I'm dreaming or not. So you need to cultivate this habit of asking yourself all the time. And then you'll find that you actually just sort of organically start to realize that you're, it just happens completely spontaneously where you're just dreaming about your GCSE maths exam. And suddenly you go,

hang on, I'm 30. I'm not in high school anymore. And then you're like, that wow, no thank you. Tipped the desk over, walk out and don't fly or go meet, I don't know, somebody famous, you know, whatever you want to do. And so it does happen, you know, can just happen spontaneously, but there are other things you can do as well. So if you wake up in the middle

of the night, you're more likely to just go straight back into dreaming when you fall asleep again. So if you wake up in the middle of the night, there are little things you can do kind of like with your hands. So if you have your hand on the mattress, you can kind of, if you start pressing your fingers very lightly into the mattress, and then after a while,

ask yourself if you're dreaming. You probably have fallen asleep and you're dreaming that you're still on the mattress and then you can get of them and do whatever you want. So there are so many different techniques. There's a whole Reddit, subreddit forum that's got hundreds of thousands of members and they're all sharing tips and congratulating each other when they finally done one. It's like the Holy Grail of being on this Reddit is actually being able to lose a dream. Great. Well, I know what I'm going to do tonight. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was creative writing lecturer, Dr. Alice Vermin.

If you'd like to know more about the fascinating science and history of sleep disorders, check out her book, Night Terrors, Troubled Sleep in the Stories We Tell About It. The current issue of BBC Science Vegas magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or visit sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship,

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