Demons Or Nightmares? A History of Night Terrors: Alice Vernon (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Alice Vernon’s talk titled “Demons Or Nightmares? A History of Night Terrors” at TEDxAberystwyth conference.

In this TEDx talk, Alice Vernon delves into the complexities and historical interpretations of sleep disorders, particularly parasomnias like sleep paralysis and hallucinations. She shares her personal experiences with troubled sleep since childhood, including vivid dreams and sleepwalking. Vernon discusses the historical fear and superstitions around sleep paralysis, once believed to be caused by supernatural forces like witches.

She highlights the societal shift from supernatural to scientific explanations for these sleep disturbances, especially as our understanding of brain activity and rapid eye movement has evolved. The talk also touches on how sleep disorders were perceived during different historical periods, including the 19th century’s fascination with ghosts and paranormal activities.

Vernon mentions modern approaches to treating sleep disorders, such as image rehearsal therapy, which uses creative thinking to transform traumatic nightmares into positive experiences. Finally, she emphasizes the importance of discussing and normalizing sleep disorders to reduce stigma and improve public understanding.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Mysteries of Sleep

Last night, I slept strangely, and I bet some of you did too. When we’re asked about the quality of our sleep, we usually respond by saying what time we went to bed, whether we were woken up by the sound of someone snoring, or how many hours, I see people being nudged here, and how many hours we managed to stay in the land of Nod.

But there is far more to sleep than this, and while we don’t talk about it enough, we certainly attempted to represent it in stories. Ever since I was little, I’ve had troubled sleep. I suffer with a group of sleep disorders known as parasomnias, which include involuntary movement or hallucinations.

As a child, I would wander around the house at night, hiding my teddies from myself, shredding books I had borrowed from my sisters, or putting the fear of God into my parents by standing silently in their bedroom. As I got older, my sleep disorders changed with me. I didn’t sleepwalk as often, but I started to have incredibly vivid dreams.

Dream Intrusions and Hallucinations

And they were so vivid, in fact, that I started to lucid dream, to realize that I was dreaming while I was dreaming. And then the imagery from those dreams started to bleed out into the bedroom in the form of sleep-related hallucinations.

Waking up from sleep in the middle of the night, I would leap out of bed, brushing imaginary spiders off myself. Or worse still, I started to suffer from sleep paralysis, the sensation of a crushing weight on my chest, accompanied by the hallucination of a sinister figure in my bedroom, or the sensation of ghostly hands around my neck, wrists, and ankles.

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I’m not the only one whose sleep is disturbed by phantoms and delusions, although for a long time, I thought I was. But data suggests that around 70% of us will experience at least one of these parasomnias in our lifetime, so if you’ve not had one already, chances are it’s coming.

But the social and cultural history of these sleep disorders has been one of confusion and misunderstanding of ghosts and goblins and witches. We tell stories about parasomnias in ways we don’t tend to do for things like insomnia, because for a long time, it was the only way we could make sense of what was happening to us at night.

Sleep Paralysis and Cultural Interpretations

But stories are powerful, and a few centuries ago, our interpretation of a specific sleep disorder had disastrous consequences. Sleep paralysis, more so than any other parasomnia, has had a strong attachment to the supernatural. Its name was actually “the nightmare.” These days, we use the term nightmare just to mean a bad dream, but historically, the “mare” half of the term referred to a possessed horse. This is what people believed, a possessed horse under the control of a witch’s spell who would appear in people’s bedrooms at night and trample their chests.

And people were so afraid of this that they used to hang talismans in stables to stop their horses from being possessed by a witch, or they would wear necklaces of coral to protect themselves. These ideas are rooted in folklore and superstition, but there’s no doubt that they had a much greater effect in the 1690s during the most infamous witch trials in history that took place in Salem, Massachusetts.

Bridget Bishop was the first to be executed for witchcraft, and in the court records, she’s accused by Richard Coman of appearing in his bedroom at night, paralyzing him with a spell, and then seizing him by the throat on consecutive nights, such was his fear, or alleged fear, of Bishop that he took to sleeping with his sword in his bed. Don’t try that at home.

Evolving Understanding of Sleep Disorders

But as belief in witchcraft dwindled and science and rationality prevailed, we started to come up with more natural causes for this dreadful bedroom visitor. Really, from the 17th century until we started to learn about brainwaves and rapid eye movement, it was believed that sleep paralysis was caused by eating, by eating too much, by eating bad food, by eating heavily before bed, hence the old advice of not eating cheese before you go to sleep.

Not that that stopped 18th century writer Ann Radcliffe who, and she’s a Gothic writer for lots of spooky stories, as legend has it, she used to eat raw meat before going to bed in order to make herself ill, induce the nightmare, and inspire her next book. Again, don’t try that at home.

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As we moved into the 19th century, sleep and dreams moved away from the realm of witches and into that of ghosts.

The sudden boom in popularity for paranormal investigations, seances, and celebrity mediums, many of whom were exposed as fraud, it won’t surprise you to know, brought the specters of the dead firmly into the cultural imagination of the dead.

And these paranormal investigations were everywhere, in the town theater, in newspapers, in novels, in your neighbor’s front room when they were having a party. And so it’s not surprising that it had a huge influence on the minds of the sleeping public.

The Society for Psychical Research

Enter the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, who between 1889 and 1894 conducted the widespread census of hallucinations. They sought to collect anecdotes from the Victorian public about experiences that may or may not have been a hallucination and may or may not have been a ghost. “I have seen faces in the dark,” writes one man. A woman describes the hallucination of a figure crawling on all fours towards her bed before scuttling under it. Some of them are absolutely terrifying, don’t read them at night.

But what’s interesting is that many of them do happen at night when the person has woken up and believes that they are fully awake and therefore believes that they have really seen a ghost. It’s far more likely that they were experiencing a hypnopompic hallucination, which is a dreamlike image the brain conjures up when we’re just coming out of sleep and we think we’re awake, but we’re actually still dreaming. And the term “hypnopompic hallucination” was actually coined by Frederic Myers, one of the founding members of the Society for Psychical Research.

Modern Perceptions of Sleep Anomalies

Nowadays, our sleep monsters are the stuff of the horror movies we consume. And we can also interpret alien abduction anecdotes to sleep paralysis. The physical feelings are exactly the same as they were during the Salem witch trials, but now our cultural iconography is that of little green men and UFOs rather than a witch on a broomstick. And this leads me to the heart of the matter.

Over the centuries, the way we have written and told stories about sleep and dreams has been one of misinterpretation, sometimes dangerously so. People really believed that they were possessed by a witch, that they had been abducted by aliens, seen a ghost, or they believed they were going mad because of the stigma that we attached to hallucinatory experiences. And this stops people from talking openly about their sleep disorders, which stops them from being researched, which stops them from being widely discussed and properly understood by the general public. We’re only just beginning to realize how crucial storytelling can be for our sleep.

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Image Rehearsal Therapy: A New Approach

A number of teams of psychologists and sleep researchers are developing something called image rehearsal therapy, which seeks to use creative thinking to provide relief for people suffering with recurring traumatic nightmares. For participants, the process goes like this: Say they are having traumatic recurring nightmares about the time they fell off their motorbike and seriously injured themselves on the hard road.

Image rehearsal therapy asks them to write the nightmare down, but to change the ending, to change the story of the dream and turn it into a positive one, while also learning techniques to induce lucid dreaming, such as learning how to recall their dreams better and using self-awareness techniques.

Then, when they have the nightmare again, they realize they’re dreaming, they lucid dream, and they can bring in this new positive ending that they’ve created. They’re on their motorbike and they fall off it, yes, but the road is now made of lovely soft marshmallow, and they wake up calm, happy, possibly slightly hungry.

Various trials have been done on image rehearsal therapy and it’s been found that even when participants didn’t quite manage to learn to lucid dream, because it can be quite a tricky thing, even when they didn’t quite manage to lucid dream, the process of writing down their nightmares and changing the ending and giving it a positive ending actually led to reduced anxiety about going to bed in the first place.

The truth is many of us will experience something strange in our sleep, but many of us probably will never tell a soul. We need to realize just how normal it is to have a lucid dream, to experience sleep paralysis or imaginary spiders, and we can do that by talking about parasomnias as openly as we do snoring or insomnia. By telling stories about our troubled sleep, we can shine a light on the darkest parts of our sleeping lives. Thank you.