Despite being one of those people who drift off with annoying ease, Alice Vernon does not sleep soundly, she sleeps “strangely”. Ever since childhood, she’s been prone to “parasomnias” – sleep disturbances that include nightmares, sleepwalking and ghostly hallucinations. In a discourse fired by lively inquiry and vivid personal anecdote, she looks to art, literature and science to demonstrate the profound effect these eerie and surprisingly common nocturnal states have had on the human imagination. It’s a fascinating debut – just don’t read it at bedtime. Looking for Trouble

Now a lecturer in Creative Writing, Vernon set out to understand the history, science and culture of these strange and haunting experiences. NIGHT TERRORS, her startling and vivid debut, examines the history of our relationship with bad dreams: how we’ve tried to make sense of and treat them, from some decidedly odd ‘cures’ like magical ‘mare-stones’, to research on how video games might help people rewrite their dreams. Along the way she explores the Salem Witch Trials and sleep paralysis, Victorian ghost stories, and soldiers’ experiences of PTSD. By directly confronting her own strange and frightening nights for the first time, Vernon encourages us to think about the way troubled sleep has impacted our imaginations. This week, we’re here with Alice Vernon, a woman long fascinated by what happens to our brains during sleep. Taking that interest one step further led Alice to begin research for her new book, Night Terrors, and that deep dive uncovered centuries worth of literature and analysis, some of it mind boggling. Night Terrors is an in-depth examination of the complicated relationship that we have with our sleep, how we try to understand it, and even try to "cure" it of some of its unwanted traits. A thread running through the book is the story of Vernon’s claustrophobic and manipulative relationship with a former teacher, whom she calls Meredith after mara, “an Old Norse word for a witch who would lie on people’s chests and try to suffocate them”. The mara is what we now know to be sleep paralysis, a parasomnia where the body’s inability to move – preventing us from acting out our dreams and hurting ourselves or the people we sleep with – continues after waking up. The person is lying down, fully awake and conscious, and yet entirely unable to move. Even screaming is impossible.The reader’s journey starts with the very first parasomnia that Vernon experienced as a child: sleepwalking. We then move on to hypnopompic hallucinations – primarily visual hallucinations that manifest moments after waking up; think spiders scuttling on your pillow. Later on, we explore sleep paralysis, night terrors and, finally, dreams and nightmares. Senior commissioning editor Kiera Jamison bought world English rights for both books from Donald Winchester. Icon will publish both titles in autumn 2022. Now a lecturer in Creative Writing, Vernon set out to understand the history, science and culture of these strange and haunting experiences. Night Terrors, her startling and vivid debut, examines the history of our relationship with bad dreams: how we've tried to make sense of and treat them, from some decidedly odd 'cures' like magical 'mare-stones', to research on how video games might help people rewrite their dreams. Along the way she explores the Salem Witch Trials and sleep paralysis, Victorian ghost stories, and soldiers' experiences of PTSD. By directly confronting her own strange and frightening nights for the first time, Vernon encourages us to think about the way troubled sleep has impacted our imaginations.

All in all, I think this book did exactly what it sought out to do - offer the reassurance that we are not alone. If you're interested in the darkers parts of our sleep, I would highly recommend this book. At the moment, lucid dreaming can be used to help with nightmares associated with PTSD in that the phenomena can essentially “rewrite” the course of recurring, traumatic dreams. If other mental illnesses such as depression or OCD cause nightmares (and indeed, sometimes the medication for these conditions can affect a person’s dreams) then learning to lucid dream could help any symptoms manifesting through sleep. Where do you see the study of parasomnias going in the near future? This was exactly the type of book I wish I had access to when I first started getting sleep paralysis. Night Terrors is Alice Vernon's attempt in demystifying and normalising the terrors around sleep, analysing how they've been interpreted and misinterpreted throughout history, while encouraging us to tell our own stories. Vernon's own testimony and experience with parasomnias is sprinkled throughout the book, and I want to applaud her bravery for being so open about such a vulnerable topic. We are mysterious creatures, to others and ourselves. How to explain the creative brainstorms, harebrained schemes, and shudder-causing evil thoughts that suddenly appear in our normally quite sane brains? Why did evolution provide us with consciousness? And, pray tell, WTF are dreams?Alice Vernon has been plagued by "parasomnias" ever since she was a child. These can vary from nightmares, sleepwalking, hallucinations, sleep paralysis and even lucid dreaming - just to name a few. They're more common than you think and will affect around 70% of us at some point during our lives. In this landscape, Alice Vernon’s new book Night Terrors: Troubled Sleep and the Stories We Tell About It offers a breath of fresh air. Vernon highlights the need to widen our conversations around sleep beyond the anxious focus on maximising the number of hours we spend doing it. 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).