Sleep problems I had been known to sleepwalk as a child, often getting up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, but not knowing I had done so. I had a habit of leaving the bathroom light on, which is what should have given it away, after weeks of my parents scolding my sister and me for failing to turn it off. The thing is, we always did turn it off, or so we thought.
It was my sister, actually, who discovered the problem, to her astonishment, when she got up to use the bathroom herself, and found me in front of the bathroom basin washing my hands. She said she’d waited for me to finish, and when I did, I walked right past her with a blank stare on my face. She’d asked me if I was OK; I’d said nothing and gone back to bed. When she mentioned it that morning, I had no recollection of the event, and I flatly denied that it had happened.
Days later, my sister encountered exactly the same situation, which I again refused to believe, although with a bit less determination. I was beginning to sense there was a problem. I began to question my own memory as well.
It was of great concern to my parents, who assumed that something awful would happen to me during one of the episodes. What if I went for a walk round the block, in my pyjamas? They told my sister to lock our bedroom door at night, and then to hide the key, after I actually found it and used it on one occasion. We considered consulting a sleep therapist; however, the locked door seemed to do the trick, and the episodes stopped.
Flash forward to my life as a young adult. I was living alone and I began to notice some peculiar things around my flat, worse than just a left-on bathroom light, although not dangerously so. I would go to get something which I was sure was in the fridge, only to find it missing. I would see dirty saucepans on the cooker, something which as a self-professed cleaning freak I would never leave for the next day. I realised that I’d re-started my childhood habit. I had heard stories of people driving while asleep, so I started hiding my car keys from myself in different places every night, in the hope that I wouldn’t remember where I had put them. I sometimes didn’t when I was awake!
I decided that before things got out of hand, I would visit a sleep clinic. I set up an appointment and met a professional who suggested I stayed in their clinic overnight. The facilities were very comfortable and the staff helpful and pleasant. Most of the patients were there for minor sleeping problems, which was the category I felt I fell into, as opposed to the few with more disturbing sleep issues, such as not sleeping for days, or falling asleep randomly and without control. I was asked whether or not I wanted to take medication, which I was advised wouldn’t - and couldn’t - be a permanent routine. I decided against it, preferring to try other methods.
You see, there are no defining triggers to sleepwalking. In other words, it’s hard to hit the nail on the head when it comes to finding the cause and prescribing remedies. Instead, the therapist helped me to try and work out what might be disrupting my sleep; if it was stress, not sleeping to a schedule, doing too many things before bedtime, and so on. I had to see which of those things might be my trigger, and change it so that I’d stop my sleepwalking for good. |