RT @HarperPerennial: HAPPY PUB DAY to this RIPPED-FROM-THE-HEADLINES thriller novel by @AlexMarwood1 that you won’t want to miss! La Kas… https://t.co/BmPs6vgEb0 This is a paradoxical and terrifying situation. In response, the brain can conjure up images of sinister figures looming over the sleeper and weighing them down, to explain the sensation of being pinned to the bed and the feeling of pressure on one’s chest and limbs. While Meredith’s oppressive hold on teenage Vernon is linked to a number of Vernon’s experiences of parasomnias, it is most clearly reflected in the sleep paralysis “demons” that populate her nights later on in her life. Vernon describes how, during sleep paralysis, she feels “crushed under the intense stare of Meredith, under her hands and her sharp nails”. Sleep paralysis, nightmares and dreams

She weaves her own accounts, historical accounts, and scientific research together beautifully into an incredibly descriptive and informative book that really drew me in and made me think about my own weird sleep. Alice Vernon’s “Night Terrors: Troubled Sleep and the Stories We Tell About It” is published by Icon. A fascinating look at the different form s of parasomnia and the ways they have been recorded and interpreted in history. I particularly found the parts about dreams in remote tribes and the affect of the emergence of colour TV on dreams interesting.Ever since she was a child, her nights have been haunted by nightmares of a figure from her adolescence, sinister hallucinations and episodes of sleepwalking. These are known as ‘parasomnias’– and they’re surprisingly common.

The two things most of us know about nightmares, according to this fascinating book, are not true. First, they are not caused by indigestion. This pervasive folk belief, Alice Vernon says, was popularised by Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, who blamed his ghostly apparitions on “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato”. Apart from interesting discussions about various parasomnias, Alice has a variety of annecdotes that range from hilarious, creepy, and even some that actually made me cry. Alice Vernon often wakes up to find strangers in her bedroom. Ever since she was a child, her nights have been haunted by nightmares of a figure from her adolescence, sinister hallucinations and episodes of sleepwalking. These are known as ‘parasomnias’– and they’re surprisingly common. 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. Night Terrors aims to shine a light on the darkest parts of our sleeping lives, and to reassure sufferers from bad dreams that they are not alone. Night Terrors: Troubled Sleep and the Stories We Tell About It by Alice Vernon – eBook Details I think there has definitely been a revival recently in terms of including parasomnias in psychological horror films. Last Night in Soho (2021) was quite notable in its depiction of nightmares and sleep paralysis (and triggered a particularly bad night for me!). Equally, though, I do see people dealing with their experiences through memes and internet humour—reacting to a picture of a haunted-looking Furby and saying that it’s their sleep paralysis demon, for example. Lucid dreaming and its therapeutic and creative possibilities seems to claim the biggest cultural interest at the moment, though. You draw up analysis and inferences from a multiplicity of sources: visual arts, literature, even newspapers and individual anecdotes. How did you go about collecting all of these into a cohesive whole?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). 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. 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.