Night Terrors: Troubled Sleep and the Stories We Tell About It

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As someone who dreams every time I shut my eyes, this was incredibly enlightening, resonated, and is a must read for dreamers. Its approach is multidisciplinary, featuring both scientific explanations for the phenomena and brief examinations of how they have been perceived throughout history.

A fascinating look at the different form s of parasomnia and the ways they have been recorded and interpreted in history. I just heard Dr Alice (the author) on Radio Wales and her voice was far superior for doing this type of content. After Ralph’s mother kills herself in the basement, his wife Abby stays up all night scrubbing away the blood, little knowing that a far more onerous task awaits: exorcising Laura’s ghost.

We also use them to help detect unauthorized access or activity that violate our terms of service, as well as to analyze site traffic and performance for our own site improvement efforts. Now a lecturer in Creative Writing, Vernon set out to understand the history, science and culture of these strange and haunting experiences.

She liked to say that her only qualification was curiosity, but as this timely reissue of her bestselling 1941 memoir proves, she also had courage, tenacity and a flair for observation. Along the way she explores the Salem Witch Trials and sleep paralysis, Victorian ghost stories, and soldiers' experiences of PTSD. The style is eclectic, ranging from science journalism, to literary analysis of victorian novels, back to autobiographical writing. Dr Alice Vernon is Lecturer in Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University, where she teaches students the fundamentals of storytelling.We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

The book has left me feeling I need more answers about the workings of the human brain, which is a positive outcome. It considers case studies, surveys, works of literature, paintings, and movies, with the knowledge that parasomnias tell stories about the people who experience them and about the sociocultural contexts they exist in. Dr Alice Vernon completed her PhD, investigating representations of insomnia in fiction, in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University under the supervision of Dr Jacqueline Yallop.All in all, I think this book did exactly what it sought out to do - offer the reassurance that we are not alone. 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. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive View image in fullscreen Looking for Trouble author Virginia Cowles (second left) and fellow war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (second right) with members of the cast of their play, Love Goes to Press, in 1946.

And in the course of such eerie stories, Vernon proves to be an empathetic guide, too, using humor and quips to bring the horrors to a welcome halt. In the course of the book, Vernon draws on her own long history of troubled sleep, as well as upon cultural and scientific resources, to show what such events say about people, time periods, and humanity as a whole. As someone who lives with a family of parasomniacs it was very informative to understand what's going on. 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.

I think it shows how essential it is for us teachers to remember how we teach is just as important as what we teach and how huge is the impact we can make to a person's life. Such stories have their own practical uses, too, as with healing trauma and improving waking-hour skills in sports and video games. Fascinating and entertaining, I feel like this book nails unpicking the complexity of humans' relationship with sleep in a way that feels relevant and easy to read. It is curious, lively, humble, utterly genuine – and, if you're a sufferer too, wonderfully reassuring. A welcome addition to the vast library it cites and celebrates, Vernon's work is a compelling guide to the uncanny grammar of our dread and desire.