Bruno Mangyoku
IT WAS the wreckage of yet another TV that finally convinced one man to seek help. Psychologist Antonio Zadra remembers the patient well. “When we asked what brought him in, he said, ‘Well, that’s the third TV set that I threw at an intruder who isn’t there. It’s getting damn expensive.'”
Zadra, who studies sleepwalking at the University of Montreal, is interested in why anyone would do things like this in their sleep. And it turns out that the answer is important to all of us.
You might think that when you close your eyes and drift off, your body basically shuts down, and dreams then play out in your head. Due to the inhibition of muscle movement, or muscle atonia, that normally occurs during dreaming sleep, most of us don’t act out our dreams or have one-sided conversations. Just 1 per cent of people sleepwalk regularly. But