Insomnia, apnoea, parasomnias and when to seek help.
Nightmares & Disorders
Chronic nightmare disorder affects several per cent of adults, wrecks sleep, and is rarely asked about. The best-supported treatment takes about four sessions and involves changing the story while awake.
Nightmares & Disorders
The airway collapses, oxygen falls, the brain briefly wakes to reopen it, and the whole sequence repeats until morning. The sleeper usually remembers none of it and wonders why they are so tired.
Nightmares & Disorders
The mechanism is simple and well understood. The experience is one of the most frightening things a healthy person can undergo, and it has generated remarkably consistent folklore across the world.
Nightmares & Disorders
Parts of the brain wake up and others stay asleep. The result is a person who can walk, cook, drive and hold a conversation while being, in every meaningful sense, unconscious.
Nightmares & Disorders
It affects perhaps one in twenty adults, it is frequently dismissed as a habit, it has a well-established link to iron in the brain, and the standard treatment can make it dramatically worse over time.
Nightmares & Disorders
It is caused by the loss of about 20,000 neurons that produce a single neurotransmitter, it is probably autoimmune, and its most distinctive symptom is routinely mistaken for something psychiatric.
Nightmares & Disorders
A loud crash with no external source as you fall asleep. A violent whole-body twitch that jolts you awake. Both are common, both are benign, and both frighten people who have never heard of them.
Nightmares & Disorders
Ordinary distressing memories lose their charge over successive nights. In post-traumatic stress disorder they do not, and the failure appears to happen during REM sleep itself.
Nightmares & Disorders
Twenty-odd sensors, a night in an unfamiliar bed, and a technician watching. Home testing has replaced it for many cases — but not for the ones where it matters most.
Nightmares & Disorders
Somniloquy is harmless and reveals nothing. Bruxism can destroy your teeth and is frequently a sign of something else. The two get grouped together and should not be.
Nightmares & Disorders
The single most useful thing to establish is what time it happened, because that distinguishes two entirely different phenomena requiring opposite responses.
