Night Terrors: The Dark Side of Dreams, Part One | Grave Talks CLASSIC

Carol Hughes (0:01)

Today on The Grave Talks, Night Terrors, The Dark Side of Dreams, a conversation with author Alice Vernon.

What happens when sleep, the place meant to restore us, becomes the source of our deepest fear? For much of her life, Alice Vernon has awakened with the unsettling sense that she wasn't alone. Experiences shaped by vivid nightmares, hallucinations, sleepwalking, and other parasomnias that blur the boundary between dreaming and waking. In her book, Night Terrors, Alice shares how these nighttime disturbances began in childhood and followed her into adulthood, influencing both her imagination and her work as a writer. We discussed the science behind troubled sleep and why parasomnias are more common than many realize. Night Terrors isn't just about bad dreams. It's about the stories we tell ourselves to survive them. And for anyone who has ever woken in the dark, heart racing, convinced something was watching them, this conversation offers reassurance that you are not alone, and that maybe the night has always held more power over us than we like to admit. Today on The Grave Talks, Night Terrors, a conversation with author Alice Vernon.

So Alice, thank you for coming back on The Grave Talks. You were on a while back and we talked about your book Ghosted. And it's kind of the history. It goes back into, I would say, the 1800s in the Victorian times. It was a great conversation. I would highly recommend people go back and listen to that episode. I found out when I was reading your book that you had written another book, Night Terrors, Troubled Sleep and the Stories We Tell About It. And I'm like, would you come back and talk about that book? Here we are today. Thank you very much for returning.

Alice Vernon (2:12)

Oh, thank you so much for asking me back, Carol.

Carol Hughes (2:15)

There's something about sleeping and paranormal that tend to kind of go hand in hand. And so I like to talk about sleep paralysis and paranormal, because sometimes it feels like it is paranormal, and what exactly is sleep paralysis.

So with you, you have had sleep issues pretty much your entire life, haven't you?

Alice Vernon (2:38)

Yes. It's been joyful.

Every incident has been delightful. Yes.

Carol Hughes (2:44)

She says with sarcasm in her voice, it's delightful to have sleep issues.

Alice Vernon (2:51)

I mean, yeah, when I published Night Terrors, there were so many people who got in touch and or had a conversation with me on a podcast or something like that. And they were like, I don't understand how you can talk about this and laugh about it. It's like, well, if I don't laugh about it, then it would just be a very dark part of my life, which it is anyway. But you know, you have to find the humor in it somewhere. But yeah, so I used to sleepwalk when I was very little. And I don't sleepwalk so much now. I do still do it sometimes, but now I have more kind of hallucinatory sleep disorders. So I'll wake up in the middle of the night and I'll have sleep paralysis, which I'm sure we'll talk about, and hallucinations. I also have lucid dreams occasionally as well. So it's just a huge part of my life, which I thought for a long time that I was the only one who had all these things.

Yeah. And I thought I was like insane and I didn't tell anybody. And so then I did my PhD and obviously sleep was on my mind. But I did my PhD on insomnia in literature. And as I was reading books about just sleep in general, I was like, oh, I have that. I have this thing. So yeah, it just opened up kind of, it answered a lot of questions, I think. And so from that PhD, I then turned some of that research into what formed Night Terrors.

Carol Hughes (4:13)

Because that is what the book is about. It's kind of a dive into these different sleep issues. And there is an overarching term for that, parasomnias or something like that.

Alice Vernon (4:25)

Parasomnias. Okay, yeah. So that relates to any sleep disorder that involves involuntary movement and hallucination. So it's not insomnia, or any kind of like sleep apnea or anything like that. Or snoring is the... Sorry, I just rattle off these weird sleep terms and yeah. So sleep apnea is essentially the posh word for snoring.

So it's not anything to do with that. Parasomnias include sleep paralysis, hallucinations, lucid dreaming, night terrors, nightmares, anything that is kind of frightful to experience, that has this involuntary movement, or a kind of hallucinatory state.