Tea Elle

longreads:

People who suffer from parasomnias, or sleeping disorders, often sleepwalk and experience night terrors, putting them in potentially dangerous situations:

My research tells me that most people who suffer from night terrors describe episodes that sound familiar: They feel suffocated, they are about to die, there is someone in the room with them. That doesn’t, of course, make my individual night terrors any less scary, and it crosses my mind that I could actually scare myself to death.

The prevailing theory about Tobias Wong’s death was that he hanged himself while experiencing a night terror. I imagine that something in his mind told him that hanging himself was the only way to escape whoever, or whatever, was chasing him, in the same way that I have thought that the only way to save myself was to jump out of a window or smash a pane of glass.

I realize that I want to talk to Dubitsky, both to find out what it was like for him and also to see how closely my experiences dovetail with his. If unintended suicide is the logical extreme of a sleep disorder, am I in imminent danger?

“Can You Die From a Nightmare?” — Doree Shafrir, BuzzFeed

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