Rapid Eye Movement Sleep

Psychologist say during sleep, there are two main groupings: Non-Rapid Eye Movement Sleep (non-REM) and Rapid Eye Movement Sleep (REM). Typically, three to five periods of REM sleep occur per night that happen between time intervals of one to two hours (Wolf-Meyer, 2012). REM sleep is important because of its restorative aspect in sleep cycles. A disturbance in this will put a person’s normal circadian sleep cycle or known as our “inner clock” out of place. To compensate for this, lengthy periods of REM sleep is needed because if it were to continue, lack of concentration would follow. Sleep cycle is related to sleepwalking because it is likely to occur during the deepest stages of sleep, stages three and four, when brainwaves are very slow
Cases have been documented to reveal common qualities in this phenomenon (G. Plazzi, R. Vetrugno, F. Provini, P. Montagna, pg. 197). One being that the sleepwalking violence occurs mostly in 27 to 48-year-old men who have had a history of unusual sleeping behavior, especially sleepwalking as a child that happens during the period when an abnormality may occur while transitioning from non-REM to REM sleep (Asis, 2015). A tragic case involving violent sleepwalking behavior was in the 1870s was 27-year-old Simon Fraser. He suffered from raging episodes from his nightmares since he a teenager. Fraser went to extremes of beating his father, attempting to strangle his sister, all while asleep. The most chilling of all acts was the death of his baby son. Fraser smashed the baby’s head against a wall, and when questioned by the police upon waking up he claimed he was defending his son against a savage animal (Asis, 2015). This temporarily impaired consciousness resulted in him being judged innocent for the murder since it was a crime committed involuntarily. Even today, sleepwalking related to the law is not a hundred percent solid. “As the science of sleep continues to unravel the complex biological and social forces that make up daily sleep and wakefulness, it is difficult to explain based strictly on it being a biological origin” (Wolf-Meyer, 2012). Sleepwalking violence has not been connected with any specific psychopathology (Cartwright, Ph.D., pg. 1152) There is not a true explanation as to why these murders occur, but it is known that sleepwalkers suffer from stress, sleep deprivation, and depression, “but no medical proof can correlate negative emotions resulting in homicidal sleepwalking” (Montaldo,