Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Looking for people sleepwalking

I am looking to get in touch with people sleepwalking or affected by some parasomnia.

Most sleepwalker either don't know they sleepwalk or only have a vague understand of the extend of their sleepwalking. Which was my case until I started this longitudinal study of myself, in correlation with many contributing/mitigating factors.
With that study I got to understand a lot more of my sleep walking: how do I do it, what does it look like, what are the different levels of intensity/complexity of my sleepwalking and of course what affects it (or does not).
During this process I worked with many approaches on how to handle those data and how to extract meaningful information about it (scroll through the many sections of that blog to explore those data).

So now I would like to discuss this approach to other people sleepwalking. As I am sure every sleepwalker has it's own "style" of doing it. And maybe different factor contributing (or not) to it.

This is a different approach as the classic sleep clinic one where patients are interviewed about what triggers the sleepwalking (as a one time subjective correlation, not as a meticulously collected correlation from which subjectivity has been removed) and spend one or 2 nights in a sleep clinic (unfamiliar sleep environment likely to trigger a different behavior than normal).
The approach I focused on is based on thorough data collection  of both sleepwalking events at home and of daytime actions potentially affecting sleepwalking. The goal is to do it over a period of time long enough to get statistically relevant data, and thus being able to draw conclusive opinions.

If you are interested please contact me (howismysleep (at) gmail (dot) com) and I will be happy to further discuss the idea.

If you have some doubts go see a sleep specialist and ask him/her the following questions:
* Why do we sleepwalk?
* What triggers it? What are the study to support that?
* What drugs are effective? What are the study to support that?
You will be surprised that those questions are pretty much unanswered. Because there is no good data on why sleepwalking happens.

4 comments:

  1. I know this is a longshot. But do you speak Spanish? I know a Spanish-speaking sleepwalker.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Kublakhan,

    Unfortunately I don't speak spanish. But I am fluent in French if that could be a bridge.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Are you still monitoring this blog? I suffer from parasomnia and do many different things in my sleep, usually with no memory.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Parasmoniac,

      Yes I am still very much interested to connect with other sleepwalkers (or parasomniacs in general).
      Please send me a message at howismysleep@gmail.com and I will be more than happy to further discuss.

      Delete