The BBC reports on rising awareness and interest in a sleep disorder whereby folks go out and have sex while sleeping, often leaving the house or bringing folks home. A couple cases are on record where a spouse has discovered the sleep walker in mid coitus with no awareness as to what was really going on. Some women have done this for a number of years with rather disastrous impact upon their lives.
I have been asked about this phenomena in reference to hypnosis and while the technical term for sleep walking is somnambulism which is the name given to a depth of trance, the two are not so directly related. Sure, folks who sleep walk do tend to be more suggestible on many of the standard scales and, yes, sleepwalking and hypnosis are often inter-related in popular films or novels (the wonderful Japanese film, Hypnosis, has some facets of this particular disorder matched to hypnotic phenomena.
However, they are not completely related.
Interesting, and certainly programmable with some folks . . . the spontaneous amenesia and the nature of the sleep state with this disorder is closer to trance than actual sleep . . . however, they’re not really the quite the same monkey.
Interesting that one of the problems associated with this disorder is that a person’s partner may awaken from sleep to discover their partner sexually engaged with them, sometimes to the point of being sexually attacked by a sleeping person. There is even a case of rape where the rapist pretended to be sleep walking in order to confuse his victim into thinking he was not responsible (the gambit did not work).
