I’d sit on the bed and take them with a cup of tea, and that would be the last thing I would remember – I’d wake up in the morning fully clothed.”The traditional method of treating sleepwalking is by psychotherapy and low-dose benzodiazapines, which are tranquillisers, or the anti-depressant drug impramine. They didn’t help at all and just made me extremely over-tired. I eventually became so tired that I started falling asleep at work, so I went back to the doctor and asked if there was anything more he could do He gave me some new sleeping tablets. Joe, who was consistently sleepwalking until the age of 30, visited his GP with some regularity but there was little he could do.”The doctor always prescribed me tranquillisers. “I had a case of a young man who shared a tent with a friend in some woods.

During the night he thought he was being attacked by a bear and tried to strangle it to defend himself. Unfortunately, the ‘bear’ was, in fact, his poor friend.”The person’s ability to act on his fears in this way separates night terrors from nightmares: during nightmares muscle paralysis will prevent the person from moving, but during night terrors paralysis will be absent.”Despite the potential danger in sleepwalking, little help is available to sufferers. In 1994, a 29-year-old prison officer from Newcastle-upon-Tyne claimed to be sleepwalking when he forced his way into a young woman’s house before dragging her into a bedroom. He did not rape her but uttered his wife’s name, got up and went home. He was charged with burglary with intent to commit rape and assault, but his plea of not guilty on the grounds of temporary insanity was accepted when the judge heard from experts that sleepwalkers cannot control their actions.Not all offending sleepwalkers walk free from court since judges also have the option of confining them to a psychiatric ward. Nor is a defence of sleepwalking always conceivable: in a rape case it would not be accepted because, while a sleepwalking man can do all manner of complex things such as drive a car, ride a horse or kill his mother-in-law, he is unable to have an erection.The reason that aggression is directed at others by sleepwalkers is due to another element, says David Nutt, Professor of Pharmacology at Bristol Royal Infirmary – the “night terror”, which tends to go hand in hand with sleepwalking.”Night terror causes the person to feel assaulted and therefore they might lash out at others,” says Professor Nutt. Thank God, something had jolted me out of my sleep – I could have killed him.”There have been many recorded instances of sleepwalkers attacking others, some of which have led to criminal charges.

“I’ve punched my girlfriend and left a big bruise on her arm, and I even threatened to cut off her head,” he admits.”I didn’t like to go away on trips for fear of what I might get up to, but on one occasion when I did go away with a friend, we went to sleep in the same room and I awoke to find myself holding an ashtray poised ready to hit this guy over the head. Luckily, my body was so relaxed I didn’t break any bones, and I just picked myself up and rang the door bell. But I did have a big gash in my leg and I had to go hospital.”Chance is often the saviour of the sleepwalker – not least in the case of the 34-year-old man from Torquay who awoke to find himself clinging to a cliff edge, 40ft above the sea. As luck would have it, it was a calm night and his cries for help were heard by a neighbouring household. Some are not so fortunate, however, such as the 13-year-old boy on a skiing holiday in Switzerland who plunged to his death after climbing out of a hotel window.The dangers of sleepwalking, however, are not confined to the walker, as Rob, an habitual sleepwalker, well knows. Joe has been sleepwalking for as long as he has known how to walk and even he chuckles slightly as he recounts the tales of his night wanderings. But his affliction has been the cause for some pretty close calls.
“My parents tell me that I used to get out of my cot while in a sleepwalking state and that, as a little boy, I had to sleep with them so that they could grab me when I started to wander off.”I used to sleepwalk two or three times a night It’s caused me some fairly major problems I fell out of a second-storey window on to a patio.