Michelle: A quarter of all drivers admit to falling asleep at the wheel. Mark: Whoa, hold on. A quarter? That can't be right. Michelle: It is. That's not a rare, freak accident; it's a routine danger happening on your commute every single day. And it’s just one symptom of a silent epidemic that started with a single, brilliant invention: the light bulb. We are, quite literally, at war with our own biology. Mark: A war started by a light bulb. That sounds dramatic, but when you put it like that, it also sounds terrifyingly true. My phone screen is basically a tiny sun I stare at before bed. Michelle: Exactly. And this is the world we're diving into today, through the lens of Night School: Wake up to the power of sleep by Richard Wiseman. Mark: And Wiseman is the perfect guide for this, isn't he? He's a psychologist, but he started as a professional magician. He's an expert in illusion and perception. Michelle: He is. And what's fascinating is that his journey into sleep science wasn't just academic. It started because he was personally experiencing terrifying night terrors—he described seeing the devil in his bedroom—which led him to a sleep expert and down this incredible rabbit hole. This book is the result of that very personal quest. Mark: Okay, so this isn't just a scientist in a lab coat. This is someone who has been to the dark side of the night and came back with a map. I'm in. Where do we start?

Michelle: We start with the man who fired the first shot in this war on sleep: Thomas Alva Edison. Before him, the night belonged to darkness and, by extension, to sleep. But Edison saw sleep as an enemy. He famously said, "We are always hearing people talk about ‘loss of sleep’ as a calamity. They better call it loss of time, vitality, and opportunities." Mark: That is the ultimate "hustle culture" quote. Sleep is for the weak, right? I feel like I see a version of that on social media every day. Michelle: Precisely. Edison wanted to conquer the night, and with the light bulb, he did. Suddenly, we could work, socialize, and live 24/7. The average American in 1960 got eight to nine hours of sleep. By 2000, that had fallen to just seven. We've been losing sleep ever since, and the consequences are staggering. Mark: So what happens when you push it to the absolute limit? What happens when you try to win the war against sleep completely? Michelle: You get the story of Peter Tripp. In 1959, Tripp was a popular New York disc jockey who decided, for a publicity stunt, to stay awake for eight straight days in a glass booth in Times Square. Mark: Oh, I can already tell this does not end well. Michelle: For the first couple of days, he was just irritable and rude. But then, things got strange. By day three, he started having hallucinations. He saw cobwebs in his shoes. He thought a doctor who came to check on him was an undertaker who had come to bury him, and he fled in terror. Mark: He saw spiders in his shoes? In the middle of Times Square? Michelle: Not spiders, cobwebs. But it gets worse. He became convinced that the scientists monitoring him were part of a conspiracy to put him to sleep. He was living in a waking nightmare, his personality completely unraveling. He finished the eight days, slept for 24 hours straight, but his life was never the same. His wife said he became moody and depressed, his career fell apart, and he went through multiple divorces. He won the stunt, but he lost the war. Mark: That's a chilling story. It’s a personal catastrophe. But what about on a larger scale? Does this sleep deprivation epidemic cause more than just personal breakdowns? Michelle: It causes global catastrophes. Take the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989. One of the worst environmental disasters in modern history. An oil tanker hit a reef in Alaska, spilling hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil, devastating the coastline and wildlife. Mark: I remember that. What was the cause? Mechanical failure? Michelle: Human error. The official investigation concluded that sleep deprivation played a major role. The third mate, who was at the helm, had only slept six hours in the previous two days. He was trying to navigate around ice floes, made a critical error, and realized it too late. A moment of exhaustion, a micro-sleep perhaps, and the result was an ecological nightmare. Mark: Wow. So from a DJ in a glass box to an oil tanker on the rocks. It’s the same root cause. It's terrifying to think your mind can just break like that from a lack of sleep. But what about when your body goes rogue while your mind is still asleep? That's a whole other level of creepy.

Michelle: It is. And that brings us to the second part of our journey: the world of parasomnias. These are sleep disorders where the brain gets stuck in a bizarre middle ground, a third state that is neither fully awake nor fully asleep. And the things people do in this state are stranger than fiction. Mark: Okay, give me an example. I'm thinking of the classic, shuffling with your arms out like a zombie. Michelle: Forget the zombie shuffle. How about this: In 2005, a woman named Rebekah Armstrong woke up in the middle of the night to a strange noise. Her husband, Ian, wasn't in bed. She went downstairs, looked out into the garden, and there he was. Mark: Doing what? Michelle: Completely naked, mowing the lawn with an electric lawnmower. Sound asleep. He had almost finished the entire garden. She just unplugged the mower, went back to bed, and he eventually wandered back in, with no memory of his nocturnal gardening. Mark: Come on! Naked lawn mowing? In his sleep? How is that even possible? Michelle: The part of the brain responsible for rational thought and consciousness is offline, but the part that controls motor skills and learned behaviors can be wide awake. It's like the body is on autopilot, but the pilot has left the cockpit. And sometimes, that autopilot does truly dangerous things. Mark: I can't even imagine. What's the most extreme case in the book? Michelle: There's the story of a fifteen-year-old girl in London. A passer-by looked up at a construction site and saw something on the arm of a 130-foot crane. It was the girl, fast asleep on a concrete counterweight. She had sleepwalked out of her nearby home, climbed the crane, and walked along its narrow arm. Mark: A crane?! That gives me vertigo just thinking about it. How did they get her down? Michelle: A firefighter had to climb up, find her mobile phone in her pocket, call her parents, and have her mother talk her awake gently over the phone before they could bring her down in a hydraulic lift. She had a complete disregard for her own safety because, in that state, the concept of danger doesn't exist. Mark: That is absolutely mind-bending. It sounds like a movie, but can it get... even more serious? Can it be dangerous to others? Michelle: It can be tragic. And this leads to the most powerful and heartbreaking story in the book. In 2008, a retired couple, Brian and Christine Thomas, were on holiday in their camper van in Wales. One night, they were disturbed by some teenagers doing wheel-spins in the car park. Mark: A classic holiday annoyance. Michelle: Brian, who had a history of sleep disorders, eventually fell back asleep. But later that night, he dreamt one of the teenagers was breaking into the van. In his dream, he fought back. He grabbed the intruder and began to strangle him. Mark: Oh no. Michelle: He woke up to discover he wasn't strangling an intruder. He was strangling his wife, Christine. He had killed the woman he loved in his sleep. Mark: That's... I have no words. That's devastating. What happened to him? Michelle: He was charged with murder, but sleep experts, including the same one who helped the author with his night terrors, examined him. They found he was suffering from a severe sleep disorder. His actions were deemed to be completely unconscious, an 'automatism.' In a landmark legal case, he was found not guilty. It was a tragedy born from a brain caught between two worlds. Michelle: After exploring these profound dangers, the book's ultimate message is one of empowerment. Wiseman pivots to show us we don't have to be victims of our own minds. We can actually become the directors of our dreams.

Mark: I like the sound of that. After those stories, I think we need some empowerment. How do you even begin to direct a dream? It feels like trying to catch smoke. Michelle: For a long time, the scientific community thought so too. The idea of "lucid dreaming"—being aware that you're dreaming while you're in the dream—was considered nonsense. Until a researcher at Stanford named Stephen LaBerge decided to prove it was real in the late 1970s. Mark: How do you prove something like that? You can't exactly interview someone while they're asleep. Michelle: LaBerge came up with an ingenious solution. He knew that even when your body is paralyzed during REM sleep, your eyes can still move. So he devised a plan. He would go to sleep hooked up to an EEG machine. Once he became lucid in a dream, he would signal to the researchers in the waking world by moving his eyes in a pre-agreed pattern: left-right, left-right. Mark: Like sending a Morse code message from the dream world. Michelle: Exactly. And he did it. The EEG confirmed he was deep in REM sleep, yet the eye movements showed a conscious, deliberate signal. He proved that a part of your conscious mind can "wake up" inside a dream. It was a monumental breakthrough. Mark: Okay, that's incredible. But for most of us, that sounds like an advanced skill. What about something more immediate, like dealing with nightmares? After the Brian Thomas story, I think a lot of people would want to know how to stop a bad dream. Michelle: This is where the book gets incredibly practical and hopeful. Wiseman introduces a technique called Imagery Rehearsal Therapy, or IRT. It was developed by a sleep expert named Barry Krakow, and it's stunningly effective. It's a simple, three-step process. Mark: I'm ready. Give me the three steps. Michelle: Step one: When you're awake, write down the story of your recurring nightmare in as much detail as you can. Step two: Rewrite it. Change the ending. You are the scriptwriter now. The monster chasing you? You turn around and it's holding a bouquet of flowers. You're falling off a cliff? You grow wings and fly. You give the story a positive, empowering resolution. Mark: And step three? Michelle: Rehearse it. For a few minutes every day, you close your eyes and mentally play the new, positive version of the dream. You are actively re-training your brain, overwriting the old, scary file with a new, safe one. Mark: So you can literally rewrite your nightmares? Does this actually work? Michelle: It's not just a nice idea. The data is stunning. Imagery Rehearsal Therapy has a 90% success rate in banishing nightmares and reducing associated symptoms like anxiety and insomnia. Mark: Ninety percent? That's not a marginal effect; that's a cure. That's amazing. It makes me wonder... if you can control nightmares, what else can you do? Can you use dreams to, say, solve a problem or achieve a goal in the real world? Michelle: Wiseman says yes. He describes an experiment where they took a group of volunteers who all had a specific goal—lose weight, stop smoking, get a promotion. They tracked them for two weeks. The results were clear: the people who dreamt about their goal were significantly more likely to make progress toward achieving it. Mark: So just dreaming about it helps? Michelle: It does. But they took it one step further. A second group was told to visualize their goal right before they went to sleep. That group was even more successful. It's like they were seeding their dreams, handing their subconscious mind an assignment for the night.

Mark: So we've gone on quite a journey here. From being victims of a sleep-deprived world created by Edison, to being terrified of our own unconscious minds mowing lawns and climbing cranes, to finally realizing we can take the reins. It's a huge shift in perspective. Michelle: It is. The book's ultimate argument, which is so powerful, is that we treat a third of our lives as an annoying interruption. As something to be conquered or minimized. Wiseman says it's time to reclaim the night. It's not dead time; it's a hidden world of therapy, creativity, and problem-solving waiting for us. Mark: It's like discovering a secret room in your own house that you never knew existed, and it turns out to be a workshop, a cinema, and a therapist's office all in one. Michelle: That's a perfect analogy. And you don't need to be a scientist or a magician to access it. The book is filled with these small, practical techniques. It's a user's manual for your own mind at night. Mark: So what's the one thing listeners can take away and try tonight? Michelle: I think it's the core of Imagery Rehearsal Therapy. If you have a recurring worry, a stress that plays on a loop, or a bad dream that haunts you, don't just try to suppress it. That actually makes it more likely to appear in your dreams—it's called the rebound effect. Instead, take a moment before you sleep. Acknowledge the worry, and then actively rewrite the story. Give it a better ending. You might be surprised by what your brain does with it. Mark: I love that. It’s not about fighting the darkness, but about turning on a light within it. We'd love to hear if you try this, or about any bizarre dreams you've had. Find us on our socials and share your story. We're all students in this Night School together. Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.