How Should I Deal With A Sleep Walker?

Not turning on the lights but check for injuries or to see if the person is awake or not. Unless you know that they are not it is best not to do things like talking to them or turning the lights on. Usually, the event will resolve back in to sleep. Occasionally they will wake all the way up but usually resolving back into sleep gain. Sleep walking is obviously different than sleep talking or fidgeting in your sleep because with walking you are getting up and you can do great harm to yourself. Usually you don't do a lot of harm to somebody else but you can do great harm to yourself, walking down the stairs or walking outside. They are unaware of the surroundings. So sleep walking again kind of falls in the area of somebody falling asleep in the dinner table. It used to be considered kind of funny but now its not. And if it's frequent or amounts to ambulation pretty far away from the bed that probably ought to be dealt with a sleep specialist. You can either involve training on how to break that, some non-drug therapy to break that, or drug therapy to control that behaviour. It tends to run in families. Tends to be related to sleep talking and night terrors where you get the individual screaming, yelling in their sleep and their eyes open. They appear to be awake but they are not making any sense and poorly consolable.