Sleepwalking

Certain children sometimes experience sleepwalking during their sleep. These children look normal when gonna sleep, but they start doing the activity on the second or third hour after they fall asleep.

They can go to another room, even out of the house. They can perform a variety of complex activities. These episodes can last for 15 minutes to one hour. The children will go back to bed then and can't remember anything they do during sleepwalking.

These children's eyes can be partially or wide opened. They can avoid everything that blocks their ways, hear you and usually respond to your command, for example, when you tell them to go back to bed.

Shaking these children, when they were walking during sleep, would normally wake them up. They will be shocked and surprised to find themselves in an unexpected place.

What causing your child to walk during sleep ain't fully understood. To be sure, sleepwalking takes place in a phase of non-rapid eye movement (NREM). But sleepwalking ain't an act the dream produces as you think.

Sleepwalking is generally with regard to situations that cause anxiety. These situations coulda just happened or expected to be imminent.

Psychotherapy, the handling of mental disorder using several psychological methods, is useful in dealing sleepwalking. This therapy is primarily verbal and intended to help the impaired children change their ways of thinking, feeling and behaving, so their stress is reduced, and they can achieve greater satisfactions in life.

Brainwave recordings, eye movements and other parameters indicate four sleep stages. Twenty percent sleep period is normally at stage 1. It's considered as the main stage for a dream. Rapid eye movement (REM) is at this stage.

Of the remaining periods of sleep, sixty percent is approximately including the phases 2 and 3; and the last 20 percent is a deep sleep, included in the stage 4. Dreams can occur in phases after stage 1, but it's referred as NREM sleep. You're through the four stages in the cycle of 90 minutes.

You don't know the exact roles of REM and deep sleep in maintaining the normality of physiological and psychological functions. However, disrupted patterns of sleep due to depression, schizophrenia and other mental disorders likely play important roles interrelatedly.

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