We then move on to hypnopompic hallucinations – primarily visual hallucinations that manifest moments after waking up; think spiders scuttling on your pillow. In fiction, I think parasomnias will always be a trope of the horror genre, but I also think we’ll start to see some of these “spooky” conditions appear in literary fiction, affecting the lives of everyday people who aren’t being chased by monsters or ghosts! Vernon highlights the need to widen our conversations around sleep beyond the anxious focus on maximising the number of hours we spend doing it. I was instantly drawn to the cover, and if you're not familiar with the image, it's the The Nightmare by Swedish painter Henry Fuseli.

Along the way she explores the Salem Witch Trials and sleep paralysis, Victorian ghost stories, and soldiers' experiences of PTSD. Over the next few years she would report from Paris as it fell to the Nazis, London on the first day of the blitz, and Berlin on the day Germany invaded Poland.She liked to say that her only qualification was curiosity, but as this timely reissue of her bestselling 1941 memoir proves, she also had courage, tenacity and a flair for observation. Vernon describes how, during sleep paralysis, she feels “crushed under the intense stare of Meredith, under her hands and her sharp nails”. This was exactly the type of book I wish I had access to when I first started getting sleep paralysis.

This week, we’re here with Alice Vernon, a woman long fascinated by what happens to our brains during sleep.

Ever since childhood, she’s been prone to “parasomnias” – sleep disturbances that include nightmares, sleepwalking and ghostly hallucinations. The reader’s journey starts with the very first parasomnia that Vernon experienced as a child: sleepwalking. That idea stems from the era of pre-colour films and television when, amazingly, only a minority of people claimed that their dreams had colour. The passion in which Vernon pursues discussion to be normalised surrounding our sleeping patterns is something that I think we can all take away from with a sense of positivity, as after all, we all have sleep.