Sleepwalking, or somnambulism, is not acting out a dream. This episode explains it as state dissociation: the motor and navigation systems wake while the prefrontal cortex, which handles memory and judgment, stays in deep N3 slow wave sleep. Freud tied it to unconscious wishes in 1907 and a 1954 study blamed repressed hostility, but sleep recordings showed it happens in non-REM sleep, unlike REM behavior disorder. Sleepwalkers’ eyes are open, with a glassy stare and dilated pupils. One sleepwalking parent gives a child a 45 percent chance, two parents 60 percent, and about 5 percent of children sleepwalk regularly against roughly 1.5 percent of adults.

In children, sleep apnea can trigger episodes, and removing enlarged tonsils often ends them. In adults, stress, sleep deprivation, serotonin differences and drugs such as zolpidem play a part. The hosts cover sleep eating, sexsomnia and how sleepwalking differs from an alcohol blackout. Then come the courts: an 1846 acquittal in Boston, a 1963 ruling by Lord Morris, the 1992 Canadian Parks case, and defenses that failed.

• People with migraine or Tourette syndrome sleepwalk at four to six times the general rate
• Episodes can track the premenstrual phase, while pregnancy often suppresses them
• Fruit fly research on the transcription factor AP2 links sleep consolidation with early brain development
• A 2001 defendant who said he was fighting ostriches had told his son not to turn on the lights
• Scott Falater changed clothes and hid the weapon in a Tupperware container, steps the court found incompatible with deep sleep