my daughter sleep walks. anyone have any experience?

this might be long winded so im sorry in advance.

-background-

my daughter is just shy of 3 years old. she has a terrible time sleeping or so i thought.
she does not always take a nap but that has no effect on her bed time habits.

we lay her down between 7:30 and 8:30 every night and we always have. my wife and i are sticklers for her schedule. i can honestly say in this almost 3 years we have never been 'out' or doing something else to cause her to go to bed late.

i have a camera set up in her room with night vision. it is piped in to my tv so my wife and i can change inputs while we are in the living room watching tv to see what she is doing. i have to admit, sometimes i am a creep and i just watch her.
so what. she is my baby.
back to the topic.

she goes to bed at 8pm and she will be up at 1am. im talking like clockwork, it never fails.between that 8pm and 1am i will see her on the camera moving all around her room. her eyes are open and sometimes she gets up and walks to a different spot. sometime she rolls to a different spot. then she falls back out.
at 1am though she leaves her room.
she usually comes out to the living room and turns all the lights on. she goes to the fridge and gets her juice. she takes books of the bookshelves. sometimes she gets her toys and plays with them and then about 3am she lays back down.

now i dont know everything she does in that block of time or when she actually lays back down but about 3am she usually winds up in bed with me or my wife.(my wife and i start out in the same bed but one of us usually migrates to the spare room. she is a heavy duty crazy snore machine and i am a light sleeper. once i wake up i am done)

i have woken up at 4 am to pee or something and i will find my daughter sleeping in the hallway or in the living room and even on the bathroom floor.

her habits were starting to worry me. i was worried she had some sort of sleep apnea or insomnia or something. she never seems tired during the day like she didnt get enough rest but we took her to the doc anyway to talk about it.

the doctor said she is sleep walking. it makes sense but that thought never occurred to me.

he said she does not seem tired during the day because she is not. because she is actually sleeping during all that.

i kind of didnt believe it when he said that. i have heard of sleep walking before but i kid of just thought thats all it was. someone walking in their sleep. apparently people can do full on activities in their sleep.

the doc said his mother sleep walks and she actually calls cabs and goes places all while sleeping.
he said another family member of his was trying to diet but was actually gaining weight and couldnt figure it out. this family member was 'getting up' in the middle of the night and cooking food and eating it and not remembering it.

so i think i busted her sleep walking the other night.

it was about 11pm. my wife was in the large bedroom sleeping and i was in the spare room laying on the bed reading a magazine. i heard my daughters door open and she walked into the room i was in and walked up to me and just stood there looking at me for maybe a minute. then she walked down the hall into the living room. i followed her.
she climbed up on the couch and sat there for about 2 minutes. she walked over to our dog and pet him for a minute.(mind you her eyes were open this entire time)
then she walked into the kitchen and grabbed her cup and took a few swigs. after that she grabbed the whole jug of apple juice and walked into the room her mom as in. she set the apple juice down on the night table and just stood there looking at her mom, blinking, not saying a word.
i watched her for almost 5 minutes then i picked her up and laid her next to her mom.
once i laid her down she said "i need a blanket daddy"
i covered her up and she slept next to her mom for the rest of the night.

the doc said the only thing there is to worry about is if they do something like turn the stove on or leave the house.
he said one of his patients(a little boy of 4 years old) was a sleep walker. this kid 'woke up' one night and opened the front door and went into the neighbors yard and hopped on the swing. the neighbor saw his motion light come on and called the parents.

the parents took the kid back home and when he woke up they asked him why he went to the neighbors yard and he said he didnt.

so that kind of spooked me and i bought a chain for the front door and put it as high up as i could get it. there is no way she can reach it.

so, sorry for the long winded post but do any of you have experience with this? do you yourself sleep walk or do any of your kids?

it seems so strange to me that people can function while they are sleeping.

the doc said it is one of those things that is not fully understood but assures me it is nothing to worry about.

he said a long distance truck drivers have been known to sleep while they are driving. he said the brain functions so high in this 'state' that they can drive for great distances while they are sleeping and they will not crash.
he said the crash comes from when they are startled awake, when the brain makes that transition from sleep state to wake state. they get startled and disoriented and thats when they crash.
not when sleeping but when waking up.

all seems strange to me.

please feel free to share any stories or experiences.

thank you

I used to sleep walk when I was 5 or 6. My parents filmed me rearranging the living room furniture in my sleep, once. I don't think it's ever happened again since, though.

I used to sleepwalk when i was about 10 years old, im not sure how long it went on for because i never really remembered doing it, i do remember waking up in weird places. At one point i'd even left the house and ended up at my dads house.
My point is that i grew out of it after a while, i like to think sleepwalking is the subconcious doing things that you wanted or didnt have time to do whilst awake.
There is one noteable thing i should mention. I used to have terrifying nightmares around the same time or just before i started sleepwalking so maybe they are linked?

a reply to: thomadom

if she has nightmares she does not show any signs of it.
she does not wake up crying or screaming. does not get all sweaty or anything like that.

of course she could be having them, i just dont know.

another thing she does is sleep on the floor. she absolutely hates sleeping in her bed.
she has been in her big girl bed for about a year. i was using her old crib mattress for it but she didnt stay in bed. we would lay her down and we always sit next to her for a few minutes and rub her back. we tell her how pretty she is and how smart she is. things like that.
we kiss her and then walk out and close the door. i come out and turn on the tv and get her camera up and she is already on the floor.
if i put her back in bed she gets right back down.

so i wait till she falls asleep and i put her in bed but she is back on the floor in no time.

she will sleep in a bed but only if she winds up with one of us in the middle of the night. if she is in her room she is on the floor.
most of the time she is on the floor directly in front of her door. thats her favorite spot.

that seems strange to me too.

now she does not even start out in the bed. i just laid her down a few minutes ago and when we went in there she said "i want to lay on my floor daddy" and she got on the floor, wrapped herself up in her spiderman blanket and asked me to rub her back.

im hoping she grows out of the sleeping on the floor phase too.

When I was a child (maybe 5 or 6) I would occasionally sleepwalk. I would get up and walk somewhere else in the house and go to sleep. My parents found me in the bathtub, on the kitchen floor, in my toy box, and various places in the living room. I seemed to grow out of it. Never figured out any reason why I was sleepwalking.

About 20 years passed and as far as I know I didn't sleepwalk at all. Then it all started again when I was deep within the grasp of an eating disorder. After I lost a drastic amount of weight and became severely malnourished the sleepwalking started. From what I have been told, I would get out of bed, walk to the fridge, grab a bunch of food, sit on the floor, and eat a little bit of everything I grabbed. Then I wouldn't put anything away. I'd just stand up and walk back to bed. Nobody told me I was doing this while I was sick. It was only told to me once I was back at a healthy weight. And once I was a healthy weight again I stopped sleepwalking. This makes me feel as if my case may have been related to nutritional deficiencies with some stress thrown the mix too. (Because who isn't stressed in this world?)

I hope your daughter outgrows the sleepwalking. Or I hope you are able to find some cause for it. Sorry I can't be of much help.

I was just reading some things online about sleepwalking and was wondering, have you ever tried scheduled awakening? I have found a few sites that mention doing this with children to disrupt the sleep cycle and minimize the occurrence of sleepwalking.

Children with nightly or frequent sleepwalking may benefit from a treatment called scheduled awakening. The technique involves fully awakening your child 30-45 minutes before the time sleepwalking usually occurs. This seems to interrupt the sleep cycles and decrease the chances of sleepwalking.

Night terrors, sleep talking, and sleepwalking

I slept walked in Army basic training.
It was because I was so over exhausted from the schedule.
I would only half shut down while asleep.
I'd be up and talking about nonsense.
I still remember how it felt. Weird.
It stopped when basic training stopped.
Every so often it will crop up if I'm extra exhausted.

My daughter was a crazy sleep walker when she was little (2 thru 6 years). She would also talk in her sleep, cry, and flip flop all over the place in her bed, and sometimes flop right out of the bed. She did grow out of the sleep walking for the most part, but still finds herself on the couch, and can't remember how she got there once in a while. She still is a very crazy sleeper, and we find her in all sorts of different places on her queen size bed. She's not a light sleeper, and even though she moves around a lot, and is pretty active, she is absolutely in a deep sleep, and is very hard to wake. It doesn't worry me for now, but if we start seeing her opening outside doors, or turning on the shower, or cooking, or something that might hurt her, we will re-address the issue.

What is it with sleep walking and peeing in the trash can?
I've seen it happen several times by several different people.
I did it myself after the one and only time I took Ambien.

a reply to: Mugly

I never sleep walked as a kid...Only in my adult life. Usually when I'm stressed, or I am sleeping somewhere other than my own bed. I've done some really crazy stuff....Drank a bottle of Ketchup once! That was pretty gross!

I'd just let her do her thing...Just make sure she can't get out the front door, and make sure any bad chemicals or dangerous items are out of reach. She may just grow out of it.

Had a girlfriend who used to sleepwalk. She got up one night and went to the front door and tried to open it and tried to go outside but the deadlock was on. I took her back to bed and she did not wake up. Another time she came out of the bedroom and tried to talk while she was asleep. I told her to go back to back to bed because she was asleep and she mumbled something then called me a 's****head'. She was totally asleep. It was strange but funny and she could not explain it. Her father used to sleepwalk a lot when he was a kid and now has dementia but I don't think the conditions are related.

a reply to: Mugly

I was a sleepwalker as a child, used to love stripping my bed and piling it all in the corner of my room !!
Oh happy days or what

Because then it got worse, albeit much less frequent.

When I was about 17 or 18, my boyfriend at the time luckily stopped me trying to jump out the bedroom window. I was just totally oblivious to what I was doing, but guess the outcome could have been rather messy.

In later life, my sleepwalking tended to concentrate on standing on my bed and clawing at the wall. Maybe I was buried alive in a past life....do hope not !

Fingers crossed, not had any incidents for a while, so looking good at the mo.

Oh and I don't know if there is any truth in this, but I heard somewhere that you should never wake a sleepwalker. Well unless they're in danger.

uk * notsleepwalking * today

a reply to: Mugly

I just experienced my daughter(she's 10) sleep walking the other night while I was sitting here at the computer.
I've heard her laugh in her sleep and stuff, but have never seen her get up before. It was kind of weird but when I think about it, it was kind of scary too.

I was sitting here and all of a sudden she comes walking out of her room, to the front door and started to open it. I jumped up and said what are you doing? a few times before I realized she was sleep walking. She kept saying she needed to go to the bathroom and was giving me a funny look when I said the bathroom was not out in the hall.

I then escorted her to the bathroom by guiding her a little and she went back to bed and had no memory of it in the morning.
She had even unlocked the door in her sleep, so that was kind of worrisome.

Sleep walking, in many cases, results in a defective or stripped safeguard the brain employs in preventing a person from physically acting out dreams in REM. Your brain typically neutralizes voluntary motor functions as remedy, hence the jerky twitching during this cycle.

Sleep paralysis is the dipole to this feature. Sleep paralysis occurs when the safeguard operates too well, temporarily bleeding the motor lock into wake time. Folks "claiming" strange abduction events, religiously mistake these abberations for their vivid fantasies.

The juxtaposition of the pair, is a tailored control over your dream states. People use it for access to "lucid dreaming". It allows you to consciously react during dream, where previously a subject is restrained from doing do. An example is, getting assaulted and not being fight back, or the treadmill effect, while running from or after a foci. Consequently, the soft liberation/release of the safeguard, may not result in sleepwalking, but often results in suddenly waking up physically kicking and punching nebulous apparitions, bound to the aether. Not a paramount condition for your bedfellow😉.

Now to address your situation at hand. The controls installed in lieu of the sleepwalking is sufficient for her monitoring now, but an audio baby monitor be a reliable substitute when she matures. A friend of mine had a father who had this condition. A technique they discovered useful in amend was, a trick dreamwalkers (different than sleepwalkers) use to recall visions during hypnogogic states. It entails practice of drifting off while holding an object. Some use a cup of water, a book, a tv remote, etc. In doing so, your subconscious mind looks to automatically correct the case of dropping the object before slumber, reliability jogging your body, and snapping you out of falling asleep. My friend confided his glee in the technique's potency, lifting the veil of anxiety produced by his father's nocturnal geas.

On an unrelated side note, that same friend insists a correlation between his father's oddity and his suspect ability to transverse the astral and portent events during his own hypnogogia. An interesting claim.

a reply to: Mugly

In your place, I'd get the opinion of a sleep specialist, to be sure it's sleepwalking, and not just waking up. She could, after all, simply be a night owl by nature (it is genetic), and up because that's natural for her. If it is sleepwalking, just be sure to take some safely measures. A flip-over bolt for the top of exterior doors, maybe unplug the stove, if she ever bothers that, and so forth. Some sort of motion sensor, to alert you, could work as well, since you are a light sleeper. Sleep walking or awake, the main concern is her safety, of course. This is the sort of latch I mean -

I used one of those when mine were smaller, to keep them from going outside when they got out of bed int he morning, which they tried once.

Well, I'm astonished you didn't leave the doctors with a bag of nasty drugs! You must have a good doctor.

I've had children, and got grandchildren, and at some point they've all got up during the night sleepwalking. Its just a phase they go through.
Stop worrying, just enjoy watching while you can coz very VERY soon your children will be all grown up and gone!

originally posted by: VoidHawk
Well, I'm astonished you didn't leave the doctors with a bag of nasty drugs! You must have a good doctor.

I've had children, and got grandchildren, and at some point they've all got up during the night sleepwalking. Its just a phase they go through.
Stop worrying, just enjoy watching while you can coz very VERY soon your children will be all grown up and gone!

the doc is awesome.

when our daughter was born we had to pic a doc from a list. we picked this guy case his name is akbar.
you know, admiral akbar from star wars.
we didnt know anything about any of the docs and figured that was as good a reason as any to pick. if he didnt work we could switch.

he is awesome though.
never makes us feel rushed. answers all questions.

i already decided that she was not going to get on meds if that option was available.
i just wanted some anwsers.

my sleep patterns are terrible and i was/am worried about hers.