Dr Sutapa Mukherjee

And that's why you sort of lie there and you're awake and you just can't move.

And I've experienced it too when I've had, say, a nap in the afternoon because maybe I didn't sleep the night before for whatever reason.

I have a nap in the afternoon and then I need to wake up, but my muscles are paralyzed.

So that's the only real time that

that we would experience that.

It's to do with the characteristic of sleep itself, that obviously we don't want people to start walking around when they're asleep.

So it's a physiological process where the muscles become less active and are paralysed so that we don't hurt ourselves.

So sleepwalking is probably the other stage where people are

Their muscles are not paralyzed and they get up and they start moving around and that's really dangerous.

So it's a physiological mechanism to make us safe when we're sleeping.

So it's all very complex, but the real reason for it is so that we're safe when we are sleeping because we have to sleep.

Thinking back now, I think like a lot of people, my parents used to give me a bath and then I would hop into bed and then there was story time and then it was lights out.

So most parents are trying to have some rituals that help their children to

to get ready for bed and for the brain to realise that it's time for sleep.

And so, you know, most children would have specific rituals that really helped them.

And for me, it was all about bath time and then story time.

So I think it was really a timing thing because when I was doing my respiratory training that was in the early 90s, the whole idea of sleep medicine was in its infancy.

So around about the late 80s was when we started to be able to measure sleep fairly routinely with the sleep studies that we even do today.

where we're measuring the brainwaves and also measuring the eye movements and so on.

So around that time when I was doing my respiratory training, sleep as a field was quite young.