Phoebe Judge

It's a case of the truth being almost stranger than fiction, I think.

You know, I don't think I've ever sleepwalked in my life.

In one case, a woman woke up and saw a garden axe sitting on her nightstand.

It hadn't been there when she fell asleep.

As she was texting her partner, she noticed messages from the night before that she didn't remember.

about hearing voices and seeing things and getting the axe from her tool shed for safety.

Another time in Australia, a woman woke up holding a paintbrush and then saw that she had apparently painted her front door in her sleep.

There are stories of people waking up to find their furniture rearranged, or waking up feeling sick and realizing that during the night they'd eaten raw eggs, even the shells, uncooked rice, cat food, and cigarettes with butter on them.

Doctors have described patients who get dressed in things they wouldn't normally wear, going out in 20-degree weather, hardly wearing anything.

What's the strangest thing that you've heard of someone doing while asleep?

At one time, people who sleepwalked were called noctambuli, or nightwalkers.

Some believed that they were possessed.

In 1859, an officer on patrol in London heard yelling coming from an apartment window.

It was after one in the morning.

It was a woman's voice shouting, save my children.

The woman shouting had thrown one of her children through the window, an 18-month-old.

The baby was taken to a hospital with head injuries, but survived.

The mother was charged with attempted murder.

He said, if I were to allow her to go at large, it would be opening a very wide door.

A man might set fire to his house and say it had been done while he was dreaming.