Phoebe Judge

it would be a most dangerous plea to establish.

A grand jury had refused to send the case to trial.

It was the first time in the UK, as far as we know, that someone had successfully defended themselves in court by claiming to be asleep.

But Ramya Nagesh says most sleepwalking doesn't involve dreaming at all.

Two scientists working at the world's first sleep laboratory at the University of Chicago discovered REM sleep cycles in the 1950s.

One of them, Nathaniel Kleitman, had started the lab, and he often experimented on himself.

Once he spent more than a month 150 feet underground in a cave with a graduate student to see how the complete darkness would affect their sleep.

Another time, he stayed awake for 180 hours to see what would happen.

Since then, scientists have also studied sleepwalking, attributing it to the brain waking up too quickly from a kind of very deep sleep called slow-wave sleep.

It also seems genetic.

In 1987, a 23-year-old man named Kenneth Parks arrived at a police station in Toronto in the middle of the night.

He had blood on his hands and said, I think I've killed some people.

Kenneth Parks had become addicted to betting on horse races.

He was losing money and started spending his family's savings and embezzling money at work.

He was caught, fired, and had to put the family house up for sale.

One day, Kenneth went to a gambler's anonymous meeting and made plans to tell his wife's family about the problems he was having.

That was a Wednesday.

He resolved to tell them on Sunday.

The night before, he fell asleep on the couch, watching Saturday Night Live around 1.30 a.m.

The next thing he remembered was seeing his mother-in-law's face.