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Is sleepwalking a form of possession? A-Z of somnambulism

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The muse of sleepwalking

Sleepwalking, or as experts will call it, “somnambulism“, is one of the sleeping disorders affecting about 3.6% of the global population. This parasomnia involves unusual movements and behavior of the patient during sleep.

While this is a real medical condition, stigma and detest have been the bread and butter for most sleepwalkers. The 21st-century entertainers have gassed the tendency by depicting sleepwalkers as zombies or possessed characters on the screens. Before I entertain the tête-à-têtes on sleepwalking- let’s try to learn more about sleepwalking.

What is sleepwalking?

Scholars have for long tried to understand the context of sleepwalking. In all sincerity, this abnormal state of behaving and appearing as though one is awake yet they are fully asleep can mesmerize.
From a scientific standpoint, sleep occurs in cyclic patterns– one leading to the other. In the first stages of sleep, the Non-Rapid Eye Movement (N-REM) stage ushers the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) stage where dreams occur.

Sleepwalking is an arousal disorder that occurs during deep sleep (NREM) in the sleep cycle. The condition usually occurs when an individual’s brain is partially awake and partially in deep sleep, just like other parasomnias. When in this in-between state the brain can get an awakening such that the body partially awakens and can perform simple tasks while parts of the brain are still asleep.

Some activities that sleepwalkers may engage in include:

Sleepwalking is not limited to only walking. It will surprise you to know there are many more activities that a sleepwalker may engage. Here are some things that happen when someone is sleepwalking. Note that these behaviors are unique to the individual:

  • The person can sit up in bed, cook, eat, and even dress up. In complex sleepwalking the person can attempt to operate machinery they can try to drive a car or do laundry.
  • The sleepwalker may also talk where in this case the speech can be monotone, robotic, or sluggard. Some individuals are not able to recognize communication and or communicate at all.
  • The sleepwalker can seem normal, which can be difficult to tell that they are sleepwalking, while others will walk in a lazy slouch, with glassy eyes and blank stares. Some will have their eyes totally closed.
  • The sleepwalker of my experience amnesia making it difficult for them to tell that they were walking unless a partner or roommate tells them. In fact, most adults do not know they do it until they move in with someone, go to a sleepover with a friend, or get married. The memory loss could be because the brain is partially awake. This makes the sleepwalker confused when they wake up in a different place from where they slept.
  • The sleepwalking episode can last from 5minutes to 15 minutes, with extreme cases lasting from 45 minutes to an hour. The sleepwalker can sleep through the entire episode while others wake up while still sleepwalking.
  • The sleepwalker might be very sleepy, experience fatigue when they wake up.

Is sleepwalking related to paranormal activities?

If you asked me this, my response will always be: a straight faced – NO

Forget the tales and Hollywood creations. Sleepwalking is not a paranormal phenomenon. 

Somnambulism is indeed a very common condition in children of ages, ranging from 2years to early stages of puberty. In most cases, the condition digresses making it rare but present in adults. Most adults will rarely experience deep non-REM slow waves of sleep, and hence they may not get to sleepwalking. Again, unlike in children, an adult’s brain is well developed to distinguish between sleep and being awake while in dreamland.

What are the causes of sleepwalking?

There is no specific cause of sleepwalking sleep experts however have discovered triggers or factors that could lead to sleepwalking. However, there are factors that are associated or seem to be contributory to somnambulism. Some of these include:

Factors that lead to sleepwalking:

1. Sleepwalking can be passed down genetically

Believe it or not, children born by a parent (s) that were sleepwalkers or by parents whose close relatives were sleepwalkers then they are a high likelihood to sleepwalk.
If a twin is sleepwalking, then their identical sibling is also likely to be sleepwalking due to their genetic makeup.

2. Your can sleepwalk because of the environmental factors around you

A sleepwalker does not walk unless there is a trigger. According to sleep experts, some people will only sleepwalk when there is a change in their sleep environment which could range from moving to a new place, change in the sleeping area’s lighting, smell, sound, and texture of the bedding being unfamiliar with them can cause disturbed sleep leading to sleepwalking.

3.Watch out for the Psychological factors rest you sleepwalk!

Stress, anxiety, and when there is an unexpected change in the individual’s life can also be attributed to sleepwalking. The individual can sleepwalk as the brain is trying to deal with the situation. Again, studies have revealed that the tendency could be associated with mental disorders such as Bipolar Disease.

Other factors that may influence sleepwalking tendencies include:

  • The media content you may consume before they sleep may also contribute to tendencies of sleepwalking.
  • Underlying medical conditions that disrupt sleeping patterns such as sleep apnea and jetlag can trigger sleepwalking.
  • Use of alcohol, sedatives, substance use sleep-inducing pills, and prescribed medication can disrupt sleep resulting in sleepwalking.
  • Existence of Other parasomnias
  • Parasomnias are sleep disorders that cause abnormal activity or reflexes when one is asleep. They include insomnia; others are sleep terrors, jet lag, sleep paralysis, and nightmares. All these disrupt sleep and can lead to sleep deprivation, which is a sleepwalking trigger.

How do we support sleepwalkers?

There is hope for a loved one who is sleepwalking.

  • Treated by managing the causes and triggers.
    • For instance, treating underlying medical conditions, seeking therapy to help deal with anxiety disorders and stress, controlling media consumed before sleep.
  • Anticipatory awakening therapy
    • This one involves waking the sleepwalker at the time they usually sleepwalk. That means if you live with a sleepwalker observe the sleepwalking episode patterns and on identifying the pattern awaken the individual when the episode usually happens.
  • Do not wake the sleepwalker unless it is very necessary.
    • Direct the sleepwalker back to bed without waking them. Wake them only when it is impossible to redirect them back to sleep or when they do not respond to the redirection. When waking them do it calmly and softly to avoid startling them because they can be defensive and can attack you. Immediately they wake up explain to them they were sleepwalking because they can be confused.
  • Make sure the house is safe for the walker.
    • You do not want your sleepy dear ones to hurt themselves when sleepwalking. Clear pathways so they do not trip on something. It is also advisable to lock doors so that they do not walk outside where they can hurt themselves or get hurt by others.

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Jewish Nazism is reality not fiction

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Jewish Nazism

I realize that the title of this article might offend and provoke many people, especially those adhering to the Judaic faith. I do know that Jews, like everyone else, are not carbon copies of each other. There are many conscientious Jews who believe in fairness and basic human equality regardless of color, race and faith, and strongly reject racism and chauvinism in any form. Also, I will no longer be using euphemistic language in reference to Jewish Nazism especially in light of the latest Dresden-like bombing of Gaza by the Judeo-Nazi state also known as Israel.

Read Also: No forgiveness for Jewish Nazism

These people I salute for their rectitude, humanity and morality. They are our natural partners for peace and a better tomorrow for our children and their children.

But there are numerous other Jews who don’t believe in human equality and justice for all. Indeed, there are many Jews, e.g. followers of the hateful Chabad sect, who don’t even ascribe full humanity to people who are not members of the Jewish faith.

Needless to say, the venomous ideology adopted by these racist fanatics has much in common with Aryan Nazism.

Read Also: The futility of counting on the U.S. to pressure Israel

What else can be said to describe an ideology that teaches adherents that the life of a non-Jew has no sanctity and that goyem can be murdered without the slightest compunction or feeling of guilt?

The shocking reactions by the Israeli government, rabbis, and community leaders to the latest abduction, murder and subsequent burning of a Palestinian kids in Gaza are very telling.

In a certain sense, these reactions and attitudes can be compared to the reactions and attitudes of many Germans to the pogroms carried out against Jews by the Nazis prior to and during the Second World War.

The gleefully despicable embrace of the brashly hideous crime by the bulk of the Israeli Jewish society underscores the fact that millions of Jews in Israel and abroad do harbor certain Nazi tendencies, especially against the Palestinian people. These tendencies are too real and too tangible to be overstated.

However, we must call the spade a spade, even at the expense of upsetting the huge Zionist propaganda machine which habitually alters the black into white and the blatant big lie into a “truth” glorified by sheepish westerners who have long been brainwashed into believing that Israel is a modern, civilized and democratic state.

In the final analysis, when Jews (or anyone else) think, behave and act like the Nazis thought, behaved and acted, they simply become Nazis. Pure and simple.

Today, there are numerous Jews who openly call for the physical annihilation of Palestinians as retaliation for the abduction and killing of three Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

Saber-rattling rabbis speak menacingly of the need to adopt “the Biblical way” to combat the Palestinians.

For those not versed in Jewish phraseology, “Biblical way” is euphemism for genocide.

Today, the Israeli media reported that some army personnel openly appealed to the government to “give us the green light to annihilate them.”!!!

Just read what thousands of Jewish youths have been writing on their Facebook pages! It is outrageous, disgusting and sheer evil.

To put it in a nutshell, Nazism is being regurgitated and exuded all over Israel. This is happening in broad daylight while professional liars like Binyamin Netanyahu are filling the ether with all sorts of shameless lies about Israel being victimized by the Palestinians.

Seventy-six years have passed since Kristalnacht. Today Jewish settlers in the west Bank, in close cooperation and coordination, with the Israeli army could very well carry out a huge pogrom against an innocent and helpless community which really finds itself very much in the same precarious and vulnerable position that European Jewry experienced prior to WWII.

I am not a prophet of doom and gloom, but the signs are unmistakably bleak.

A final point, the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are surviving thanks to the good-will of the international public opinion. Should the international community go into a brief slumber, God forbid, Israel and its own Wehrmacht, SS, Gestapo and Hitler Youth might embark on the unthinkable. Don’t you ever say Jews can’t carry out a holocaust against their victims, the Palestinians?

Words can kill; words do kill.

Unfortunately, the chilling words we are hearing from many Israeli Jews these days leave no room for optimism.

Khalid Amayreh is a Palestinian journalist and political commentator , we lost him on account of natural reasons on 12th of July last year in the Occupied Palestine

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I’m most definitely Palestinian!

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Palestinian

In-your-face brutality, unending genocide, unending atrocities, mass slaughter directed against one’s people, one’s brethren, causes the most strong and unimaginable reaction, in response to the oppressor’s horrendous and barbaric deeds. The autocratic, despotic, tyrannical Israeli-hand systematically and with pre-planned engineered precision, massacres, annihilates, eliminates the young and the old Palestinian alike – in the most inhumane and most despicable of ways. Slaughters men, women and children in broad daylight. Bares its blood-thirsty intentions, its monstrous objectives in the most unashamed of ways. Mercy to none – not to the living, not to the severely wounded and dying; no mercy even on the dead or their lifeless remains.

The constant fear of being bombed anytime, rained down with missiles and all manner of munitions from within the vast arsenal of the Israeli side; definitely stockpiled high, with enough buffer inventory of munitions, deadly and lethal stockpile, to blow the receiving side multiple times over; so as not to leave a “shred” of evidence of your original physical-self on the surface of the land, which your people, generations and generations of your ancestors, since time immemorial have dwelt on.

Read Also: The age-old Palestinian-fear (of the Israeli thirst)

The inexplicable terror of seeing Israeli drones constantly “floating about” unopposed, in the skies above your unsheltered head. Drones with eyes like that of a greedy dog. Electronic pixels wanting to cast an evil eye, an evil-spell upon your very being. Eyeing upon your existence, wanting to blow-up, tear-up your physical being, seemingly wanting to devour your flesh and body; all by way of a few computer clicks / even the manual computer-clicks now, seemingly, are being replaced by more automated ways of executing these most evil deeds. Software, coded software, written programs to execute on the most Evil-intentions. Evil-intentions of the most evil amongst the human race.

Everybody knows, the Israelis have exterminated with their weaponry, uncountable numbers of Palestinians across a 40, 50km stretch of land, in front of the whole world, over the past so many weeks and months. And retain the capacity, the ability, the power, the means to slaughter, devour many, many more innocent ones, day in, day out.

The Israelis possess American technology, American weapons – the bedrock of their faith, the foundation stone of their belief in their never-ending invincibility. The Palestinians have their faith in Allah; that Allah will redeem his faithful people, from the clutches of these war-mongers, who rain down terror, day and night on the most innocent, the most vulnerable.

Most definitely, the Moslem spirit in me, the Palestinian spirit in me is not defeated; quite to the contrary, it’s rekindled, stronger than ever.

I’m definitely Palestinian, in every sense of the word, and Allah will save us, Allah will have mercy on us, Allah will guide us.

(Note: Azhaar Amayreh is a marketer stuck in war-ravaged Rafah with her child.)The following article is part of a campaign to raise money to help MZEMO contributor Azhaar Amayreh and her family leave Gaza. Please give what you can.

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The futility of counting on the U.S. to pressure Israel

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It is really ludicrous to see how dishonest the U.S “mediators” constantly demand that the Palestinians display more “good will” toward Israel at a time when Israel continues to perpetrate a real Holocaust against the hapless and helpless Palestinaians and steal Palestinian land in broad daylight.

It seems amply clear that the current Palestinian leadership, i.e. the Palestinian Authority (PA)  led by Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, neither learns from its own blunders nor from other people’s blunders. This is really a gigantic disaster befalling the Palestinian people and their enduring just cause.

How else can one relate to the unrelenting illogical insistence of the the whole world on accepting the U.S., Israel’s guardian-ally, as “mediator and honest broker” between us and our murderous tormentors and grave-diggers, Israel?

Read Also: The US and IsraelThe dog versus the wagging tail.

Indeed, one doesn’t have to be an expert on American foreign policy in the Middle East to know that the U.S represents the problem, not the solution, given its long-standing embrace of Israeli fascism and expansion.  After all, it is the US that not only enabled Israel to actively pursue its lebensraum policy at the expense of its neighbors but consistently shield it from any accountability or international condemnation.

Today, the U.S. administration is criticizing Palestinian “unilateralism” in reference to desperate PA efforts to get the UN Security Council to recognize Palestinian statehood and agree on a deadline for ending Israel’s Nazi-like occupation.

Well, we all know that the U.S. is being pornographically hypocritical when it accuses the virtually vanquished Palestinians of acting unilaterally as if its spoilt nefarious daughter, Israel, were ever acting in full conformity with international law.

Well, Mr. Abbas and Mr. Ereikat: Don’t be too gullible, too sheepish. Ask your American interlocutors, e.g. Mr. John Kerry, the following questions:

Since when did Israel ever behave bilaterally rather than unilaterally?

Was the usurpation of Palestine and expulsion of its indigenous people at the hands of Jewish terrorist gangs hailing from Eastern Europe, a bilateral or unilateral act?

Was the annexation by Israel of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights a bilateral or a unilateral act?

Was the building of hundreds of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as the transfer of 600,000 Jewish settlers to live on a land that belongs not to them a bilateral or unilateral act?

Was the wanton demolition of some 30,000 Palestinian homes by Israel a bilateral or a unilateral act?

Was the annexation of the bulk of the West Bank and East Jerusalem a bilateral or a unilateral act?

And what about this ugly structure, called Separation wall, which resulted in the theft of thousands of acres of private Palestinian land? Was it a bilateral or a unilateral act?

I could go on and on and on listing America’s hypocritical and duplicitous stands on Palestinian grievances and Israeli crimes. Indeed, the U.S dishonest stand on the Palestinian plight has only been consistent in its moral depravity. Indeed, hypocrisy in its most brazen form has always been and continues to be the modus operandi of American policy toward the Palestinian issue. I know it is politically incorrect to speak in this tone. However, truth must not be another victim of the dark evil embrace between the U.S. and Israel.

But morality is not and has never been part of American politics or policies, especially foreign policy. This is why the world looks so ugly, so gloomy and so unjust.

The U.S. is insisting that only a “negotiated” settlement to the Palestinian issue would be acceptable to the U.S.

Read Also: The Palestinian Authority: confused, frustrated and corrupt

In other words, Israel must always have the final say as to any possible peace deal with the Palestinians.

But since Israel would never ever end its occupation or dismantle the settlements, let alone allow for the repatriation of the refugees, it means there can be no negotiated settlement unless the Palestinians agree to surrender to Jewish Nazism. But that will never happen as Muslims, including the Palestinian people, would never allow the Ramallah leadership or any other leadership to commit adultery with the honorable Palestinian cause.

Let’s be honest. The purportedly honest American broker or mediator is neither honest nor a broker or mediator. The proverbial American judge is simply telling the insolent rapist (Israel) and the vanquished rape victim (the Palestinians) to sort it out amongst yourselves. Do we have to be the smartest humans on earth to understand the implications of this brutal ugliness?

It is tantamount to a total American embrace of Israeli fascism. It means that the American stance is actually Israel’s stance. It also means that that the U.S. would never accept or condone any settlement that Israel doesn’t accept.

That is why the Palestinians need to have a moment of truth with themselves.
And the message they need to internalize is that they would have to wait ages if they continued to put their trust in the U.S. to pressure Israel to walk in the path of peace.

Let us face it. Israel will never walk in the path of peace unless it is pressured and bullied to do so. However, Israel would never ever walk in the path of peace as long as it continues to receive nuclear submarines from Germany and the most advanced fighter jets from the U.S.

In a nut shell, America can’t and won’t exert any meaningful pressure on Israel to end its N-a-z-i-like occupation. We all know that Israel controls the American government or at least controls those who control the American government. Israel is intoxicated by its arrogance of power and Talmudic insolence. And the U.S., Israel’s guardian-ally, is not in a position to be an honest mediator and to impose a deal on Israel or even convince her to allow for one that would give the Palestinian a semblance of justice.

What should be done?

We must go ahead with our efforts at the U.N. Security Council, irrespective of American threats to veto any resolution favorable to the Palestinian cause. At least casting the veto would embarrass America itself and its treacherous Arab allies (they are not actually allies but cheap slaves and puppets as we all know).

We Palestinians must be confident of our inevitable triumph over Zionism and its evils. Yes, it may take time, but eventually Zionism won’t live forever in a sea where hundreds of millions live.

Khalid Amayreh is a Palestinian journalist and political commentator , we lost him on account of natural reasons on 12th of July last year in the Occupied Palestine

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