These activities can be as benign as talking, sitting up in bed, walking to a bathroom, consuming food, and cleaning, or as hazardous as cooking, driving a motor vehicle,[3][4][5] violent gestures and grabbing at hallucinated objects.

Children's respiration during sleep should be monitored with nasal cannula or pressure transducer system or esophageal manometry, which are more sensitive than the thermistors or thermocouples currently used in many laboratories.

In the midst of a night terror, the affected person may wander in a distressed state while still asleep, and examples of sufferers attempting to run or aggressively defend themselves during these incidents have been reported in medical literature.

One study suggests higher levels of dissociation in adult sleepwalkers, since test subjects scored unusually high on the hysteria portion of the "Crown-Crisp Experiential Index".

[16] Another suggested that "A higher incidence [of sleepwalking events] has been reported in patients with schizophrenia, hysteria and anxiety neuroses".

One thing that can happen is a sleep disorder called sexomnia, where an individual can engage in sexual behaviors with oneself or others.

[29][10] Genetic studies using common fruit flies as experimental models reveal a link between night sleep and brain development mediated by evolutionary conserved transcription factors such as AP-2[30] Sleepwalking may be inherited as an autosomal dominant disorder with reduced penetrance.

Genome-wide multipoint parametric linkage analysis for sleepwalking revealed a maximum logarithm of the odds score of 3.14 at chromosome 20q12-q13.12 between 55.6 and 61.4 cM.

[34] Medications, primarily in four classes—benzodiazepine receptor agonists and other GABA modulators, antidepressants and other serotonergic agents, antipsychotics, and β-blockers—have been associated with sleepwalking.

As expected, weight gain is also a common outcome of this disorder, because food that is frequently consumed contains high carbohydrates.

There are some medications that calm the sleeper so they can get longer and better-quality rest, but activities such as yoga can also be introduced to reduce the stress and anxiety causing the action.

During an alcohol-induced blackout (drug-related amnesia), a person is able to actively engage and respond to their environment (e.g. having conversations or driving a vehicle), however the brain does not create memories for the events.

[41] A systematic review of the literature found that approximately 50% of drinkers have experienced memory loss during a drinking episode and have had associated negative consequences similar to sleepwalkers, including injury and death.

[40] Other differential diagnoses include rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder, confusional arousals, and night terrors.

Pharmacological treatments have included tricyclic antidepressants (imipramine), an anticholinergic (biperiden), antiepileptics (carbamazepine, valproate), an antipsychotic (quetiapine), benzodiazepines (clonazepam, diazepam, flurazepam and triazolam), melatonin, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (paroxetine), a barbiturate (sodium amytal) and herbs.

[48][medical citation needed] Unlike other sleep disorders, sleepwalking is not associated with daytime behavioral or emotional problems.

Sleepwalkers should not have easily accessible weapons (loaded guns, knives) in the bedroom or any room of the house for that matter.

The German chemist and parapsychologist Baron Karl Ludwig von Reichenbach (1788–1869) made extensive studies of sleepwalkers and used his discoveries to formulate his theory of the Odic force.

"[52] This same group published an article twelve years later with a new conclusion: "Sleepwalking, contrary to most belief, apparently has little to do with dreaming.

[6] More accurate data about sleep is due to the invention of technologies, such as the electroencephalogram (EEG) by Hans Berger in 1924[54] and BEAM by Frank Duffy in the early 1980s.

He believed that sleepwalking was connected to fulfilling sexual wishes and was surprised that a person could move without interrupting their dream.

At that time, Freud suggested that the essence of this phenomenon was the desire to go to sleep in the same area as the individual had slept in childhood.

[57] Vincenzo Bellini's 1831 Italian opera semiseria, La sonnambula, the plot of which is centered on the question of the innocence of the betrothed and soon-to-be married Amina, who, upon having been discovered in the bedchamber of a stranger, and despite the assurances of that stranger that Amina was entirely innocent, has been rejected by her enraged fiancé, Elvino—who, then, decides to marry another.

In fact, when stressed, Amina was susceptible to somnambulism; and had come to be in the stranger's bedchamber by sleep-walking along a high parapet (in full view of the opera's audience).

The outstanding difference between Lind and her contemporaries was that, "whilst the beauty of her voice was far greater than any other in living memory (thus, the Swedish Nightingale), what really set her apart was her outstanding ability to act"; and, moreover, in performing as Amina, rather than walking along a wide and well-protected walkway (as the others did), she routinely acrobatically balanced her way along narrow planks.

[58] While she was in Manchester—on the basis that, at the time, many characterized "hypnotism" as "artificial somnambulism",[59][60] and that, from a rather different perspective, her stage performance could also be described as one of "artificial" (rather than spontaneous) somnambulism—her friends arranged for her to visit the local surgeon James Braid, who had discovered hypnotism in 1841:[61][62][63] Mr. Braid, surgeon, whose discoveries in hypnotism are well known, having invited the fair impersonator of a somnambulist to witness some of the abnormal feats of a real somnambulist, artificially thrown into that state, it was arranged that a private séance should take place [on Friday, 3 September 1847].As sleepwalking behaviours occur without volition, sleepwalking can be used as a legal defense, as a form of legal automatism.

[67] In the 1963 case Bratty v A-G for Northern Ireland, Lord Morris stated, "Each set of facts must require a careful examination of its own circumstances, but if by way of taking an illustration it were considered possible for a person to walk in his sleep and to commit a violent crime while genuinely unconscious, then such a person would not be criminally liable for that act.