Looking for Trouble author Virginia Cowles (second left) and fellow war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (second right) with members of the cast of their play, Love Goes to Press, in 1946.

In terms of sleep, though, it is so subjective and strange that we have to package it into a story that makes sense, as difficult as that can sometimes be.We then move on to hypnopompic hallucinations – primarily visual hallucinations that manifest moments after waking up; think spiders scuttling on your pillow. In a discourse fired by lively inquiry and personal anecdote, [Vernon] looks to art, literature and science to demonstrate the profound effect these eerie and surprisingly common nocturnal states have had on the human imagination. When aspiring foreign correspondent Virginia Cowles turned up to report on the Spanish civil war in 1937, she was a 26-year-old Boston debutante in heels.

Vernon's own testimony and experience with parasomnias is sprinkled throughout the book, and I want to applaud her bravery for being so open about such a vulnerable topic. I'm finding it difficult to find the words to review such a complex book; perhaps fascinating and disturbing at the same time. The reader’s journey starts with the very first parasomnia that Vernon experienced as a child: sleepwalking. We have a stair lift from the ground floor foyer to the first floor but are unable to install a through-floor lift due to the building’s historic status.If other mental illnesses such as depression or OCD cause nightmares (and indeed, sometimes the medication for these conditions can affect a person’s dreams) then learning to lucid dream could help any symptoms manifesting through sleep. I’ve already done a couple of events, and it has been wonderful to hear people come up and tell me about the things they’ve also suffered with at night.