What Dreams May Kill?

by Cory Frolik

There's fitful sleep, and then there's fitful sleep. In 1992, Kenneth James Parks of Toronto drove about fourteen miles to his in-laws' home, stabbed his mother-in-law to death and bashed his father-in-law with a tire iron, all while he was asleep. (Yes, it happens.) On Feb. 9, Penn professor Stephen Morse attempted to explain this phenomenon in the third installment in the Penn Humanities Forum on Sleep and Dreams. Morse's lecture, "To Sleep, Perchance to Kill: Altered Consciousness and Responsibility," addressed criminal acts committed while asleep and the legal ramifications thereafter.

When sleeping, people do all sorts of wild stuff, and as much as 10 percent of the population occasionally get up and stroll around. The phenomenon of somnambulism occurs primarily during the third and fourth stages of sleep. Some people merely sit up in bed or launch into random activities, like folding laundry. Others attempt more dangerous tasks, like cooking. I, as a college senior, once peed in a dresser in the dorm room next door. And yet my R. Kelly moment was nowhere near as horrific as that of one Mrs. Cogdon. While caught between sleep and waking, Cogdon dreamt she was fending off assailants, then fetched up an axe and planted it in her daughter's head. (For a woman who killed her daughter in her sleep, Mrs. Cogdon's first name and hometown are suspiciously hard to track down on Google.)

Events such as these can happen automatically, because our brains are used to running tasks on autopilot.

"You don't want to be micromanaging your bodily movements. [There are times] you want to go on automatic," says Morse.

Divided consciousness is what allows a person to multitask. And though walking while chewing gum is the classic example, performing a task as complicated as administering axe blows while not "introspectively conscious" is also quite possible.

The laws accommodate such contingencies. Morse says, "If you kill while perchance you are sleeping, you are going to get some kind of nonresponsibility outcome in the law." The law doesn't punish people for crimes they commit while sleeping, considering these actions to be nonactions. While Morse agrees with the law's treatment, he disagrees with the concept of "nonactions." He figures that a lack of self-monitoring shouldn't necessarily negate responsibility, especially when a conscious act — extreme inebriation or skipping medication — leads to this state.

As for what kind of dream you'd have to be having to spur a killing spree, it's hard to say. If you ascribe to Freud's theories, the murders would fulfill some suppressed wish. But for the record, I had nothing against that dresser.