The reader’s journey starts with the very first parasomnia that Vernon experienced as a child: sleepwalking. I think it shows how essential it is for us teachers to remember how we teach is just as important as what we teach and how huge is the impact we can make to a person's life. 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. Over the next few years she would report from Paris as it fell to the Nazis, London on the first day of the blitz, and Berlin on the day Germany invaded Poland.

Ever since childhood, she’s been prone to “parasomnias” – sleep disturbances that include nightmares, sleepwalking and ghostly hallucinations. 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. In terms of sleepwalking, it seemed to be particularly romanticised in the nineteenth century—especially when the sleepwalker was a young woman.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.

Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive 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. The idea of a woman in an eerily calm trance-like state, vulnerable and often dressed in just her nightgown, seemed to be an object of fascination for a lot of medical men who wanted to watch and study her as she walked about in her sleep. Alice’s book, blending the scientific with stories of vampires, witches and ghosts, is sure to keep readers up at night. Commenting on the acquisition, Jamison said: “Alice and James both have an incredible gift for writing books packed with information, brought to life in vivid colour, and with a thrill of something fantastical troubling the edges of reality.

A note about accessibility– Unfortunately, our Grade II* listed building is not currently fully accessible.

After Ralph’s mother kills herself in the basement, his wife Abby stays up all night scrubbing away the blood, little knowing that a far more onerous task awaits: exorcising Laura’s ghost. This week, we’re here with Alice Vernon, a woman long fascinated by what happens to our brains during sleep. It is curious, lively, humble, utterly genuine – and, if you're a sufferer too, wonderfully reassuring. Looking at the historical records of the 17th-century Salem witch trials, for instance, Vernon learns how experiences of sleep paralysis generated several accusations of witchcraft in the trials. 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.

In response, the brain can conjure up images of sinister figures looming over the sleeper and weighing them down, to explain the sensation of being pinned to the bed and the feeling of pressure on one’s chest and limbs. These can vary from nightmares, sleepwalking, hallucinations, sleep paralysis and even lucid dreaming - just to name a few.

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. Ever since she was a child, her nights have been haunted by nightmares of a figure from her adolescence, sinister hallucinations and episodes of sleepwalking.She points to the DreamsID project, a collaboration between sleep scientist Mark Blagrove and artist Julia Lockheart, in which participants share their dreams, nightmares and other parasomnias, whose findings seem to suggest that the process encourages empathy. The Leeds Library is committed to making its building and collections accessible to everyone in our current capital building works project The Next Chapter Project. This pervasive folk belief, Alice Vernon says, was popularised by Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, who blamed his ghostly apparitions on “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato”. Since then, the idea that our society may be experiencing a “sleep crisis” has become more popular, with reports that people’s sleep debt – namely, the difference between the amount of sleep they need and the amount they actually get – has been rising in recent years. Vernon highlights the need to widen our conversations around sleep beyond the anxious focus on maximising the number of hours we spend doing it.