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REM Sleep Behaviour Disorder
In REM sleep the normal muscle paralysis fails and the person acts out dreams: talking, moving, sometimes getting hurt.
It affects about 1% of the population - a figure from a Swiss cohort, HypnoLaus in Lausanne - and is a recognised early marker of neurodegenerative disease.
During REM sleep the body should stay still. When that paralysis fails, the movements of the dream become real: abrupt gestures that break the rest of the sleeper and of the bed partner.
Fragmented sleep leaves daytime sleepiness, but the real value lies elsewhere: RBD often precedes by years diseases that affect attention, movement and cognition. Recognising it opens the way to early clinical follow-up, not to alarm.
It is a parasomnia: the body acts while the mind sleeps. Drive Awake includes it because it joins the two threads of the project - the science of sleep and its relevance to safety, present and future.