Movies: I want to play a game, Part 1 – Think like a victim.

There was, for a brief time, a horror blog meme in which people waxed bloggy on the horror films victim that you would save if you could. (Mine's the first victim, the hippy chick, in Jaws, but that's beside the point.) While I never officially participated in this ring o' posts, it did get me thinking about a curious viewing habit of mine: I never really ponder saving a victim in a horror flick. Instead, I find myself wondering if, in their place, I could find a way to escape their fate. For example, I'll imagine that I'm one five kids trapped in the posh country house with Jason lurking outside. What would I do? I think the answer, for the curious, is to split up. Despite the logic of a million horror movies saying otherwise, splitting up is the best strategy. Each person separates and books it in as straight a line as possible in different directions. The different directions thing is key. Splitting up to search an old farmhouse, for example, isn't really splitting up. Splitting up makes distance and time work in your favor. For every victim Jason managed to claim, it becomes increasingly unlikely that he can claim another victim as the distances between potential victims increase and Jason's knowledge of potential victims' locations decreases. Continue running until you reach an Air Force base with access to nuclear weapons.

I first noticed this habit of mine watching Two Thousand Maniacs, Herschell Gordon Lewis's low-fi splat Southern revanchist fantasy. In that flick, one of the victims is nailed into a relatively small wooden barrel. Dozens of long nails are then hammered into the sides of the barrel, making it a sort of economy-class iron maiden. Then the barrel is rolled down a hill. The victim, presumably, bounces around inside, being pulped by repeated impact with the nails. After seeing that flick, I got obsessed with question of whether or not one could survive that death trap. I eventually came to the conclusion that, if you agreed that that painful mutilation was better than death, then you should shove your feet and hands against one side of the barrel and prop your back hard against the other side. This will, unfortunately, cause massive damage to your hands, feet, and back. But, if you could hold that pose for just a minute or two – which, granted, is no small thing – then you could prevent yourself from being bounced around, which is where the real damage of the whole barrel roll thing tips irrevocably into fatality. Sadly, the whole thing's academic as the first thing the ghost rednecks do when the barrel stops is look inside to see their handiwork; but still, you'd have given yourself a few more painful moments of suffering existence and the chance to try to think your way through another deathtrap. For what that's worth.

As it is Halloween, it's time to roll out yet another installment of the critically reviled, yet perennially popular long-running Saw franchise. This got me thinking: If the structure of each kill in the Saw flicks is, essentially, a game in the truest game theory sense of the term. Therefore applying a little bit of game theory logic to the traps of Saw should allow us to generate a few survival strategies for Jigsaw victims. What does game theory tell us about Jigsaw's traps.

Reader beware: I'm no expert on the subject of game theory, so this series is something more along the lines of a thought experiment informed by limited exposure to game theory. We're just thinking aloud here. Still, I think the results are interesting.

First, let's define some terms. We'll keep it simple. Games are discrete events that have a set number of players, a defined number of strategies (in Jigsaw traps, these are always "play along" or "don't play along"), and a set number of outcomes. NB: Not all game theories games meet this criteria, so you can already see were abusing the concept. This is why I've never been awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics.

All this sounds obvious, but it is important. Within the Saw franchise there characters who start off in a trap alone only to realize that they are, in fact, part of a bigger game. For our purposes, we'll say that every time you change any of the three criteria of a game, you're in a new game. If you are wandering through a trap maze and you suddenly find yourself with a group of people all in the same fix, consider yourself in a new game.

The idea that each trap is a discrete event is sometimes very easy to figure out: Often a Jigsaw trap involves a single person making a single yes/no choice. But more complex games confuse the issue. In Saw II and Saw V both featured characters working their way through a trapped filled environments. Is each trap a separate game or is the game over when the players are either all dead or have exited the environment? This is wrapped up, curiously enough, in a later issue: the number of players. We'll discuss it in more detail later, but for now let's agree that in games with one or two player games, each trap is a new game. In games featuring three or more players, the entire time spent in the trapped environment is a single game.

Every game needs players. Players are defined in our little thinkie thought post here as any person within a Jigsaw trap that can affect the results of the game by making a choice of whether or not to play the game according to Jigsaw's rules. Again, this sound obvious, but it is an important distinction. Throughout the franchise, we meet characters trapped in Jigsaw games that are not actually players. In the first film, Amanda (not yet a Jigsaw cultist) must decide whether or not to kill a man for the key trapped inside him. If she does not kill the man, a bear-trap like device on her head will spring into action and rip her head apart. There are two people in this trap, but Amanda is the only player as only she can affect the outcome of the game with her choice.

Number of outcomes is tricky, mostly because some strategies lead to certain outcomes, but others only might lead to specific outcomes. Namely, your dead meat if you don't play along, but playing along does not ensure that you're going to survive. Case in point, the man in the web of razor wire web in the first film (seen in subsequent flashbacks): Though he tries to play Jigsaw's game, his body gives out. Furthermore, living through the trap might not be a given victim's best-case scenario. In actual game theory, this would not be incidental. In some Jigsaw traps, part of the game's logic involves the victim pondering whether or not living mutilated or implicated in a crime or whatever is worth playing the game. For the purposes of making the conceptualizing Jigsaw's traps as games as easy as possible, we'll consider just two outcomes: Players either live or die, and living is always better than dying.

For all the gonzo Rube Goldbergian inventiveness of Jigsaw's traps (and we'll consider traps designed by any member of his cult to be a Jigsaw trap), there are only three variables that actually make any difference to a victim's survival.

1. Trap rigor: Is the trap well made? In his early period, Jigsaw made a few traps that a person might survive simply on the basis of blunder. Such a fuck-up appears in the fourth film. This is an unlikely out, but it is there.
2. Game validity: Is there really an out? Like ideological and religious leaders everywhere, the second Jigsaw starts to fade, his followers start to screw-up his teachings. Specifically, Amanda and Hoffman both construct traps that don't actually have escape routes. If this is the case, you're screwed no matter what.
3. Number of players: How many people can affect the outcome of the game? Remember that we're counting only those people who can alter the course of a game by choosing to play along or not as players.

That's it. At rock-bottom, whether you've got a bear trap on your head or you're on the bottom of a Jacuzzi full of puréed rotting pig corpses, those are the only three variables that matter. (There's a single exception to this – we'll get to that later.) You'll note that, from the perspective of a victim within a Jigsaw trap, you can only be conscious of the last one. If factors 1 and 2 are in play, there's no way you could know it and, therefore, no way you could reasonably factor it into any strategic response. Maybe you'll get lucky and the trap has an unforeseen out that you'll stumble across (this happens twice in the series: in Saw 4 and Saw 5) or maybe you're screwed no matter what you do (this happens at least twice in the series: S3 and S5 - curiously, the death trap in S5 also happens to be the trap that lacks vigor, so it was built to strictly kill, but had an unforeseen out): Either way, you cannot be sure and your better off acting as if you are in a rigorous trap that's a valid game.

This means that you focus on the remaining factor: How many players?

From a perspective of survival strategies, all of Jigsaw's traps can be organized into two categories, each of which demands a separate approach.

1. One and two player games.
2. Three or more player games.

In the next post, we'll discuss how you'd survive one and two player games.

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Stuff: "Tastes like a bloody Band-Aid."

In a previous post, I mentioned my weakness for swag that, rather than just pitching the show/flick/whatever, pretends to actually be from the world of the property it's pushing. Though this wasn't exactly what I had in mind . . .

The Onion's AV Club test drive HBO's Tru Blood blood orange soda drink, a tie-in to their sturm und fang vampire soap opera.

From the post:

In the show, most vampires don't seem to really like how Tru Blood tastes. They choke it down—most like it served warm—only because they want to live in peace with those pesky humans. So how does a company make a drink in the real world that mimics the taste of badly mimicked blood? Why, with blood oranges, of course!

Here's what the HBO Shop has to say about its exclusive, expensive product: "It’s official! The Tru Blood drink has now been 'de-fictionalized' and emerges into reality as a delicious blood orange carbonated drink. Meticulously crafted, the Tru Blood Drink is an exact replica of the bottle design as seen on True Blood. The 14 oz glass Tru Blood bottle is stained in a rich red, with raised Tru Blood English lettering and matching Japanese Kanji. This blood orange flavored soda is slightly tart, lightly sweet and subtly carbonated. Designed to taste great while matching the appearance of Bill's favorite drink, the drink pours like a regular soda, but with the standing appearance in a glass is stormy and mysterious."

How's it taste? Along with the opinion that does duty as this post's headline, here are some other notable comments:

"This is actually really good. It's a little sweeter and a little less sharp than most orange soda. It doesn’t get up my nose as much. But it’s richer and fruitier."

"It's chalky. Probably why it tastes like ground-up Smarties."

"Tastes like a melted cherry Slurpee."

"With bacon vodka, it tastes like biting a live pig, which I suppose is pretty vampire-like."

"I guess fans of the series will find this kitschy, but my appraiser tells me my Addams Family collectors' cups aren't worth shit."

The original story contains video of some of the Onion crew trying the faux faux-blood drink straight up and as a mixer.

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Stuff: A post-horror world?

Though it is mostly focused on sci-fi, Guardian UK blogger Damien G. Walter throws in a little horror into his consideration of a post-science fiction world. We should note that Walter sees a distinction between "sci-fi" and "science fiction." Perhaps that's a UK thing - can any international readers enlighten us? Anywho, from the blog post:

But even as sci-fi powers its way to full spectrum dominance of the cultural battlefield, many readers and writers of speculative fiction are looking at the banners proclaiming Mission Accomplished with, if not awe, then certainly shock. Among these readers, sci-fi is a term of derision, in much the same way that literary fiction would reject being labelled as soap opera simply because it happens to have similarities with EastEnders. Sci-fi is at best a dilution, at worst an absolute corruption of the ideas born out of fantasy, horror and science fiction over their long history. The wave of sci-fi overwhelming the mass media today, while often fun, is rarely on the level of the best those genres have to offer.

Yet the literary tradition that has its roots in HG Wells and Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe and George MacDonald, that grew through the writing of Tolkien, Lieber, Howard, Heinlein, Clarke and Asimov, and branched into the modern genres of fantasy, horror and science fiction, may have reached its fruition. The modern mythology of speculative fiction that those writers shaped is now as familiar to modern audiences as their everyday lives. Alien civilisations, robot overlords, zombie uprisings, elven nations and starships have become a lingua franca for artists of all kinds to draw on, whether to create light-hearted entertainments or to use as metaphors to explore the darkest recesses of human psychology and society.

The walls that defined speculative fiction as a genre are quickly tumbling down. They are being demolished from within by writers such as China Miéville and Jon Courtney Grimwood, and scaled from the outside by the likes of Michael Chabon and Lev Grossman. And they are being ignored altogether by a growing number of writers with the ambition to create great fiction, and the vision to draw equally on genre and literary tradition to achieve that goal.

So the question for today is, can we imagine a what post-horror-ghetto world would look like? Is it even possible?

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Movies: Three kinds of apocalypse.

Yesterday, the wife, my horror flick wingman Dave, and I went to go see the latest recrudescence of zombie cinema, long-time Jimmy Kimmel Live! director Ruben Fleischer's Zombieland. Watching Fleischer's rigorously non-objectionable zom-com actioner, I realized that my taste in end times has changed radically over the years.

For those who haven't heard the news, because you just came out of a coma, in your private isolation ward, in a special secret lab, on the bottom of the ocean, on the Jupiter moon of Io, Zombieland features Woody Harrelson (doing a cleaned up, good guy version of his Mickey character from Natural Born Killers) and the poor man's Michael Cera, Jesse Eisenberg, on a wacky road trip across a zombie infested post-collapse US. Along the way, the boys meet a hottie and her younger sister, Woody gets dangerously close to having to emote, and not-Cera learns that sometimes to win somebody's heart you need to do an awful lot of killing. Built around an uninspired plot, populated with thin characters, and breezily predictable, Zombieland is aimed as people who find Shaun of the Dead too cerebral and Diary of the Dead too frightening.

What is innovative about Zombieland is its tone. Zombieland may put to rest the idea that the engine of zombie cinema runs off steady flow of cultural anxieties, from war to financial meltdown. It is hard to imagine a less angsty, troubled film than Zombieland. Not only do our characters gleefully dispatch zombies with giddy abandon, but when one of the characters accidentally dispatches a pure strain human the most notable reaction is laughter followed by a hasty, "But it is sad though."

What Zombieland has done is take the Merry Looter Scene typical of zombie flicks since Dawn of the Dead and made it the entire basis for the flick's charm. The Merry Looter Scene is the near inevitable scene in a modern post-apoc flick in which our protags go hog wild in a grocery store, shopping mall, whatever. Despite the apocalyptic conditions that prevail, there's something carnivalesque about the scene and, more often then not, the scene involves our protags wallowing in fancy clothes, nice booze, fancy new cars, or whatever else symbolizes that the lowly survivors are now free of the economic constraints the once bound them. Doom's all around them, but in the topsy-turvy world of the zombie holocaust, the bike messenger and the beat cop are now the rulers of all they survey. They aren't really the meek - they've usually had to do a metric assload of killing to get where they are - but they have definitely inherited the Earth. (As an aside, this is hardly novel. As seen in this years Silent Scream Series, the French silent film The Crazy Ray features a carnivalesque apocalypse.)

The thing about this is that it is expresses an essentially conservative, in the most literal sense of the term, impulse. In flicks like Zombieland, 28 Days Later, and the various "of the Dead" franchise films, the world is pretty much the one we recognize, simply more dangerous and more depopulated. More importantly, there's a crucial continuity with the old world. In Zombieland, aside from the rubbish in the streets, the infrastructure of the old world is still intact. (In fact, we even get a gag in which the narrator explains that a particular Texas town looks like it was destroyed in the zombicaust, but it is actually just a dump.) Everywhere they go has power, there are no unchecked wildfires, nobody frets about leaking nuclear power plants, and so on. All that has happened is that the people who were once the losers and outcasts are now free to do as they wish. And what they wish to do is drive nice cars, stay in plush joints, drink A-grade booze, get laid, and play Monopoly with real money. The characters in Zombieland don't want to be on the bottom of the heap, but they want the heap.

Which brings us to Thundarr the Barbarian. When I was a kid, my favorite post-apoc landscape belonged to the short-running Thundarr the Barbarian cartoon (1980 to '82). In the "future" of that show, in the then far-distant year of 1994, a runaway planet zipped between the Earth and the Moon. The Moon split in two, but gravity held each half in about the same position of the current Moon. The Earth was racked by catastrophes and, 2000 year later, is home to all manner of magic and mutants.

But don't take my word for it. Here's the intro:



Admittedly, the cosmic doom visited upon the Earth in that intro is far more epic than a zombie holocaust (that damn runaway planet apparently even stole all our clouds). But that's not really the distinction that sticks out in my mind. Rather, the world of Thundarr seems to have radically split from the pre-disaster world. The show did have one character who constantly pointed out the remnants of pre-collapse world: Princess Ariel's function in the show was to act as a exposition, explaining trains and soda pop and bowling and Cape Canaveral and whatever else might pop up to Thundarr as the plots demanded. (Oddly, the female figure who remains the sole link to Earth's past was a reoccurring motif in '80s cartoons: the mom in The Herculoids was a stranded Earth astronaut who attempted to teach her child about her native home as was Prince Adam's mom in He-Man.) What's interesting, however, is that Thundarr usually didn't give a rats ass. Insomuch as Ariel's book lernin' was useful for blowing up the evil wizard's war tanks or killing any given shoe's baddy, he cared. But there was never this sense that Thundarr or his Wookie-rip-off companion Ookla were ever all that interested in the pre-collapse world. The idea of re-establishing the previous order or even mourning its passing doesn't occur to them. They represent a radical break with the past. The heap has been swept away and replaced. These post-apoc works are the opposite of the Merry Looter flicks. We're going to dub them "Ookla, Ariel, We Ride," or OAWR, works.

As a kid, it was that kind of post-apoc I dug. In my juvenile mind, the post-end looked like Gamma World or Thunder Dome - and as soon as the fit hit the shan, we'd all start wearing football padding studded with metal spikes. There should be mutant animals and plants walking about. Sure, we can have a car or two. Maybe even a gun. But, honestly, what we really need is Year Zero weaponry and some black magic. Good times.

Now, however, I have to admit that Thundarr-style shenanigans now seem hopelessly dated. Case in point, though it is hopelessly unoriginal, Zombieland doesn't seem retro in anyway. The same can't be said of Doomsday, Neil Marshall's retro-tastic post-apoc flick which managed not only to get numerous football safety pad fashion plates in shot, but also managed to work in a bunch of Medieval knights in a castle because why the hell not?

Eighties vintage feel aside, I think there's something else behind my shift from digging surrealistic Thundarr cosmic doom to more Zombieland-style doom-mongering. I think part of it has to do with growing older. When you're a kid, you have no emotional investment in the system that supports you. All of it is confusing, illogical, and often profoundly unfair. OAWR films not only satisfy the fantasy that the adult world gets swept away, but the radical weirdness of the world levels everybody regardless of real-life experience. In contrast, as I've grown older and softer in the belly, I don't mind the idea that life as we'd know it would be swept away in a violent wave of mutilation - but I totally want a comfy bed when I'm not slaughtering undead or fighting cannibal bike gangs or what have you.

So that's what I'm proposing Zombieland doesn't feel as dated as the original Dawn of the Dead because the horror audience is aging and we are too into our apartments and children and cars and our increasingly valueless 401Ks to enjoy the fantasy of the world as we know it getting totally wiped off the face of the Earth. We just want the all the jerks dead so we no longer have to punch clock.

There is, notably, a third way for post-apoc tales. Most post-collapse worlds, be they Merry Looter tales or OAWR works, have a strong element of wish fulfillment in that they posit a simpler world. In Zombieland the characters discuss how great it is that parking is free and we're not plagued with Facebook status updates. The fantasy is that a disaster strips all the superficial crap away, leaving behind something purer and truer; see Walking Dead back cover copy. Few post-apoc works suggest that life will simply just get worse and worse and worse. Nothing is clarified, and if you started at the bottom of the heap, some armed warlord a-hole will most likely just stomp you down even more. Adam Rapp and George O'Connor's Ball Peen Hammer is one of the few post-apoc works that suggests that a post-collapse world would look like Somalia on its worst day. In Rapp and O'Conner's grim graphic novel, there's still a government, but it has grown brutal and sporadic in its presence. Dog packs run the street. A flesh-eating virus is rotting its way through population. There is no power or running water. There are conspiracies afoot; but, with no stable communication systems, nobody can be sure what is going on, or even if those involved in the conspiracy still know what's going on. Worse yet, there's a young generation of kids who feel this state of affair is normal. Honestly, the dark hard-edged weirdness of Ball Peen Hammer is probably the most genuine image of what humanity, without all the social props, would look like. But it is too relentless to pack a megaplex. We're more optimistic about the end of everything.

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Link Proliferation: Don't be a slutagator.

Just a quick one today.

Gator Loving

Regulars of this blog know my love for all film crocogator-ish, so I thought it was about time we actually discussed us some crocogatorish loving news. According to a 10-year study of gator nests in Louisiana, some alligators monogamously pair bond.

The ecologists were surprised to find that out of 10 alligators' nests that were studied, seven females chose to mate with the same male over the course of many years. The open habitat and dense population of alligators in this area makes it likely that females encounter many males during the breeding season, further corroborating the idea that mating fidelity is by choice, not chance. As Lance said in a press release: To actually find that 70 percent of our re-trapped females showed mate fidelity was really incredible. I don’t think any of us expected that the same pair of alligators that bred together in 1997 would still be breeding together in 2005 and may still be producing nests together to this day.

Ain't it sweet.

Heads Will Roll

Over at Largehearted Boy, the regular "Book Notes" column features Marc Estrin's historical novel The Good Doctor Guillotin. The novel follows the different lives of five men, all of which meet at the gallows for the first guillotining of the French Revolution.

For fans of popular music (in the folk sense rather than the current mass cult sense) Estrin links to three revolution era songs beloved by the revolting masses.

The Marseillaise needs little explanation. The one intriguing fact is that it was written by C-J Rouget de Lisle on April 25, 1792, the very day our hero Nicholas Pelletier, the patient, the package, was executed. Claude-Joseph wrote it at his table in Strasbourg -- childhood home of the builder of the execution machine.

Ça ira is an enthusiastic, if bloodthirsty, tongue twister in which we find the aristocrats swinging from lamp posts and Marie Antoinette in hell. It was the most popular "people's song" during the Revolution.

La Carmagnole was a popular revolutionary song and dance again concerning Marie Antoinette who, by the way, was unpopular not only because of her "Let them eat cake" attitude toward the poor, but because her Austrian family was likely to attack France to preserve its own and Europe's monarchies. Listen at Wikipedia. There is a wonderful Kathe Kollwitz drawing and set of sketches ("Carmagnole") of a revolutionary crowd dancing around a guillotine in Paris.

Next time you're drunkenly stumbling down the streets of the Financial District, raging impotently at the self-appointed masters of the universe, and promising to wash the nation free of sins of their corruption in a tidal wave of their accursed blood, you now have a couple of songs you can sing at the top of your lungs.

Nifty.

This Is a Picture of a Mummy Monkey

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Books: Who the Wild Things were.

The online edition of the Boston Globe has an appreciation piece on Sendak's 1963 classic Where the Wild Things Are.

The piece caught my attention for this little tidbit about the inspiration for the Wild Things:

In interviews, Sendak has said the Wild Things were inspired by visiting relatives, whose appearance in his boyhood Brooklyn home were a source of great alarm to the budding storyteller. Just who were these creatures, barging into the living room and upsetting the domestic routine? (They’d come over for dinner, so young Sendak was told, but was he the meal?) Sendak cites one uncle in particular, named Joe, as a template for the Wild Things, and looking at the illustrations we can imagine him as he appeared to the impressionable child: a rotund, hirsute guy, jovial but prone to overexcitement, toothy, and bulgy-eyed.

A profile piece published last month in the Oakland Tribune described the influence in even greater detail:

The youngest of three children in a Polish-Jewish family, Sendak was not the most robust child. He nearly died from bouts of pneumonia and scarlet fever, and spent a great deal of time indoors, drawing, reading and listening to his father's vivid stories about life in the shtetl and family members lost in the Holocaust. Or he was at the movies, soaking up Mickey Mouse shorts, campy monster movies and silver screen glamour. The result was an incredible mixture of folklore, cinematic screenplays, lurking danger and wild children's stories, which eventually wove themselves into the rich tapestry of Sendak's books.

And the wild things were based on the relatives who came to dinner at the Sendak home.

"They smoked cigars, their teeth were terrible, and they had hairs pouring out of their noses, and what was the matter with them?!" Sendak says in a taped interview available to museum visitors. "Waiting for my mother to get all the food ready — and her being late — meant these people could eat you. If they got to be hungry enough, they would eat you because they handle you so roughly."

But nothing terrified young Sendak as completely as the Lindbergh baby kidnapping in 1932. Famous pilot Charles Lindbergh's young son was snatched straight from his crib. And Sendak, then just 4, insisted that his own father protect him by sleeping in his room, curled up on the floor with a weapon.

"I can see him now in his underwear top and underwear, with a baseball bat," Sendak says in a taped interview. "I would not go to sleep — that's when my insomnia began — until he was safely on the ground with the bat. And my uncle's great mistake was in saying to my father, 'Philip, who would want your children?' I never forgot the pain of him thinking we weren't good enough to be kidnapped. So that's how distorted a child's emotional conception can be. And I waited all my life to get even with him."

Everyone knows that uncle now — he's the least attractive of the wild things. And now, of course, he's famous, as are all the characters in Sendak's more than 100 children's books and dozens of opera, ballet and theatrical sets, including "Brundibar," the Sendak-Tony Kushner collaboration staged by Berkeley Rep in 2005.

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Mad science: How'd you sleep?

What Horror Movie Are We Today? We're "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari."

The Mind Hacks blog has a link to a study titled "Potentially Lethal Behaviors Associated With Rapid Eye Movement Sleep Behavior Disorder: Review of the Literature and Forensic Implications." In plain English, the study reviews nearly 40 cases of potentially murderous and suicidal sleepwalking behavior. The Journal of Forensic Sciences article is behind a paywall, but Mind Hacks teases out some of the cases:

A 63-year-old man with RBD and delayed-onset Shy-Drager Syndrome reported "a progressive 10-year history of abnormal behavior during sleep. He would at various times choke, kick, punch, and spit on his wife while he was asleep. In addition, complex behaviors such as getting out of bed and running into walls while asleep were reported by family members. This behavior occurred while the patient was dreaming, usually of being attacked.

A 67-year-old man had a 3-year history of progressive stiffness and slowing of his left side. Five years before the onset of these symptoms, he began having vivid dreams together with violent movements during sleep. Once he dreamed of being trapped in a house on fire, and he almost jumped out of the window, if not for his wife awakening and restraining him.

A 25-year-old woman with multiple sclerosis "presented with a 6-month history of sudden awakenings from fearful, often vivid…dreams and with terrified screams or violent behavior such as kicking, running to the door or to the window, crying and falling out of bed. If awakened, she always recalled a fighting dream. Once she repetitively banged her head against the floor, inducing a large facial hematoma. On that occasion, she was dreaming that a man was knocking her against the wall.

The post also points to a case where a person accused of homicide and attempted homicide won an acquittal by claiming the acts were committed in their sleep.

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