A new study of sleepwalkers found an intriguing paradox: Although sleepwalkers have an increased risk for headaches and migraines while awake, during sleepwalking episodes they are unlikely to feel pain even while suffering an injury.

Results show that sleepwalkers were nearly 4 times more likely than controls to report a history of headaches (odds ratio = 3.80) and 10 times more likely to report experiencing migraines (OR = 10.04), after adjusting for potential confounders such as insomnia and depression. Among sleepwalkers with at least one previous sleepwalking episode that involved an injury, 79 percent perceived no pain during the episode, allowing them to remain asleep despite hurting themselves.

“Our most surprising result was the lack of pain perception during the sleepwalking episodes,” said principal investigator Dr. Regis Lopez, psychiatrist and sleep medicine specialist at Hospital Gui-de-Chauliac in Montpellier, France. “We report here, for the first time, an analgesia phenomenon associated with sleepwalking.”

Study results are published in the November issue of the journal Sleep. (1)

Pain is our criterion of being alive.

Feeling is our criterion of being alive.

But what if the opposite is true?

What if only when you are truly alive you do not feel pain at all?

Challenge your definitions and assumptions. And you might end up with a different reality. What is “true” after all? Who knows. Perhaps something in between. Perhaps the resultant of all possibilities. Perhaps both 1 and -1. Perhaps 0.

Pain. No pain. => No feeling is the solution.