A GERMAN couple was in absolute panic on Wednesday morning, when they awoke to find their 10-year-old son had disappeared from their hotel room in Paralimni.
Calm was restored, however, when police found the boy sleeping peacefully in a vacant room on the floor above his parents. The 10-year-old had sleepwalked out of their room during the night..
According to Paralimni police officer Yiannos Kapnoulas, who was directly involved in the case, the family had gone to bed at around 11pm on Tuesday.
“The child must have sleepwalked out of the room at around 12.30am – some staff members had seen him in the elevator, others on the floor above his parents’ room,” Kapnoulas said.
When the couple awoke in the morning to find their son was missing, all her broke loose.
Paralimni Police Station, as well as the district’s CID and Crime Prevention Unit, arrived at the hotel to investigate.
“The mum was out of her mind crying,” said Kapnoulas. “Everything was going through her mind; she is in a foreign country and was terrified about what might have happened. You know, the case of Madeleine [McCann] who went missing while on holiday with her parents in the Algarve and hasn’t been found since was going through everybody’s minds.”
So the police decided to take everything from the start and began questioning every single hotel employee who had been on duty over the evening.
“We interviewed each member of staff one by one and concluded that the boy was last seen on the floor above his parents’ room,” said Kapnoulas. “So we decided to check all the vacant rooms on that floor; that’s when we found him, fast asleep in the room directly above his parents.”
It turns out, a hotel employee had seen the 10-year-old on the third floor and when the boy in his sleeplike trance said he had been locked out, the employee went and got the key to the room the boy was trying to enter, and let him in, without checking to see if his parents were actually in there.
The parents’ relief, said the officer, was palpable. “They were elated; the boy’s mum burst into tears and surrounding tourists started applauding. It is nice to have such a positive outcome for once.”
According to Wikipedia, sleepwalking – also called somnambulism or noctambulism – is a sleep disorder that makes sufferers engage in activities that are normally associated with being awake, while being asleep or in a sleep-like state.
“Sleepwalking is usually defined by or involves the person affected apparently shifting from his or her prior sleeping position and moving around and performing normal actions as if awake (cleaning, walking and other activities).”
Sleepwalkers are not exactly unconscious during their episodes, just not conscious of their actions. They have no recollection of their sleepwalking actions, so unless they are awakened by someone else, some sleep disorders can go unnoticed for years. Sleepwalking is more commonly experienced in people with high levels of stress, anxiety or psychological factors and in people with genetic factors (family history), or sometimes a combination of both.
