Sleepwalking Domestic Violence?

Jan 9, 2009— -- Alyson Kaplan awoke suddenly early Sunday morning, struggling to breathe. She found her husband, Mark, above her, choking her with the string from her sweatshirt hood and yelling profanities.

She called the police and reported the incident. But days after his arrest, the Kaplan family of Coral Springs, Fla., is trying to convince authorities that her nightmare was literally part of her husband's bad dream -- a form of sleep violence similar to sleepwalking or sleepeating.

"He has no recollection whatsoever," Eric Schwartzreich, Mark Kaplan's lawyer, said. "He believes when his wife said that it happened, that something happened."

On Wednesday Alyson, 36, petitioned the automatic no-contact order issued between alleged victims and suspects in domestic violence cases and, according to Schwartzreich, she will advocate for no charges to be applied to Kaplan's arrest for battery by strangulation.

"They walked out of the courtroom, hand in hand," Schwartzreich said.

Schwartzreich maintains the whole incident can be blamed on a sleep disorder diagnoses Kaplan received last February at the Coral Springs Sleep Medicine Center of Florida.

"My client suffers from multiple sleep disorders -- sleep apnea, parasomnia," he said. "He sleeps with an oxygen mask most nights. This is a medical disability that he has and she's going to stand by him."

The community around the highly-ranked middle school where Mark Kaplan serves as principal might not accept the sleep violence explanation, according to reporting by the Miami Herald.

But sleep experts have certainly heard of stranger stories.

"It is not the first of its kind -- that is, a sleep-related violence attack by attempted strangulation," said Rosalind Cartwright, chairman of psychology at Rush University in Chicago and a long-time researcher of parasomnias.

That same incident, Cartwright added, was caused by sleep apnea arousing the person during the night.

Various accounts of strange parasomnias -- episodes of violence, eating, or sexual activity related to sleep -- have cropped up in recent years.