It's over ten pages long...a Sunday Times Magazine article. So here's the first page and I'll repaste the url for those who want to sign-up (I've never been spammed by them) and finish it...just a username and password is all.
>The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Deer
By CHIP BROWN
The Strange and the Beautiful
t takes a while to figure out why Dr. Mark Mahowald's grainy sleep-lab videos are so spooky. One immediate reason is the phenomena on the footage -- a class of disorders called ''parasomnias,'' which are defined as unwanted and involuntary behaviors during sleep and are by definition occult, because they appear when most people are unable to witness them. But even the scientists who stay up late by profession never quite get used to what they see. Mahowald, a neurology professor at the University of Minnesota and director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center, likes to say to his students, ''We study the strange and the beautiful.''
To judge from the tapes, that's the understatement of the semester.
Here's a bearded elder man bolting up at 4:30 a.m. He clutches his left leg, waves his right arm and brays at the top of his lungs -- "HO! HO! HO!" -- dementedly jolly cries that also evoke something bestial and wounded. In the morning he remembers nothing of this ''confusional arousal'' triggered by obstructive sleep apnea, a condition in which a constriction of the throat causes you to gasp for breath. Inevitably the man came to be known at the lab as Santa Claus. Mahowald said that when the patient saw himself on tape he was ''horrified'' but finally understood why he'd been kicked out of so many hotels.
Here's a fat, frizzy-haired woman in bed grinding her teeth. The sound is like a door hinge in a haunted house. Her left hand fumbles for a snack; she starts to eat, with no conscious control over her actions.
Here are people in the midst of ''partial'' arousals who spring from bed and rip off the electrodes glued to their heads, removing patches of their scalps as well; people who box the air, flail at imaginary snakes, twitch, jerk, groan, rub their genitals, bloody their hands on nightstands or rock and tremble like bobble-head dolls. People who by day are wry, levelheaded paragons of mental health but who at night find themselves locked in life-and-death struggles with intruders.
Mel Abel, for instance. He's a droll, mild-mannered man who grew up on a farm in Minnesota, owned a tavern for a while and sold real estate. A taped snippet of one of his nights in the sleep lab is part of a parasomnia training video. At 4:24 a.m., Mel begins sleep-talking: ''Quit using the goddamn bowl for banging like that -- quit it now! Get the hell out of here! Go on! That's about four times this morning that I have told you. I don't know if you're that deaf or that dumb, which . . . goddamn continuously. . . . What the hell are you looking for, a walleye?''
For sure, some of these spectacles are hilarious. It's hard not to laugh when a sane Midwesterner who doesn't have a cat sits on the edge of his bed asleep, saying, ''Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.'' But it's not so funny if you are one of the automatons eating raw bacon and cigarettes. Some parasomnia cases have the parameters of Greek tragedy. Mel Abel's eyes brim with tears when he tells how criminally close he came to harming his wife, Harriet. He was struggling with a deer whose neck he was trying to snap when he discovered he was actually home in bed with his hands on Harriet's head and chin. Harriet woke him up, hollering, ''Mel, what in the world are you trying to do?''
These after-hours manifestations of the strange and beautiful undermine all our noonday notions of who we are and what we can command. Suddenly it's easy to understand what spawned the lore of demons and succubi, those ''old hags'' from whom the word nightmare is derived, and the countless other psychoreligious confabulations dreamed up over the centuries since Plato declared that ''in all of us, even good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature which peers out in sleep.''
Our ideas about ourselves are constantly evolving, but the pace of the revisions lately has been accelerated by phenomenal advances in both neuroscience and sleep medicine, which is one of the youngest sciences. ''We are at the dawn of the golden age of sleep research,'' says David Dinges, chief of the division of sleep and chronobiology in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. ''The field is moving so fast scientifically that few researchers can even take the time to write a book.'' <
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/02/magazine/02SLEEP.htmlFascinating article, rorris! Thanks! And welcome aboard!
