February 04, 2003

Parasomnia.

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.''

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?''

''We are at the dawn of the golden age of sleep research,'' says David Dinges.
New York Times

Posted by dean at 01:37 AM

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