Can you imagine what your life would be like if you dozed off out of the blue? This is a reality for the people who suffer narcolepsy. A bizarre malady, it was first registered in scientific lore by the French maverick Jean Baptiste Gelinou, who treated a patient who’d keep falling violently asleep during his work hours whenever he felt an overwhelming emotion. He chose the name “narcolepsy” for the condition, which is a rough Greek translation for “seized by numbness”.
The main physical symptom is dozing-off against one’s will. However, that’s not the only thing that comes with this strange disease. Narcoleptics suffer from excessive sleepiness throughout the day, and sometimes, mostly when they live an intense sensation, fall to the floor because they lose control of their muscles. This phenomenon, called cataplexy, happens because emotions trigger a type of paralysis that other people only experience during sleep. The people who suffer this disease lack orexin, the neurotransmitter that regulates sleep and waking cycles. Therefore, their brains can’t tell the difference between dreams and reality. Another strange symptoms is that narcoleptics often end up wandering around numbly without being aware of what they’re doing. Imagine constantly living through that sensation you have whenever you walk into the kitchen and forget why you went there in the first place.
All of the symptoms of narcolepsy are both delicate and very uncomfortable. Yet, hands down, the most terrifying of them is that people who suffer it sometimes can’t tell whether they’re alive or dead. The bizarre behavior of their brains makes narcoleptics often doubt their life, as they can’t tell the difference between dreams and reality because they suffer from very vivid hallucinations.
Narcoleptic brains are so irregular that they don’t sleep as anybody else would. Usually, there are four stages of sleep, and each of them presents different kind of brain activity. These stages define themselves because of how deep our sleep is. The third stage is called “deep sleep”, and it’s the point when we rest the most. The following stage is what people call REM stage (“rapid-eye movement”). That’s the point of sleep when most people dream. It usually comes until a person has been asleep for over an hour and a half. In contrast, narcoleptics may fall into the REM minutes after they’ve gone to bed. However, because they haven’t completely ceded their consciousness, illusions start taking hold of their behavior. This only makes it more difficult for them to have a tight grip of reality.
Hallucinations are always a double-edged sword. Whereas, on the one hand, it can lead one to experience pleasurable dreams in a much more lucid manner, nightmares become ten times more awful. People feel like they’re living this in their own flesh, to the point that they question over and over again what is happening to them. These hallucinations could lead the person to question their reality, including whether they’re still alive.
As strange as it may sound, narcolepsy is as common as Parkinson’s disease. One in every two thousand people has the chance of suffering it. It is often diagnosed by the MSLT (Multiple Sleep Latency Test), a full-day test that schedules five naps during your day so doctors can measure how easy it is for you to fall asleep in a quiet environment in a span of twenty minutes. Once detected, people are medicated with specific drugs that increase attention levels, such as Modafinil and Ritalin. It is a chronic condition that can be controlled while not fully eradicated.
Narcolepsy is a condition that messes with your whole sense of reality because it dilutes the difference between your real life and the fictions that stem from your brain’s irregularities. Can you imagine what it would be like to live your whole life as if you were caught up in a dream?
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