During a particularly severe winter in the early 1960s, everybody in my elementary school got a lesson about the dangers of hypothermia. We were warned, should we find ourselves in a blizzard or too long on the toboggan hill, that a too-low body temperature could result in drowsiness that could prove fatal. The idea of giving in to a sleep to the death fascinated and horrified me, but I knew – even at that age – that if saving my own life meant resisting a nap, I wouldn’t be able to do it.
I have fallen asleep reading in bed, watching TV, riding as a passenger in a car, on a train, on a plane – all those relaxing situations where, if I’m already tired, passivity or quiet pleasure will be enough tip me into the land of Nod. But lots of people do that, and especially in my family, whose members have a dominant doze gene.
My dad was a confirmed nap-taker, as are my brothers, and some of their adult children. So far, my kids seem to have escaped this. On my wedding day, in the afternoon interval between the ceremony and the dinner, all the members of my family - except for me, and only because I had a 9-month old baby to look after – fell asleep on my mother’s lawn, at roughly the same time. Sleep contagion had a human domino effect, and while we all thought it was funny, no one thought it was odd. Just as we’re all tall, we’re also what I would term ‘low energy’. (One of my brothers married a woman with an energy surplus, who has injected some welcome dynamism into the bloodline.)
But I also fall asleep at less appropriate times. Reading aloud, for instance, which made for abbreviated and bizarre story times with my kids when they were small. I would sometimes carry on talking in a kind of somnambular automatism, coming to a few minutes later to my children’s incredulous ‘Mom, do you have any idea what you just said?’ I have drifted off in dentists’ waiting rooms and passport offices, at the movies, concerts and the ballet, and most embarrassingly, during piano lessons. (But only sometimes, if the piece was long and boring!). I don’t think I was ever caught at it, but it could be that my students were just too diplomatic to say anything.
There is almost nowhere that I can’t cat-nap. Only once did I ever nod off at the wheel, but that scared me so much, I never let it happen again. While briefly and tediously employed by a major oil company, I once arrived a few minutes late to a sales meeting to find all seats taken. When my boss offered to get another chair, I said I’d rather stand because ‘it’s harder to fall asleep on your feet’. I thought it was funny. He didn’t.
It’s always bothered me that I didn’t have more get-up-and-go. I avoid thinking of all the things I might have accomplished had mid-day inertia not ‘cut the legs off’ my intentions. (That’s how the French refer to a sudden loss of energy) Mornings usually start out fine, although my head can be drooping before noon if I’m at the computer doing something passive like reading the news. Writing falls into a similar category – it lacks external stimulation and is often laborious – and it’s frequently more than I can manage to stay awake, let alone alert and creative. It’s part of the reason why I despair of ever finishing my novel. It never occurred to me that there was anything I could do about this, since even getting more sleep didn’t help. Then a facetious remark made last summer to an in-law about her husband’s sleepiness – just another family narcoleptic – made me curious enough to do a little research.
Narcolepsy is characterized by excessive daytime sleepiness and usually, but not always, accompanied by one of more of the following symptoms: cataplexy (sudden muscular weakness, usually with an emotional trigger such as laughter) sleep paralysis, hypnagogic hallucinations and automatic behaviour. None of these really applied to me, but bells started clanging wildly when I read that REM sleep episodes are abnormally frequent in people with narcolepsy. Long ago, my favourite Belgian stopped asking me about my dreams. There’s no end to my tales of night-time adventure and it is no exaggeration to say that I am busy all night long. Every night.
For the narcoleptic person, REM sleep kicks in soon after falling asleep (usually in less than 15 minutes instead of the usual 90) and occurs far more frequently than it does during normal sleep. Restful non-REM periods are sharply reduced, and the result is an inadequate amount of restorative sleep, leading to daytime fatigue. In addition, the ‘sleep/wake’ switch in the brain is thought to malfunction, as perhaps it does for insomniacs, but in the opposite way.
All of this made sense to me, and I was pretty convinced that I had found a valid reason for my dopiness. My family doctor, who probably has her share of patients who self-diagnose via the internet, took it all seriously and referred me to a sleep clinic. My answers to their initial questionnaire, which included the Epworth Sleepiness Scale, determined that depression was not at fault. The next step was to determine if I slept poorly due to sleep apnea and I was sent home with a machine to record my sleep behaviours, breathing patterns and snores. Once that was ruled out, the last step was to make arrangements for an overnight stay at the clinic, where electrodes will be stuck to my head to analyze nocturnal brain waves. (I’ll have to wait until my next trip to Calgary for that.)
The neurologist says she won’t be surprised if the results show abnormal REM activity, which will make a diagnosis of narcolepsy straightforward. If they don’t, then I have what is simply referred to as idiopathic hyper-somnolence – excessive sleepiness of unknown origin. In either case, there is no cure, although there are treatments. Scheduled napping is one. Taking a medically-justifiable afternoon snooze is, to me, an unproductive option that offers no real improvement, but the other is a medication to regulate that on-off switch in the brain. It is not understood exactly how the drug Modafinil works, but it is considered a much safer, gentler alternative to Ritalin, a stimulant with a molecular resemblance to cocaine. I don’t like the idea of Ritalin, and while I have taken it occasionally for a diagnosed condition and found that it does help me to focus, it’s an ineffective defence against an overwhelming desire to sleep. It helps to stay physically active or visually stimulated but neither of these things is compatible with writing.
Narcolepsy is considered by the medical profession to be seriously under-diagnosed, and many people never investigate the cause of their sleepiness, often classifying themselves as simply lazy or low in energy. It’s a negative self-image, and one that I had for a long time. I also blamed my owlish tendencies, but even after 8 hours of non-stop sleep, I am still tired. My days were like a paraphrase of that famous description of an airline pilot’s job: Hours and hours of lethargy punctuated by moments of intense activity.
For years I’ve joked that I could fall asleep at a red light. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me that when you’re tired, you feel sleepy, but the neurologist drily assured me that getting a few winks in while waiting for the light to change is not a normal thing to do. The oddest thing about this whole experience is that when I take the medication, although I still feel tired, I don’t have to fight the urge to put my head down. Tiredness and sleepiness have always been inseparable to me, and it has been a revelation to discover that one can exist without the other. To understand how that feels, just imagine being ravenously hungry, but without any desire to eat.
Sleep has been a drug I was involuntarily addicted to, and without that need, my afternoons – and this is 
And it’s great, finally, to be able to live up to my name.
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