From eating and motorbike riding while asleep to corks in the bed as a cure for restless legs – a neurologist’s casebook
Jackie, a softly spoken woman in her 70s, had to get rid of her beloved motorbike when she realised she had been driving it while fast asleep – sleep-riding. Adrian, 39, collapses into slumber every time he tells a joke. Don, a tall American in his 60s, has such a problem with eating in his sleep that once, after fitting a padlock to his fridge, he got up to find he had polished off his pet parrot’s bird seed. He feels frustrated that his condition is often treated as “comic relief”; for him and the other patients in Guy Leschziner’s clinic, sleep disorders are no joke.
These are just some of the case histories in The Nocturnal Brain. Leschziner describes himself as a consultant neurologist and sleep physician, but he’s also part detective and part marriage counsellor, as well as a patient listener and a droll storyteller. “I later discover that corks” – in the bed – “are a traditional remedy for night cramps, although I suspect this is not supported by a rich evidence base,” he writes, after interviewing a desperate patient with restless legs syndrome.
Related: Why the sleep industry is keeping us awake at night
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