Nightmare Scenarios and Medical Mysteries
Four years ago, I published an essay about living with crippling night terrors. The experience of writing that — and of having thousands of people read it — was a lesson in the allure of stories about unexplained medical phenomena.
A couple weeks ago, I woke up suddenly. My heart was racing, my mind panicking. “My wallet!” I screamed. “My wallet got stolen!”
My husband Matt, who had been asleep next to me, woke up. “Honey. The dog has your wallet.” He said this completely deadpan, as though it was the most logical thing in the world.
“Oh,” I said, calming down. “Where did he put it?”
“It’s in your bag,” he said. “He put it in your bag.”
“Okay,” I said, and went back to sleep.
Matt has learned how to placate me when I wake up in a panic: He’s learned that even though I may sound completely lucid, I’m actually not awake, and the best way to get me out of it is to play along, sometimes in an absurd way. Disarming me with humor makes the terror less, well, terrifying, whereas telling me “this is a dream” doesn’t work — I am always insistent that it is very real.
“The dog stole my wallet” is one of the more benign experiences I’ve had with night terrors — certainly more benign than, say, getting on top of a desk to try to go through a window, or ripping a cable TV hookup out of the wall — which I wrote about in 2012 when I tried to understand what had been happening to me on and off for more than 10 years.
Night terrors typically occur during the first third of your sleep cycle. You wake up in what can only be described as a state of sheer panic. The panic is usually something in the vein of needing to escape from somewhere, or that the room you’re in is closing in around you, or that there’s someone looming over your bed who’s about to murder you. (Real uplifting stuff.) Except you’re not really awake, even if you’re talking and acting as though you are — and often, getting up and running out of bed and inadvertently causing yourself or others harm. In short, they’re incredibly scary.
In the 2012 story, I never really managed to figure out why I had night terrors; I eventually chalked them up to, roughly, “anxiety and living in New York, and also anxiety.” (I had a lot of anxiety!) Because night terrors affect such a small number of adults — they are more common in children, who typically grow out of them — there haven’t been studies on them like there have been with other sleep disorders, like nightmares and insomnia. The doctors I spoke to gave me vague, unhelpful directives like “hide your knives,” so I wouldn’t be tempted to use one to try to kill the “murderer” in my house.
As someone who has always loved reading stories about unexplained or unexplainable medical phenomena, writing one where I was the person suffering the mysterious condition really felt like I had gone through the looking glass. All the things that make these kinds of medical mysteries so compelling to read — a baffling ailment, a subject desperate to figure out what’s wrong, an indifferent and/or flummoxed medical establishment, institutional doubt as to whether the condition is in fact a figment of imagination — feel particularly fraught when they’re about yourself. They’re not whodunnits so much as they’re do-I-have-its.
I soon found that writing about your own medical mystery comes with its own set of unanticipated pitfalls. As I reported out the story, I started realizing that there’s little hope of being objective when you write a story like this. You simply can’t evaluate what’s wrong with you with the clear eyes of someone on the outside. I couldn’t tell whether I was an unreliable narrator; all I had to go on were my own recollections, which could very well have been faulty — particularly when much of the (scant) literature on the subject confidently stated that people with night terrors don’t remember them.
I had written about myself before, but this felt different, more fraught. This was me at my most vulnerable — I was writing about things that my brain and my body were doing that I had essentially no control over. It wasn’t shameful, exactly, but I’d never talked about it publicly before. Would people think I wasn’t in control of my life?
After the piece was published, though, I found that in fact, by writing about it, I had seized control of my own narrative from my own subconscious. It was empowering in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. I can’t say that writing about my night terrors completely exorcised those demons, but the process did help me come to terms with what I had been going through.
The other stories in this collection are a mix of first-person pieces, like Joyce Cohen’s fascinating dissection of her experience with hyperacusis, which makes everyday sounds feel torturously loud, and stories like Joel Oliphint’s terrifying exploration of empty-nose syndrome, in which people have been driven to suicide after routine sinus operations make the act of breathing feel alien. Each one highlights just how much about the human condition is still completely opaque and unknowable, despite millennia of scientific advances and research, and how the biggest mysteries of all are sometimes the ones that come from within.
Nearly four years after my original story, my night terrors have calmed down. I think I was helped by some big life changes, like moving to Los Angeles from New York and getting married, as well as some smaller ones, like going to sleep around the same time every night, having a quieter bedroom, and eliminating screens before bed. They still flare up occasionally, and they still seem to be, to some extent, out of my control. But as long as I know my dog has my wallet, they seem like something I can live with.
