Sleeping Beauty Read Free Page B

was true to form. After a stunned silence he looked at the ground, did a couple of knee bobs, harrumphed! a few times and said, “A rock band ?”
    I’m wondering if we’re going to spend the entire time talking about my dubious employment when Wendy changes tack.
    “Okay, let’s get down to business. When did your symptoms begin? When did you first notice that something was wrong?”
    I settle in. This could take awhile. “About two years ago I started to notice that it took a long time to wake up.”
    She nods while she writes. “Tell me about that.”
    I clear my throat, trying to think how to explain. “Well, I would be awake in my mind, but I wasn’t always sure I really was awake.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because I couldn’t move. Well, sometimes I could open my eyes, but not much else.”
    “Okay, you couldn’t move. Anything else?”
    “And there were these...visions.” I hate even saying this word aloud, so my voice sort of drifts off into an unintelligible murmur at the end.
    “What kind of visions?”
    Oh lord, this is embarrassing. Why she had to ask Charmant to sit in on this after our disastrous first encounter (well, disastrous second encounter, I suppose) I have no idea. “I would see things...people and colors and things in the room with me, around my bed.”
    She looks over at Charmant. “Brendan?”
    He looks irritated, like the kid who always gets called on in class because he’s the only one who ever knows the answer. “When a person enters deep dreaming REM sleep, the brain paralyzes the body so the dreamer doesn’t act out the dream and hurt themselves while they’re unconscious.”
    I’m annoyed that he hasn’t looked at me once. It’s like I’m not even sitting here.
    He continues, still speaking only to Wendy. “Hypnopompic Paralysis like Ms. Beau is describing”– the use of my last name doesn’t go unnoticed by me–“happens when you wake up while you’re still in REM sleep. The person will be largely unable to move, and may even continue to dream while awake.”
    Finally he makes eye contact with me. “This can obviously be terrifying.”
    I’m about to volley back something sarcastic like, “No shit, Sherlock,” but instead I push my tongue to the roof of my mouth to discourage my tear glands, which are trying like hell to go into hyper-production. I put on a sudden and brilliant performance of a sneezing attack, which prompts Wendy to hand me a tissue, which allows me to cover my weepy little face and blow my nose.
    “Did you tell your doctor about this at the time?” she asks.
    “Not at first. But eventually I did.”
    “And what did your doctor say?”
    “She didn’t know what to make of it so she referred me to a psychiatrist. Not because she thought I was crazy or anything,” I hurry to add. “The psychiatrist barely listened to what I told him. He said I was likely so depressed that I couldn’t get out of bed.”
    “What did he say about the visions?”
    I shrug. “I hinted around about the things I was seeing. He said he’d probably want me evaluated for schizophrenia.” I pause, reaching for a new tissue. “It was a long time before I mentioned it to anyone again.”
    “What did the anti-depressants do for you, if anything?”
    I laugh. “They made me tired for one thing, which wasn’t good because by this time I was scared to death to go to sleep.
    Wendy flips through my chart. She stops and runs her finger down the page, reading. “So one of your doctors finally suspected narcolepsy. What did you say when he told you that?”
    “I told him that couldn’t be right.”
    “Why did you say that?”
    “Because at the time I only knew about ‘Hollywood narcolepsy.’”
    Wendy looks up from the page, her expression quizzical. “What’s that?”
    “Whenever they show narcolepsy in the movies it’s always some a guy at a restaurant who flops over into his shrimp bisque and starts sawing logs like a lumberjack. I never did that.” I