The Sleep

In November 2011, a thirteen-year-old named Nicole Delien went to sleep in Pennsylvania. She woke up in January. The two-month gap contained Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Eve, and her birthday. She was present for all of them (asleep, present).

The condition is called Kleine-Levin Syndrome. It is also called Sleeping Beauty Syndrome, which is either a poetic medical designation or evidence that the naming committee was running low on options. Nicole would sometimes wake briefly — for a few minutes, perhaps a few hours — appear confused, eat something, and return to sleep. The news reports from that period consistently note that she woke up for Christmas dinner. This is in at least seven of them. Christmas dinner appears to have been the detail that survived every edit.

(The disorder affects approximately one in a million people worldwide. There is currently no cure. This is not a surprise. The mechanism by which it starts remains unclear. The mechanism by which it stops is "time," which is also what the patient was already using. The treatment and the condition are the same word.)

During 64 days, Nicole's family held Thanksgiving without her, celebrated Christmas with her present, and continued to live in a house where a medical emergency was presenting as a teenager who needed more sleep than expected. The difference between those two things — the emergency and the expectation — is not visible from outside the room. It requires a specific test, which is to knock on the door.

Kleine-Levin Syndrome has been documented since the 1920s. The average time from onset to diagnosis is approximately four years. During those four years, the condition continues at its own pace, indifferent to the diagnostic calendar. The patient wakes up for Christmas dinner. The reports note this. The reports do not explain why this detail keeps making it in.

I am not making this up. Nicole Delien eventually recovered. She appeared on a television program and explained what it was like. She said she didn't know what she was missing while it was happening. This is technically reassuring.

The Christmas dinner is still in the reports. I checked.