![]() ![]() In that position I often slip into a fugue state where my mind wakes up from a dream, but my body remains immobile. ![]() I can’t fall asleep on my back - or rather, I don’t dare to. And few sleep-related brain glitches can be scarier than what is known as “sleep paralysis” - the evil twin of lucid dreaming.įour years after The Disappearing Spoon, his wonderful chronicle of crazy tales from the periodic table, science writer Sam Kean returns with The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery ( public library) - a mind-bending tour of the mind, which Kean opens with a fascinating example, at once very personal and powerfully illustrative of the brain’s humbling complexity: Due to the sheer enormity of what happens in the brain while we sleep, there is also a sizable possibility that things would go wrong when they do, things can get scary. ![]() ![]() “In both writing and sleeping,” Stephen King wrote in his meditation on “creative sleep” and the art of wakeful dreaming, “we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.” But while he was exploring the creative process from a metaphorical angle, he was inadvertently describing one of the greatest neurological nightmares that could befall us. ![]()
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