Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [64]
I got up on my bed and shouted, “There’s a jackal in the room!” She said, “No, there isn’t, and you have to see a doctor.”
“I will, but right now I’m really busy.”
That’s how I justify not doing things that are important. I think, I’m just so busy. People don’t understand how busy I am. If people knew how busy I was, they’d know that I don’t have time to see a doctor.
One night Jenny and I fell asleep watching Fight Club. There’s a scene in the movie where Brad Pitt holds down Edward Norton’s hand and he’s going to pour acid on it. And I had a dream that it was my hand. And I jumped out of bed and sprinted down the hall like I was in an action film, and I threw a chest of drawers in my wake because I knew that Brad Pitt is very cunning. I hit the elevator button and Jenny ran into the hall and shouted, “Michael, you’re dreaming!”
“Brad Pitt was gonna pour . . . ,” I insisted, but then I immediately apologized to Jenny and she said, “You have to see a doctor.”
And I said, “I will.” But I didn’t.
I did however continue to read The Promise of Sleep. I skipped to a chapter on sleep disorders. There are seventy-eight known sleep disorders. Things that range from sleep apnea to night terrors to narcolepsy. Narcolepsy is terrifying because there are people who fall asleep at any time. There are female narcoleptics who fall asleep the moment they reach orgasm. I think you could call these women “men.”
I came across something called REM behavior disorder, which is a condition where people have a dopamine deficiency. Dopamine is the chemical released into your body when you fall asleep that paralyzes you so you don’t act on what’s happening in your brain. I learned that people who have this deficiency have in rare instances been known to kill the person they’re in bed with while remaining asleep. In other words, the person would have a dream that there was a burglar in the house and he would beat the burglar to death and then he’d wake and see that “the burglar” was in fact his wife and she’s dead. And I read this and I thought, That sounds a lot like what I have.
And I still didn’t see a doctor.
So it’s January 20, 2005, and I’m in Walla Walla, Washington. I’m lying in bed at La Quinta Inn. I’m Googling myself, watching the news, and eating a pizza at the same time. And I fall asleep. And I have a dream that there is a guided missile headed toward my room and there are all these military personnel in the room and I jump out of bed and I say, “What’s the plan?” And they say, “The missile coordinates are set specifically on you.” And I decided in my dream and as it turns out in my life to jump out my window.
There are two important details here. One is that I was staying on the second floor. Two, the window was closed. So I jumped through the closed window. Like the Hulk. That’s how I described it at the emergency room. I was like, “You know the Hulk? You know how he just kind of jumps through windows and walls?”
So I jumped through the window, and this is the hardest part to explain because people who have REM behavior disorder are physically able to do things they couldn’t normally do because they don’t feel any inhibition or pain. So I jumped through the window, fell two stories, landed on the front lawn of the hotel, got up, and kept running.
I’m running and I’m slowly realizing that I’m on the front lawn of La Quinta Inn in Walla Walla, Washington, in my underwear, bleeding. And I’m like, Oh nooo. But at that moment, the only thing I can think is that I’m relieved that I haven’t been hit by the missile. That would have been a disaster. At least I’m still in the game.
It was the ultimate moment in my life where, in retrospect, I’m like, WHAT THE HELL? But at the time I was like, I guess I’ll walk to the front desk and explain what happened. Fortunately the person working at the front desk was mildly retarded. And I say fortunately because he was completely unfazed by what had just happened. It