We spend more than 200,000 hours sleeping in a lifetime, the equivalent of more than 8,000 days. Yet research has only just begun to decode the mysteries behind what can go wrong. Here, Dr. Carlos H. Schenck, one of the most prominent sleep doctors and researchers in the country, takes us on an incredible journey into the mechanisms of sleep, and the spectrum of disorders that can occur when these mechanisms go bizarrely awry. Dr. Schenck discusses the causes and treatments for common problems-insomnia, restless legs syndrome, sleep apnea, and more. But what sets this book apart is the rare glimpse it offers into the cutting-edge science that he and others have pioneered in identifying, understanding, and explaining the realm of "parasomnias"-the mysterious, more extreme sleep disorders,such as dream enactment, sleep-related eating disorder, sexsomnia, sleepwalking, sleep terrors, sleep paralysis, and even sleep violence, which affect at least 20 million Americans. Comprehensive, engrossing, and backed by the latest medical research, Sleep is a groundbreaking work about what continues to be one of our most mysterious medical puzzles-making it an indispensable guide for sufferers of all sleep disorders and their families. Carlos H. Schenck M.D. is a senior staff psychiatrist at the Hennepin County Medical Center and Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center, a renowned interdisciplinary sleep clinic and laboratory, and is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis. A recognized expert, he has identified and named numerous parasomnias with his colleagues, and is often quoted in the press, including the New York Times , and the New York Times Magazine . He has also appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and on CNN . He lives in Minneapolis. A Tour of Sleep Considering that people on average will spend 25 years of their lives asleep, it's surprising how little most of us know about what goes on when the lights go off. It's almost as if our waking selves and sleeping selves are two separate beings living in alternate dimensions, never catching more than a passing glimpse of each other. Most people don't seem very curious or concerned about this odd desire they have to close their eyes, lie down, and blank out for several hours every night...until something goes wrong, or even very, very wrong. Maybe it's that they can't fall asleep, or can't wake up, or find chocolate syrup and raw noodles in their hair in the morning, or have just pummeled their spouse with jackhammer legs, and wonder what in the world happened when they thought they were in bed and supposedly asleep. Poets and philosophers have painted contradictory images of sleep, but its resemblance to death is often a theme. Edgar Allan Poe called sleep "those little slices of death," John Fletcher named sleep "Brother to Death," and Roman poet Ovid wrote, "What else is sleep but chill death's likeness?" But maybe it's William Shakespeare, who often wrote about insomnia, who captured it best when he called sleep "nature's soft nurse." While it may look like nothing much is happening while a person is sleeping, there's actually a complicated chain of events going on in the brain, and that chain is vital to our overall health. With all the possibilities for the complicated chain of events to break down or even go haywire, it's surprising that sleep clinics aren't exploding with more people reporting all sorts of sleep problems. We know that at least 10 percent of the U.S. population has a clinically significant sleep disorder, but it's hard for us to know just how many people have parasomnias—because it's still such a new field of study. Most medical schools continue to allocate little time in their curricula for teaching about sleep and its disorders, so if someone goes to a family doctor with a sleep-related complaint that's out of the ordinary, it's unlikely to be diagnosed and treated properly. And worse, plenty of people don't realize that they have "real" disorders; they assume that their strange sleep behaviors are just their own weird quirks that they have to live with. Many of my own patients had no idea anyone else had ever gone through what they'd gone through until they saw a magazine article or television report where a patient from our clinic described the same problems. There's also reluctance among many to talk about their concerns because of the potential stigma involved. Until recently, even the medical community believed that people who exhibited violent or aggressive or sexual behavior in their sleep probably had unaddressed psychological problems. Surely that man who throws punches and shouts obscenities in his sleep really has some pent-up rage he's not addressing during the day, right? As it turns out, probably not. There are rare cases of parasomnias that are caused by purely psychological issues, but we've now discovered that the vast majority of those with extreme sleep disorders hav