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his chapter could literally be viewed as a nightmare gallery of sleep horrors. It's the stuff of Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe novels, of the most frightening and grotesque experiences the human mind can imagine. Sleep is the one cradle we can all take with us from infancy to death. It's a safe place to retreat when the world around us is going to hell on a rocket sled. It can also turn into a hell of its own. Hopefully you don't suffer from any of the problems described here, but we all seem to have an attraction to the macabre and grotesque. And as long as we're going to discuss the grotesque, let's begin with perhaps the most bizarre sleep-related phenomenon known today.
More than a quarter-century ago we discovered that a wide range of disorders with symptoms most apparent in waking life could be diagnosed through the detection of sleep abnormalities. Disturbances in sleep brainwave traces can alert psychiatrists to mental symptoms which may not have appeared yet. Cardiologists can use the same traces to spot abnormalities in cardiac rhythms and function.
Sleep disorders are one of the first symptoms of mental illness, and the use of sleeping electroencephalogram (EEG) traces in sleep may be one of the best methods we have of making early diagnoses of schizophrenic or psychotic episodes or any of a host of other neurological and psychiatric disorders. The cost of this type of diagnosis is still relatively high, but with miniaturization reducing the price of EEG machines it may soon be possible for people to take sleep EEG's at home and present the traces to a diagnostic technician or even have the computer suggest its own diagnosis.
We don't have cures for most forms of mental illness, but this application of technology holds great promise for reducing the suffering of people with a wide range of disorders, from sleep apnea to epilepsy.
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