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I surveyed those on the list for the incidence of unusual  sleep
movements.  Thirty (or so) of you reported on about 58 individuals in
your households, twenty five with PD or PD+.  I could report on this
topic all at once, but it would be a lengthy report.  I will instead over
the next week e-mail out to the list several short reports (a serial!)
which will bear the "Subject" "Stalker, Part 1", Part 2, etc.
 
 
I was
walking  on the sidewalk of a  residential neighborhood when an auto
driving slowly in the same direction as I was walking passed me and
turned right at the corner in front of me and drove out of sight. I
walked rapidly to the corner to see the auto.  It had stopped and a man I
didn't recognize was pointing a rifle at me.  I jumped for cover in the
gutter next to the curb, and soon found that I had landed on the floor
beside my bed, along with an overturned table and lamp.
 
On another
occasion I was in a group of people chasing a box containing a Hagen-Dazs
ice cream bar, which some force was mysteriously propelling  down the
street.  Just as it was about to be retrieved by one in the crowd, I
kicked it to put it out of reach.  My kick landed firmly on my wife, who
uneasily was trying to sleep beside me. (Maybe I'll be the title
character in an Oliver Sack's book: The Man Who Mistook his  Wife for a
Hagen-Dazs bar.)
 
My wife does not look forward to the dream life of the
Stalker sleeping beside her.  Even when my performance is rated a
nonviolent "G", she must listen to my professorial sleep lectures (not
concerning sleep, but while asleep).  Sometimes my perorations are in a
foreign language (real foreign!), but frequently they are coherent but
strange  utterances which when repeated to me cause me to recall that
they were  specific events  of my dream.
 
While I make light of these
events, our initial reaction to them was embarrassment.  Choking,
kicking, and punching ones spouse is difficult to explain, even if the
villain is unconscious and is actually trying to keep an ice cream bar
out of the wrong hands.  Freud and others have conferred too much
importance on the dream as a channel to the real truth:  the ice cream
bar is the masked intruder into our consciousness, permitted passage to
awareness only because of the disguise, the meaning of which 100 hours of
analysis at $150/hr. will identify.Better not talk about it.  People may
get the wrong idea.
 
And if you are afflicted with PD, your dream life
may  not be the greatest of your concerns.  In any event, your spouse may
suggest that everyone might get a better sleep (you not kicking spouse;
spouse not being kicked) by considering separate bed, bedrooms, or
perhaps different wings of the house, or karate lessons.---------------
(to be continued)