Sleep Donation

Donor Y and The Elective Insomniacs

Ten days after Donor Y’s story breaks, the San Francisco ER admits a group of twenty chattering maniacs who are refusing sleep. Every one of them tests positive for the Donor Y nightmare. These people were not our patients. They did not receive transfusions from American sleep banks. They were passengers on Flight 109, from Havana to SFO. Immediately, the passengers become misery-celebrities. They represent an entirely new species of revenant in our midnight world.

We learn that these people were part of a group of sixty-one medical tourists. As recently as a week ago, not one of these twenty new victims of the nightmare contagion could fall asleep. Either unwilling or unable to wait another night on the Slumber Corps rolls, they’d chartered a flight to Cuba and paid to receive an experimental sleep transfusion. They spent a week recovering in Havana, cocooned in a secret room behind the Malecón Hospital, near the leafy gold light and the shining Bahia. Sleeping and dreaming, assimilating the transfusion. During that time, the Cuban doctors confirmed that twenty of the twenty-two American recipients had regained their ability to fall asleep on their own. As happens in the best-case scenarios, a single transfusion had jolted them into their original sleep-wake cycles. The return flight to San Francisco should have been a beautiful milestone for these people: stars shuttling past the cabin windows, the recovered insomniacs drifting into natural sleep. Half an hour into the flight, the steward reported hearing piercing screams throughout the cabin. A fifty-three-year-old male passenger from North Carolina, snoring in a middle seat, 13B, was the first to present symptoms of the Donor Y nightmare. Soon half a dozen other passengers seemed to be plummeting into the same dream, and then the howls came at regular intervals, according to the steward at the press conference, “everyone screaming at once, the way a Ferris wheel sounds, like they were all going in circles.”

The Corps was not unaware that such medical tourism occurred. They had reports of sleep transfusions being offered for cash already under way in Cuba, Vietnam, Haiti, western Germany, despite Headquarters’ issued warnings to American insomniacs regarding these “back-alley dream dealers,” decrying their lack of oversight and regulation, their profit-hunger, their shabby facsimiles of Gould’s machines. What nobody knows is how the Cubans wound up with units of the tainted sleep in the first place.

Fusillades of educated speculation erupt on our TVs:

Units of the infected sleep have crossed the ocean, through some black-market transaction.

An American who received one of the tainted sleep transfusions gave—or sold—her infected sleep abroad.

And then things shade into hysteria, with some people alleging that the Donor Y pathogen has gone airborne. What if it was sneezed out, coughed up, a scum of germs on skin? What if it was transmitted to all the passengers via the recycled air of the plane?

The Corps issues a press release: NIGHTMARE-PRIONS CAN ONLY BE TRANSMITTED THROUGH SLEEP TRANSFUSIONS. The Donor Y nightmare cannot be contracted orally, or through skin. It is not an airborne virus. It is not transmitted through insect bites, food, water, or sexual contact with a sick dreamer. There is no risk of transmission to a sleep donor.

But this does not halt the proliferation of paranoiac theories regarding motive, transmission.

It feels like a moment in history. Even in the present, you get that shivery sense, watching the greenish footage of Flight 109 parked on the tarmac, the circular door to this winged hospice opening and releasing the victims of the outbreak down spindly stairs. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost”—this expression I’ve known since childhood, and never once had the occasion to use. These descending people on the TV screen look like they’ve seen worse. Several older men are crying, their shoulders hiccuping up and down under the red Slumber Corps blankets. In the hospital, they won’t pull their heads through the teal pajama holes. They don’t dare blink. They pry the lids open with thumb and forefinger; some beg for stitches, tape.

The doctors are calling them “elective insomniacs.”

The doctors have begun to forcibly sedate some of these patients, at their request, since they are incapable of mastering their terror of sleep.

The goal of the electives: to stay conscious. To never again cycle into REM.

And then we learn that the passengers of Flight 109 are not the only ones: hundreds of other victims of the Donor Y contagion are refusing to sleep.

It’s startling how quickly their arrival changes everything for us.

People are confused by the new taxonomy of insomnia: Wait, these twenty insomniacs make a full recovery in Cuba, they have one bad dream, and they give up on sleep for good? So they are infected with a nightmare; what in God’s name could be so frightening that death seems preferable to sleeping? What are they seeing, at night?

Newspapers are not even printing descriptions of the Donor Y nightmare. There is great concern that readers will convert the words into a copycat dream, causing waves of hypochondria, mass hysteria. As a protection, this press embargo strikes me as unnecessary—none of the infected patients can tell us anything of substance about the Donor Y nightmare, even after experiencing it for dozens of nights in a row. As one infected woman explains in a radio interview, the Donor Y nightmare does not translate into “upstairs language.” Her speech was cold and precise, the words crisply etched against the silence, so that when I closed my eyes what I saw was not the dream but snowflakes, these soluble blue skeletons falling through space. What she could say about the dream melted quickly away, like a visitation from another world entirely.

Doctors at the sleep clinics are working with teams of psychiatrists at the VA hospitals, hoping to replicate their success at getting PTSD-afflicted veterans to “risk” a night’s sleep. As far as elective insomnia goes, that’s our closest precedent: war veterans who are afraid to sleep, who dread their nightly redeployment to the Mekong Delta or Kabul, and the wet red scenes that might recur in dreams while they are trapped behind their eyelids.

The horrible symmetry of the reversal is rich fodder for late-night TV comedians, jowly theologians, the news anchors with their sibilant pity, their masks of skin and hair. Ratings spike. Panic spikes. Windows shine late into the night, every home in America shingled in yellow rectangles of light, until it seems like entire neighborhoods are having allergic reactions to the Donor Y crisis; even people with no history of insomnia or dream transfusions are suddenly frightened to crawl into bed.

The National Sleep Bank establishes a hotline for concerned citizens.

Callers accuse any human volunteer who answers in a breathless singsong, like betrayed children: “You said this couldn’t happen!”

If we failed, admits Dr. Peebles, it was a failure of imagination. Contagion itself: early on, we foresaw this as a danger. We took the appropriate precautions. After early clinical trials of Gould’s machine showed certain nightmare-prions could be passed from body to body, every laboratory in the country joined forces. New tests got developed: sleep-assays, dream immunoblots. All donated sleep in this country is subjected to a rigorous screening and purification process.

But this specific outcome of a nightmare-contagion? “Elective insomnia”? This was unforeseeable. This was unpreventable. Who alive could have guessed that one San Diego man’s bad dream—no matter how frightening—could make patients nostalgic for their insomnia?

A new mental illness, some psychiatrists are eager to label it.

A kind of extreme sleep-anorexia.

“Iatrogenic”: a word that sends me to the dictionary. More deadpan comedy: it means our “lifesaving” transfusions have provoked a secondary insomnia. The cure is worse than the disease.

Some begin to speculate: Was this done by design? Is Donor Y a new kind of bioterrorist, who co-opted Gould’s technology to stage an attack?

Some are beginning to believe he is the actual ungulate. The red-horned devil himself.

I’m so stunned that when I answer calls, my mind’s a blank. I let my mouth reel off the Corps’ press release: “Now, more than ever before, the world needs your gift of sleep.”

Elsewhere, the elective insomniacs are taking increasingly drastic measures to escape the REM-cycle. They latch their eyeballs open, a Clockwork Orange self-torture. Abuse amphetamines. The most desperate electives will not seek treatment in the hospital, preferring instead the slow, excruciating death of sleep refusal. “Opting out,” Jim calls this.