By the time he came to Gélineau, he was having as many as two hundred a day. He sometimes fell asleep in the middle of a meal, the knife and fork slipping from his fingers; he might drop off in the middle of a sentence or as soon as he had been seated in a theater. Intense emotions, sad or happy, often precipitated his sleep attacks and also episodes of “astasia,” in which there was a sudden loss of muscular strength and tone, so that he would fall helplessly to the ground, while remaining perfectly conscious. Gélineau regarded this conjunction of narcolepsy (a term he coined) and astasia (we now call it cataplexy) as a new syndrome—one with a neurological origin.1 In 1928 a New York physician, Samuel Brock, presented a broader view of narcolepsy, describing a young man of twenty-two who was prone not only to sudden sleep attacks and cataplexy but also a paralysis, with the inability to talk or move, following his sleep attacks. In this state of sleep paralysis (as the condition was later to be named), he had vivid hallucinations, which he experienced at no other time.
