What if you could sleep 50 hours straight and still never feel truly awake? Welcome to the bizarre, distressing, and totally exhausting world of the hypersomniac, reports Matter.
Last spring, Lloyd and several other idiopathic hypersomnia patients held the first “Living with Hypersomnia” conference. It was designed to connect patients in person and allow them to hear directly from hypersomnia researchers about their work. They rented a big meeting room at a Marriott near the Atlanta airport and, thanks mostly to Facebook promotion, sold out all 140 seats. One was mine.
The night before the meeting I was having dinner at the hotel bar, a faux-modern tableau of white and red and shiny metallic, and watched a group of a dozen or so gather at a table near the front desk. They were hugging each other energetically and exclaiming, and many were wearing matching T-shirts. I knew they had to be the sleepyheads.
