The Long Night Awaits

 by Mickey Hunt

1.

Therapist

 

A particular sleep patient of mine possesses an unusual condition that is ending up straying far outside my professional and medical expertise. I’m recording this account as the story unfolds in the hope of shedding light on what may be an increasing phenomenon in our technical, postmodern world—what I call Eternal Night Disorder.  He claims that each of his nights lasts an entire year.

 

Allow me to begin with a brief summary of my background.

 

My mother grew up in Camas, a small papermill town along the Columbia River.  My parents were weather researchers, and when I was a child, they took my older brother and me along with them when they spent the winters in the Norwegian archipelago, Svalbard, where they were based.  We boys attended the school there. Our town was about midway between the mainland of Norway and the North Pole, and far north of the Arctic Circle. We enjoyed all the winter sports, and when not outside, read around the clock, it seemed, both fiction and non-fiction.  My parents’ project lasted three years.

 

After that time, we only traveled in summers and we went to school in Camas during the other three seasons.  Then for me, years of college, grad school, a doctorate, and special training.

 

After Dawn and I married, she and I settled back in Camas.  Though children never came, we thought then, like my parents, that the town would be a good place to raise them.  The papermill employed nearly 3,000 people in those days, and many of the departments ran 24 hours a day with three eight-hour shifts, Days, Swing Shift, and Graveyard.  That’s what everyone called them.  Many of my sleep therapy patients felt they needed help with circadian rhythm disorders, but my practice also treated many other conditions as well, and a number of patients traveled to my office from Portland-Vancouver, which was important for my practice as the papermill began closing down.

 

The career of sleep therapist came naturally to me because ever since adolescence, I’ve been a classic insomniac. In high school, I began reading self-help books, and with time, I found that other people had similar problems. Not only did I learn ways to adapt to, cope with, and remediate my own disorder, I was able to make a solid living working with hundreds of patient/clients through the years to improve their sleep and their lives.

 

There is, however, the one exception to my pattern of success.

 

My patient can express his condition far better than I can, and there’s a reason for this, which will become clear, so with his permission, I will offer extracts from his sleep journal, add a few of my own comments, and allow you to reach your own conclusions. The journal begins the night before the first time he came to see me...

 The whole story appears in Strange Days Radio: Selected Cases of Paranormal Investigator Jonathan Barron. Available at Amazon Books.