I guess I'm a terrible person, but I found this article in today's Post pretty amusing. It discusses the phenomenon of sleep-eating, which is pretty much what you'd expect. I know it's wrong to laugh at a syndrome that its victims can't help, and about which they feel shame, but you'd have to be a much better man than me not to find passages like these hilarious:

"Many sleep eaters realize what they have done... after they wake up and find cereal boxes in their beds, frosting in their hair or debris strewn around their kitchen."

or this one:

"[S]he found that she'd started to use her toaster oven and a blender during these episodes."

or my favorite:

"...one of his patients broke the doorframe getting out of her bedroom; her mother had locked the door at her request."

There are some other good tidbits in there, too, including that must-have accessory for any competitive syndrome-of-the-month, the celebrity sufferer: Montel Williams, who had to alter his food purchasing habits in order to avoid eating raw chicken.

But I think the most interesting factoid is that one profiled sufferer solved her problem by putting a rubber snake on her kitchen table. She's scared of snakes, and the sight of the fake one usually sends her right back to bed. It's interesting to wonder what bizarre subset of a person's consciousness is working at that moment -- clearly it's something without much memory, volition or self-awareness, but it is still capable of figuring out that food good, snake bad. It makes you wonder if perhaps the older, stupider parts of these folks' brains are puttering along happily, while their swollen mammalian forebrains, usually responsible for grappling with sophisticated concepts like counting carbs and complaining about the price of gasoline, doze peacefully. It's a little creepy, but also kind of fascinating.

Anyway, I'm sure it's a difficult condition to live with, and I can certainly understand how a loss of self-control would be frightening. But for some reason I find the idea of my ancient caveman ancestor posessing my body, wandering around my kitchen and maybe trying to work the juicer -- well, kind of endearing.