This week we present two stories from people who needed to decipher themselves.

Part 1: After some unfortunate night-time incidents, Keith Mellnick realizes he needs to better understand his sleepwalking before it starts causing even more problems.

Keith Mellnick is a freelance photographer whose past work in the Middle East, Central Asia, and East Africa has been highlighted by National Geographic Books, the Atlantic, and his brother's refrigerator. Based in Washington, DC, he currently works primarily with organized labor and progressive causes throughout the US. In addition to photography and storytelling, he enjoys any opportunity to escape into the woods--far from politics, Photoshop, and oppressive DC heat indexes.

Part 2: Avneet Johal is excited to start his first year at university, but strange thoughts and behaviors keep getting in the way.

Avneet Johal is an award-winning storyteller based in Vancouver, BC with expertise in communication and leadership. He previously managed housing programs for the Canadian Mental Health Association and has worked on a series of successful political campaigns. A Canadian representative at the United Nations, he follows global affairs and also enjoys sports, languages, and (good) rap music. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Los Altos Institute and is honoured to work with a team of talented undergraduate students at the University of British Columbia – a team which he thanks for encouraging him to share his stories with a wider audience.

Episode Transcript

Part 1: Keith Mellnick

Six years ago, I was home in New England visiting my mom, sleeping in my childhood bed downstairs when, in the middle of the night, I jolted up at the horrifying sound of my mother shouting for help.

I leapt out of bed and I was going to head out the door and go upstairs but then I pause because I realize the sound wasn’t coming from her bedroom, which is directly above mine. It was coming from the same floor. And my heart sank as I realized that somehow she had gotten trapped inside my bedroom wall.

I realize that sounds improbable, but it is astonishing the shit your brain will accept without question when you are an active sleepwalker. And if we can leave my mom inside the wall for just a minute, I'd like to give a little history of my sleepwalking.

The technical name for it is somnambulant parasomnia and, much like a dream, I don't actually remember when or how or where it began. What I remember is in my early 30s it’s just starting to happen more often. It started with talking once every few weeks. And not simply talking but screaming. Screaming curse words at the top of my lungs.

And every once in a while, I would actually scream like a howler monkey being attacked by a jaguar for about 10 seconds. On one of those incidents, my housemate at the time the next morning said, “So, I heard you last night. I know you do in your sleep thing, but I had two thoughts about it. One, it was terrifying. And two, it was not masculine.”

Not too long after that, I started moving more in my sleep. And the thing also about the screaming, I know about this because I have an app on my phone called, aptly, Sleep Talk Recorder, that records any sounds I make. So I would listen to those and I'll be able to pick up all of these incidents.

Keith Mellnick shares his story with the Story Collider audience at the Bier Baron Tavern in Washington DC in October 2019. Photo by Lauren Lipuma.

A little bit later I start acting out some of these dreams. A recurring dream I started having, once every few months maybe, was that my apartment was getting broken into. So I would climb out of bed and I would tiptoe towards the door and I could hear somebody in the next room. And I would always shout at the door pretty much the exact same thing, which was these words, “I know what you're doing.” Which under any circumstance is a weird thing to yell at a burglar.

The incident started getting more regular over time and more pervasive. I had this very boring but meta dream that I was lying in bed and I was having trouble sleeping. I was a little chilly so I tried to pull the blanket up over me, but I couldn’t get a good grip on it. So I’m playing with it a little bit and finally I get a grip and I tug it. And when I do, I wake up very suddenly.

I wake up because my mother has elbowed me in the rib cage. I have fallen asleep standing up at church. In my defense, I was jetlagged, it was midnight mass and it was church. That said, that explanation did not seem to placate the gentleman in the pew in front of me whose jacket I was clutching aggressively.

Not too long after that, I have this dream where I’m a British soldier stationed in late 19th Century Afghanistan during the second Afghan War and word had come down that there was going to be an attack on our fort and the captain had tasked me with reinforcing our meager walls with whatever I could find: logs, rocks, bottles, children, anything that would fit in the wall and it stressed me out. People had their families inside this fort.

And I’m grabbing stuff and I’m pushing it into the mud but the wall just collapses every time I try and support it. At some point, I look to my left and I think, “Goddammit, they're just going to come right through that window.” And I look to my right and I think, “That’s weird. There's a Beatles poster on the wall.”

That’s when I enter this magical space where I’m not really awake and I’m not really asleep and I start trying to rationally deduce what is real.

I look around. I see I’m kneeing on a bed. This is clearly not the 19th Century. It’s Washington DC and the 21st Century. I look and I discover that I have withdrawn every single drawer from my bureau, emptied them out and placed them on their edges around the bed. Still not completely awake, my first thought is, “That’s not going to stop anybody.”

And it’s not so long after that that I go up to my mom’s house and discover that she's trapped inside the wall.

So I leap out of bed. I can hear her shouting. The sound is muffled but she's clearly scared. I don't know how long she's been in there. I don't know how much oxygen she has. I don't know what to do but I want to calm her so I yell at the wall, “Mom, I’m on it.” Because in a time of crisis, it’s important to project confidence.

But I don't have confidence. I don't know what to do. I’m freaking out. This is not like my mom. This doesn’t happen to her.

So I panic. I grab a pretty solid and pretty expensive table lamp from the nightstand and I start smashing it against the wall as hard as I can to try and create an air hole. The bulb explodes, the shade is in tatters, the lamp itself breaks in half. The wall, interestingly enough, doesn’t even have a scratch on it. I don't know what the hell that wall is made out of but we really could have used it in Afghanistan.

All this commotion starts to wake me up a little bit and I enter that space where I’m trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not. I’m about 90% sure this is just a dream. As I said, my mom’s more savvy than to get stuck in a wall.

And then I look in the doorway and standing there like Houdini is my mom in her nightgown looking rightfully concerned. And she asks a very informed question. She says, “Keith, are you awake?”

And I say, “I think so.”

“What happened to the lamp?”

“I thought you were trapped inside the wall.”

That seems to satisfy her. She comes over and gives me a great, big, warm hug, the kind of loving hug that only your mom can give you and then she says, “My baby boy is fucking crazy.” And then adds, “Maybe you should do one of those overnight sleep studies.”

So I look into it. There's actually a really great place up in Friendship Heights. But I send them my insurance information and they email me back saying my insurance doesn’t cover it. It’s going to be $700.

So I email them an mp3 of me screaming like a howler monkey they write back and say, “We’ll do it for free.”

I go up to this place on a Tuesday night. It’s an office building. You'd have no idea what was going on in there. I go up to the eighth floor, walk in, and it just feels like this high-tech opium den brothel. There's lots of people walking around looking kind of hazy, hoping they don’t bump into anyone they know. Everyone is signing waivers. And this technician he leads me into a small room that’s big enough for… there's a twin bed and then there's this collection of machines that look simultaneously futuristic and ‘70s retro.

I put down the pillow I brought to make me feel remotely at home. I look and notice the camera in the corner and then the technician glues about 20 or 30 little electrodes all over my head and all over my body and each one is connected by a long skinny wire to these machines.

He explains that they have an EKG and EEG and EMG and EOG, which is at least two more Gs that I knew were out there. But they're going to measure the activity in my heart, in my brain, my muscles and my eye movement, as well as measure my respiration and my perspiration.

I lie down and, despite the fact that I feel like a marionette plugged into the matrix, I get a pretty average night’s sleep for me, six or seven hours. I don't scream, I don't jump out of bed, but I do talk at one point where apparently I say, “That sounds great. Let’s do it.” I don't know if I’m closing a business deal in my sleep or what’s happening there.

It’s a month between the test and when I’m going to be able to meet with this renowned sleep doctor and I can’t wait for it. I go into her office and she's sitting on one side of her desk and I’m on the other. She's looking over my chart like she's plotting the invasion of Normandy.

And she says, “You don’t have sleep apnea. You breathe fine in your sleep and you definitely get a sufficient amount of deep sleep to restore your body and sufficient amount of REM sleep to restore your mind or your dream, but…”

Then she looks up with a little twinkle in her eye and she says, “but, during your stay here, you had in incredibly high, elevated number of arousals.” Which I didn’t see coming.

Honestly, my first thought is that I’m a bit embarrassed, as if the sleep technician had to watch a shitty black-and-white monitor with me masturbating in my sleep all night. But then, truth be told, I actually feel kind of cool after a couple of seconds because I’m no spring chicken. I like to think I got a robust libido but I've got it backed up by science now.

She quickly goes on to explain that in this context an arousal is when you come from one state of sleep you should be up one or up to the surface for just maybe 5 or 10 seconds. We all do it and often people wake up a number of times for a brief period at night and we don’t even remember it.

So I ask her, “Okay, what would be a normal number of arousals for a guy like me in a place like this?”

And she says, “I would expect 10 to 20, maybe even a few more.”

“Well, how many did I have?”

“137.”

So while most people fall asleep and take about a half hour to meander down to REM sleep, have their first few dreams and then head over towards some light sleep and then some deep sleep and do a few laps, I pretty much hit the pillow and drop like a pearl diver down into my dreams. And then I rocket back up to the surface and then I go back down to the bottom. I’m pretty much running intervals through my entire sleep state until I wake up in the morning. And that rapid switch is why my brain can’t regulate the release of the paralytic chemicals that keep us from acting out our dreams.

So luckily there is hope. First thing she does is prescribe me trazodone. It was the first antidepressant approved by the FDA in the 1970s. Turns out, it doesn’t really do a whole lot for depression but a low dose helps a lot of people with sleep.

So I get my pack of pills and I go home that night. When I take that first one, I’m so curious I feel like Alice. I pop it in my mouth and I fall asleep and then I wake up in the morning. And it’s an amazingly peaceful night’s sleep. It just feels restful. It feels like I got away from whatever for the night.

And it’s not addictive. I’m allowed to take it every day, so I do. And it’s marvelous. I’m just feeling like I've never gotten such good sleep in my life. But I am one of the few people who has a rare side effect.

And there aren’t a lot of side effects that I wouldn’t tolerate for a good night’s sleep other than maybe sleeplessness. But the side effect that I’m getting is suicidal thoughts. Yeah, it’s a deal breaker. To be clear, what’s crazy is even when I get the thoughts, I know it’s because of the drugs. And they're never genuine desires, but anytime I get even mildly stressed, and I’m raised in the kind of family where anytime you can’t make a decision, you're just stressed out, I get these thoughts.

So I have situations where like I can’t decide in the supermarket between Cheerios and Honey Bunches of Oats and this thought goes into my head that’s like, “Maybe you should just kill yourself.”

It’s a deal breaker. I get off the drugs. But on some level, I’m grateful that the trazodone didn’t work because it forces me to deal with the problem rather than just mask the symptoms.

So I work with the doctor on a whole routine. First of all, no screens before bed. As you've probably all heard, they inhibit the release of melatonin which makes us feel sleepy. Improve my diet, increase my exercise, no caffeine after noon, regulate the consumption of alcohol, and perhaps most importantly, go to see some therapy so I can deal with some of the stress that’s freaking me out in the middle of the night anyway.

It has now been five years since I did that sleep test and every once in a while, as my girlfriend can attest, I will scream out in my sleep. But it’s pretty rare and it’s usually kind of a little bit of a canary in the coal mine that maybe there's things I’m not dealing with. Overall, I’m so much happier and I’m sleeping generally really well. So until I go back to destroying furniture and harassing parishioners in my sleep, I’m definitely going to consider the issue resolved. Thank you.

Part 2: Avneet Johal

I've always performed well academically. I should be excited to be here. I’m two months into my first year as a university student. I’m getting ready to leave my residence dorm room and it’s happening again. Something doesn’t feel right about the way that last textbook went into my backpack.

I take it out the bag, I put it back in. still not right. I take everything out of the bag. I put everything back in. something is still wrong. I unpack and I repack the bag several times over before I can leave my room. This time, I’m only 20 minutes late for class. This feels like an improvement. The day before, I missed the entire class doing the same thing.

A few days later, I don't like something about the way that my residence dorm room door has closed and locked behind me. Something about it wasn’t right. The way that it felt when it closed, the sound of the lock when it turned. I tell myself to forget about the door, just go to class, ignore these thoughts, the door is fine.

I make it halfway to class. I’m consumed completely, as I always am, by the thought that there's something wrong and I have to go back to properly close the door again. It’s becoming physically uncomfortable as the mental thoughts translate into physical pain.

Avneet Johal shares his story with the Story Collider audience at Fox Cabaret in Vancouver BC in November 2019. Photo by Rob Schaer.

I give in. I go back. I repeatedly open and close the door, sometimes even taking short breaks between my attempt, but I can’t quite get it right. I hear someone approaching along the hallway so I quickly pretend to be doing something else and I quickly pretend that I’m looking for something in my bag as they pass.

As they approach they say, “Hi, how are you?”

“Hi, good. How are you?” I say in return.

As soon as they're gone, out of sight, I return to the door, opening and closing it for 45 minutes. Class is over. I miss the chance to hand in my assignment again.

The more I’m experiencing these strange thoughts and behaviors, the more I try to hide them, which is getting harder and harder to do. I can’t let anyone see me doing these things. It would shatter my denial if I had to answer any questions or truly acknowledge what’s been going on. I would be embarrassed, confused, ashamed. I wouldn’t even know what to say.

It’s difficult for me to explain the level of frustration I feel at having to repeat so many actions so frequently throughout the day. If I want to put my shoes on, I have to put them on and take them off and put them on and take them off four or five times before I finally get it right, each time tying and untying the shoelaces.

I can’t close the lid of my laptop without doing it several times over. I know it makes no sense and I’m annoyed at myself for wasting so much time doing these things. If I try to stop or break free from my thoughts, my brain always knows exactly how to keep me held hostage. If I don’t open and close the lid one more time, there will be an earthquake that will destroy the entire university. if I don’t do it five more times, my dad will die.

It doesn’t matter how much I tell myself that this is irrational, it’s beyond irrational. These consequences will all be my fault and I’m never prepared to take that risk, so I always give in.

I also can’t focus or concentrate on anything else until I complete the required repetition so I give in. Soon it spreads to every single movement that I make, every single motion. Every time I lift my foot off of the ground, every time it returns back to the surface. Every single motion.

Any time any part of my body makes contact with anything else, I have to think so carefully about the angle, the speed, the direction, the sprit, the purpose of every single movement. Every action has to be accompanied by the appropriate thought. I don't even know what this means. I never know what it means until I know that I've done it wrong.

I’m beginning to hate this. Some days, on many days, I decide to stay in bed. I can’t quite face the prospect of getting in and out of the covers, in and out of bed 20 times over just to get one foot on the ground and keep it there. I can’t do this anymore. I'd rather just not try.

At this point my life is a mess. I’m hardly going to any of my classes. Somehow I’m still keeping up social appearances and I’m still maintaining my extracurricular team commitments. Such is my determination that no one ever find out and such is my desperation to keep pretending that things are somehow still okay. I begin to derive some strange level of satisfaction from being able to hide it so well in public. Each repetition, each adjustment, each thought executed so well perfectly in secret.

Returning to my dorm room, I see a poster in the lobby area of our first-year residence building. In large print, the poster asks if you're experiencing any of these symptoms and it says to call this number if you are. The poster is describing my life. It’s describing my repetitive thoughts. It’s describing my repetitive behaviors so I get closer to read more.

As I do, I notice that the poster is from the center for brain health. That’s when I realize this poster isn’t for me. There's nothing wrong with my brain. It can’t be this. All of the scholarships, all of the academic awards, how could I possibly have done any of those things if there was something wrong from my brain. It’s not this. It’s got to be something else, so I leave it.

I carry on for months struggling, deeply in denial and unable to face reality.

I have this one-liter, plastic Dasani water bottle that I keep in my dorm room and that I fill up from the communal house lounge down the hallway every time I need some more water. The house lounge, it’s made up of a couple of sofas positioned in an L-shape. There's a small television mounted onto the opposite side and on the opposite side there's a fridge, a sink and a microwave all in a row.

Usually, on better days, when I go to get water it takes me two or three tries to fill and empty the water bottle before I can get it right. On this particular day, I just can’t quite get it. Every time the water fills to the top, I have this thought that I don’t want to have. Nothing terrible, just some random thought. Or maybe it’s the way that the tap turns off. It just doesn’t feel right. So I empty the water bottle completely and fill it up again over and over.

It’s like trying to count slowly to the number ten without thinking of the word ‘Athens’. If any part of the word Athens, even the letter ‘A’ slips into your mind for even a split second, you have to start again counting from zero up to ten and you can’t leave until you get it right. I try this impossible task with my water bottle. I start at about 11:00 p.m. quickly pretending to be doing something else as I always do when someone enters the space. As soon as they're gone, I return to my hellish challenge over and over again.

I started at about 11:00 p.m. It’s now 2:00 in the morning. I’m still here, standing in the same spot, filling this water bottle and emptying it out over again. I’m frustrated. I’m exhausted. I’m stuck in this loop.

The sun rises. Daylight pours into the lounge. I’m still here standing, tortured by the sink, trying over and over and over and over again. This is the worst possible kind of prison. It’s one that I know that I've constructed in my own mind.

The next day I go back to that poster in the lobby of the residence building. I can’t live like this anymore and there's no way that I can sustain this façade that somehow things are even remotely okay. Something is wrong and I need help.

I take out my red TELUS flip phone, I pull out the little antenna and I dial the number on the poster. The response on the other line, “We’re sorry. You have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. Please check the number and try your call again.”

I know that I dialed that number correctly. Out of desperation, I look at the poster and I dial again very slowly, very carefully. I receive the same response, only this time I hang up as soon as I hear the recording.

I stand in the lobby broken and completely empty. I feel like I have gone for as long as I can go without help, and I cannot go any further. I don’t know what’s wrong with me and I don't know what to do. This poster that I'd been walking by on so many days, this poster that I've kept in the back of my mind for so long, this, I thought, would be my one source of hope and possible understanding in my darkest hour. I've languished in denial for so long that this one chance for hope now, too, seems to be gone.

I study the poster for any other contact information. I don't find anything. There is however, in smaller print, some information about obsessive-compulsive disorder. I go back to my dorm room, I sit at my desk and I search online for obsessive-compulsive disorder. I read article after article, book extract after book extract.

OCD involves unwanted thoughts that intrude on a person’s mind and cause a great deal of discomfort, which the person tries to reduce by engaging in repetitive behaviors or mental acts also known as compulsions. The articles talk about the need for perfection requiring all of the tools and the equipment and the resources and the surroundings to be an absolute perfect arrangement before one can begin a task. I know this feeling.

The articles talk about symmetry and exactness, the idea that certain tasks and certain actions need to be done in a particular way. Otherwise, it just doesn’t feel right. Or some people have thoughts that something bad will happen. I’m understanding all of this all too well.

I even read that people with OCD often know that their thoughts and behaviors don’t really make any sense and seem strange to other people, although a child with OCD might not realize that their behavior is so foreign to others.

Sitting in this dorm room, sitting at this desk, I start to get some of my life back. Things are beginning to make sense, even my childhood is beginning to make more sense to me now. I suddenly have an explanation for my thoughts and for my behaviors. I know that there's been something wrong with me for quite a long time. I've been living in denial for so long because I’m so afraid of what the truth might reveal. In the end, it reveals that there isn’t anything wrong with me. I just have this disorder which is thought to be caused by a lack of the brain chemical serotonin.

Sitting at this desk I finally begin to acquire the tools and the information that I need to manage my disorder. I finally learn that I’m not alone. That many people have gone on to live meaningful and successful lives with OCD. I finally am starting to understand what’s been happening. This understanding allows me to accept what I've been going through. This information, most importantly, finally gives me hope.