When Emmanuel Mignot opened the door, a black-and-tan dachshund bounded into the basement room at Stanford University's Sleep Research Center, its nails scrabbling the concrete floor. The dog looked around, shook itself with a flapping sound, and wagged its tail excitedly. Across the room, a dozen men and women exchanged nervous glances. They had seated themselves carefully in chairs against the wall, and now they watched as Mignot's associate, Seiji Nishino, reached for his research tools: a can of dog food and a spoon.
“Allez beau teckel!” said Mignot, a native of Paris, as he knelt to rub the dog’s belly. Beau seemed an excitable but ordinary dog. His regular food was dry pellets, Nishino told the visitors. But today, Beau would get some nice, aromatic, canned dog food—a special treat. Nishino rapped the spoon against the can. The visitors went silent. They remained completely still in their chairs as Nishino opened the can. He spooned the wet food onto the floor, and Mignot cooed, “C’est de la bonne viande.” Beau perked up, trotted happily to the food, sniffed, rolled his eyes in pleasurable anticipation—and dropped to the concrete, limp as an empty sock. His chin hit the floor with a thud.
The visitors, members of a narcolepsy support group from California’s East Bay area, laughed, then caught themselves and awww-ed in sympathy. One of the most dramatic symptoms of narcolepsy, the disorder in which sleep instantly overwhelms a person during the day, is collapse triggered by excitement or strong emotions. So what happened to Beau, a narcoleptic dog, did not surprise the people in the room. “He knows we’re laughing at him,” said a handsome, silver-haired man, as his wife reached down, lifted Beau’s head, then gently set it down again. “It feels like a dead weight, just like your body does,” she said.
