Educational Media Reviews Online

For most people, insomnia is a rare or occasional event in their lives. A sleeping pill or a change in habit affords relief. Those who are chronic insomniacs or who suffer from other sleep disorders must sometimes seek more specialized treatments. The Enigma of Sleep offers a look at several sleep disorders and the international sleep clinics that treat them.

Setting up the documentary, a Parisian expert effectively explains the stages that people should experience in order to achieve the restorative benefits of sleep. Patients are wired to machinery that tracks their brain waves as they attempt to sleep. There is no universal number of hours the human body requires; everyone has different needs and sleep cycles. The subjects in this documentary are patients and the researchers who treat them in sleep clinics in Paris, Zurich, Italy, and Israel.

Some disorders, such as sleep apnea result in an interruption of these stages; sufferers of sleep apnea wake up before reaching the deeper stages. Sleep deprivation, we learn, can even be deadly. One of the more engrossing case studies presented involves an entire family in Italy affected with Fatal Familial Insomnia. Those afflicted with this disorder gradually stop sleeping and eventually die because of lack of sleep. On the opposite end of the scale is narcolepsy, a disorder which results in excessive amounts of sleep. One subject in the film sleeps 20 or more times a day. Narcoleptics, it is explained, can experience REM sleep, but also often experience hallucinations.

More research apparently needs to be done to affect cures for these disorders. One researcher indicates that we don’t even know why humans need to sleep—only that we must.

Although the documentary is sometimes a little overly talky, The Enigma of Sleep provides an interesting take on sleep disorders and is recommended. This would be a good addition to collections supporting health sciences.