Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep by Randall David K

Author:Randall, David K. [Randall, David K.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Norton
Published: 2012-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

8

Bumps in the Night

It was not a good night to be Ken Parks. As he tried to wedge all six feet five inches of his frame onto his living room couch, Parks couldn’t have known that he was about to upend our understanding of what the brain can do. At that moment, all he could think of was how he was screwed. He was broke, out on bail, and sorely in need of a time machine that could undo the last twelve months of his life. His wife wouldn’t even let him into their bedroom.

It wasn’t always like this. Though he was a high school dropout, he had convinced his wife, Karen, the daughter of an engineer, to marry him, and together they had fashioned a normal middle-class lifestyle. They owned a home in the suburbs of Toronto and had a five-month-old daughter. Then he discovered horse racing. All it took was watching a five-dollar bet turn into forty-five dollars and he was hooked, convinced he had a supernatural ability to pick winners. That reality proved otherwise didn’t matter.

With his large size, Parks was easy to spot at the track, making bet after bet and quickly draining the family’s bank account. Once he ran out of money, he reasoned that the only way to get it back was to double down. After loan sharks refused to extend him any more credit, Parks created fake purchase orders at his job and deposited the money into his own account. He embezzled thirty thousand dollars before someone caught onto him. Stuck in jail and charged with fraud, Parks called Karen and told her that not only had he lost his job but that the family was penniless, and all he had to show for it was a mound of worthless racing slips.

Learning that your husband promised your refrigerator to a loan shark so that he could bet on horses would be enough to send any woman to a divorce attorney, but Karen was resilient. She told him that unless he promised to stop gambling, she would leave and take their daughter with her. She also demanded that Ken go to her parent’s house and ask for their help in sorting out the financial mess he had made. Without much support from his own parents, Parks worshipped Karen’s family. Now, they would know that he was nothing more than a screwup. With that unpleasant conversation scheduled for the next day, Parks lay in the house that he could no longer afford and watched Saturday Night Live in an effort to relax enough to fall asleep after two restless days without it.

That was the last normal moment in Ken Parks’s life. Sometime during the night, he got off of the couch, walked out the front door, and got into his car. He then drove fourteen miles on a busy highway and pulled up to his in-laws’ townhouse. He parked, got a tire iron out of the trunk, and let himself into the house with his key.

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