Sleep Paralysis: Night-mares, Nocebos, and the Mind-Body Connection

Acknowledgements

ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book has been a long-term labor of love, and many people have helped to sustain my efforts. I am grateful to Michael Owen Jones, Carole Browner, and the late Alan Dundes and Donald Ward for their inspiration and support. David Hufford and Allan Cheyne have been tremendously generous, and their groundbreaking sleep paralysis scholarship has been foundational in my own work. I want to thank Susan Folkman, Kevin Grumbach, Ellen Hughes, and Helen Loeser for their apparently limitless wisdom and encouragement concerning this project. Conversations with colleagues at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine have been invaluable—and the inspired perfectionism of Rick Scott’s and Yvette Coulter’s bibliographic and technical expertise, as well as scholarly detective work, have made managing the details a pleasure. The writing of this book was supported by Grant #G13 LM008224 from the National Library of Medicine (National Institutes of Health). My mind-body research has also been sustained through my role as director of education at the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, with the support of an endowed chair from the Osher Foundation. This position has afforded me many opportunities to share my nocebo work with health professional students, residents, and faculty—and to learn much from our discussions. Mac Marshall, Studies in Medical Anthropology series editor, has been a steady source of inspiration, guidance, and enthusiasm. I would also like to thank Adi Hovav and Doreen Valentine, editors; Marlie Wasserman, director; and Marilyn Campbell and Jamie Greene, prepress, at Rutgers University Press for making the publication process such a pleasure. Kazumi Honda, Katherine Hillman, Maya Jairam, and Sean Clarke contributed the illustrations that greatly enhance the depictions of night-mares in this book. Thank you for your generosity. I am grateful for the support of friends and my extended family, who have helped me in so many ways, from faithfully clipping relevant newspaper articles to offering me writing space (both figuratively and literally) while they entertained our children. My heartfelt thanks to Kathleen Kerr; Carole and Robert Millhauser; Scott, Richard, and Mark Showen; and the B-team: Peter, Lauren, and Becky. Thanks, also, to the friends who enthusiastically embraced this book’s topic (and agreed to be interviewed) during the early years of the project: Dorrie Nussenbaum, Anath Ranon, and Chris Cassady. I am deeply indebted to all of the people who trusted me with retellings of their night-mares, but, most of all, to the Hmong men and women who openheartedly shared the challenges of their immigrant experiences, as well as their joys. Ua tsaug ntau. Above all, I thank Nancy—and Scott, Jeffrey, Kate, and Sarah—for their support , enthusiasm, and good humor. In the introduction to John Waller’s 1816 essay on the night-mare, he writes: “The enjoyment of comfortable and undisturbed sleep is certainly to be ranked among the greatest blessings which heaven has bestowed upon mankind.” It is a testament to the youthful exuberance of my four wonderful children that, despite my writing into the wee hours about the most loathsome and terrifying nocturnal demons, I was sufficiently exhausted to sleep soundly each night. Sweet dreams— SRA San Francisco, California ACKNOWLEDGMENTS x Sleep Paralysis ...