By Jack Vening
Spend long enough watching weird history YouTube videos or spooky TikToks and eventually you’ll find the story of Paul Kern. Kern was a Hungarian World War I veteran who found fame as the oldest of old-world icons – the medical curio – after he survived a mid-battle bullet wound to the head, woke from the resulting coma, and never slept a wink again.
The damage caused to his brain was so precise that it apparently eliminated both the ability to fall asleep and, somehow, the need. He lived another 28 years fully functional, if a little isolated. Doctors were baffled, scientists were disturbed. This was an age when people thought cigarettes were explicitly good for you, but even they knew you had to sleep to live, right?
Right? I think about Paul Kern every time I’m reminded that my sleep is abysmal, that my abysmal sleep is the root of most of my problems, and that my abysmal, problematic sleep is probably killing me in a very observable way. In a time when pop science is more pervasive than ever and health and wellness cultures remain dominant, I think about Paul Kern basically every day of my life.
The quality of my sleep? Pitiful. My sleep hygiene? Embarrassing. My dreams? Sometimes cute, though I’m told this doesn’t indicate anything good or bad. It’s a picture of total inconsistency. Since I was a kid I’ve had wildly varying bedtimes, wholly incomplete nights, and wake-ups stretching into
