Chapter 6 Chapter Five Violent Tendencies

Before he could give an answer from his original self, Leon pressed pause and asked Wowalt to sit back on the sofa. "It seems like it just happened yesterday." The psychiatrist smiled thoughtfully as he sank into the soft leather sofa. Leon's feelings are completely different, these past images seem to evoke memories that make him feel relieved. "Leon, I was really terrified by you at that moment. At the first moment, I was worried that you would show me a dead animal." "No." Leon said, reaching under the coffee table and taking out a shoe box.He lifted the lid and showed his visitor the contents of the box. "It's a good thing it's not an animal."

"Even this you keep to this day?" Dr. Wowalt asked. Leon shook his head and replied, "These sneakers are not the ones from back then, but I found them in the microwave early this morning." "Today?" Dr. Wowalt leaned forward to examine the shoes with interest. "Yes, just found out this morning, the day after my wife left me." The psychiatrist started playing with the earrings hanging from his earlobes. "Are you married?" Wowalt asked after thinking for a moment. This sudden question surprised Leon. "Yes, but why do you ask?"

"You're not wearing a wedding ring, though," Wowalt explained. "What did you say?" Leon touched the ring finger of his left hand (Natalie advised him to wear the wedding ring on the hand near the heart), but was taken aback; where the wedding ring used to be, now there was only a ring of indentations. "I must have left it in the bathroom," Leon muttered, though that was highly unlikely.Because the wedding ring is almost tightly wrapped around his finger, even with oil or cream, it is impossible to pull it off, so he decided to send the wedding ring back to the jewelry store for adjustment.

Wowalt stared at Leon again with sharp eyes and asked, "Do you want a child?" "Yeah, that's for sure. Natalie has been off the pill since the first day we moved in here, and that was about a year ago." "Even so, she still left you?" "At least that's how it looks for now." Leon explained the ins and outs of the whole weird incident to him, and Wowalt obviously became more excited as he listened, and even clapped his hands suddenly, interrupting Leon's words: "No matter what you say, I don't think you will hurt you in your sleep Mrs."

"But it doesn't rule out the possibility!" Wowalt waved his hand and clicked his tongue disapprovingly. "It's theoretically possible, but I know everything about sleep disorders from my decades of research and treatment experience. Some people can clean the house during the deep sleep period, or with their partner. Have meaningful conversations and even answer questions. I also had a patient who could do laundry in the middle of the night and even operate complicated electrical appliances; there was also a market research manager who wrote all the contracts in his sleep state. Typed verbatim into a computer and e-mailed to his subordinates. Another case involved driving twenty-three kilometers in sleep to a neighboring town..."

"And there he stabbed his mother-in-law with a kitchen knife," Leon added. Wowalt moved the corner of his mouth regretfully. "Yeah, it's a pity that the Kenna Parks incident wasn't some horror movie director's fiction, but a real event heavily reported in the media." "So it is still possible to have violent acts in a sleeping state?" Leon asked persistently. "Yes, but the probability of this is very small. Less than one in every thousand sleepwalking patients may have such a condition." "Then why are you so sure I won't just happen to be the one doing the violence?"

Wowalt nodded like a professor, as if Leon were a college student asking good questions. "Based on my treatment experience and years of research results, you are not the kind of person who is violent while asleep. As you know, the medical research on sleepwalking is quite limited, but in the past few years, my However, the research team has made many important discoveries, one of which is that people have misconceptions about this concept at the beginning. Although most patients will engage in many activities during the night's deep sleep, strictly speaking, The so-called somnambulists are not in a sleep state at all, but in another barely studied state of consciousness, between sleep and waking, which I call 'beyond sleep and waking'. The Third Field'."

Leon nervously stroked his Adam's apple.Wowalt's description made him think of a state of sleep paralysis that sometimes happened to him, in which he had to struggle desperately to stay awake. "We once conducted a long-term observation and follow-up on a certain family, and came to a conclusion: Basically, the violent behavior of sleepwalking patients is mainly aimed at close family members." "Let me just say it!" Leon clapped his hands and said, "Now even you have said that..." "But..." Wowalt raised his index finger, "However, there are traces of this. Natalie once complained, did you behave roughly to her in sleep?"

"No." "And did you strangle her or beat her the night before she left?" "I have no idea." "Trust me, you should know. Of course, when you wake up the next morning, you can't remember what you did in your deep sleep the night before, but if you did any violence, your wife will definitely complain. Sleepwalkers don't suddenly pull out their partner's nails one day, or knock out their partner's teeth, the violence develops gradually." "But I saw it!" Leon retorted. "What did you see?" "Her bruised eyes," Leon said excitedly, "Didn't I already tell you about Natalie's injuries?"

"But you also told me that not long ago, you just woke up from a horrible cockroach nightmare." "What do you want to imply?" Leon asked uneasily. Sitting on the sofa, the psychiatrist leaned forward and said, "The light in the room was very dark at that time. Is it possible that you mistook the swollen eyeshadow for a purple scar in a half-dream and half-awake state?" "No, I don't believe I'm mistaken, and it doesn't explain why Natalie is missing her thumbnail." Or more than half of the front teeth are broken. "Besides, she was limping and shuffling."

"She left with a big suitcase. When I took a taxi with a heavy suitcase, I also walked very hard." "So how do you explain this?" Leon shook the fused sneakers in his hand as if they were evidence in court.The same thing happened in the past when he burned a pair of shoes in the microwave while sleepwalking just days after he moved into his adoptive parents' home. A mocking smile appeared on the corner of the doctor's mouth.His eyes wandered to an empty wine bottle on the sideboard. "Did you drink alone?" "Yes, but..." "Drink the whole bottle?" Leon sighed, and at the same time was annoyed that he forgot to throw away the empty bottle. "My wife didn't come back for a long time, and I had already opened it, so I drank it without restraint." "So since then, you probably can't remember exactly what happened, right? For example, you don't know how you undressed and climbed into bed and fell asleep, or how Natalie got home. Yeah, you don't feel anything, do you? Also, maybe you forgot what you did to those shoes, too." Leon shook his head vigorously. "Why would I put my shoes in the microwave while I'm dead drunk?" "Then why would you want to beat your wife?" Wowalt looks at the clock and repeats what he said in the video: "I'm sure there's a rationale for all this, everything that's happened. Maybe it's Natalie coming home late and seeing you drunk and angry So I decided to stay with my best girlfriend for a few days." "I've called her best friend a long time ago, and Natalie isn't there." "Or to a hotel. It shouldn't take a day or two for this relationship to deteriorate, am I right?" Leon nodded unconsciously. "Is it because of the miscarriage?" This question seemed to give Leon a slap in the face. "How did you know about the miscarriage?" Leon asked blankly. "Just a random guess. You said that you have worked hard to have a baby this year, but I haven't seen any children's books, and there are no brochures for diaper tables or baby carriages on the coffee table next to the sofa. Not to mention any clues to furnish a nursery." Leon nodded sadly and acquiesced, as embarrassed as if someone caught his pigtails. When he and Natalie rented this dream apartment, they both thought it was the beginning of a bright future.But after the miscarriage, everything began to change. "How about work?" Wowalt asked next. "Natalie just recently opened a gallery with her best friend." Leon replied, and was glad that the topic had changed. "I'm asking, how are you two working?" "So that's what it means. Basically, everything is going well." "But in fact...?" "We, I mean, Sven and I, are busy working on a big building project." "Who is Sven?" "Sven Berger, my best friend and partner in my architectural firm, was the one who got us this big deal, the plans for a children's hospital. We won in our first competition The response has been overwhelming, so we have a good chance of winning the final construction contract. I just need to make some minor adjustments to the model and hand it in by Thursday at the latest." Wowalt glanced at the clock again. "There are only a few days left. It seems that you are under great pressure not only in personal affairs, but also in work." Then he stood up from the sofa. "Yeah, I mean, no, that's not the problem." Leon also stood up.He knew what the psychiatrist was trying to imply.Long before the car accident that lost his parents, he suffered from chronic sleep disturbances.After the accident, Leon's sleep disturbance went from bad to worse.It wasn't until he met the Nader couple who took good care of him that his mental pressure eased a little, and his subconscious mind was no longer confused.As his love and attachment to his foster parents grew, he became less and less afraid at night.This was Dr. Wowalt's conclusion, although he was somewhat disappointed that Leon hadn't been violent since he moved away from the Moores.The sneaker incident in the oven was Leon's last act of vandalism, but that accident did no harm. "Why are you so sure that I'm not violent?" He accompanied the psychiatrist to the door, still asking persistently, "I have always been different from others since I was a child." "Being different doesn't mean you're violent, Leon. In countless therapy sessions, and dozens of video recordings, we've never found any violence in you." "Maybe it was because we interrupted that experiment too early that we didn't see any violence on the tape." Wowalt shook his head, patted Leon on the shoulder and said, "The reason why we don't see any violence in the video is because it didn't happen at all. As early as I installed the head sleep camera for you I knew it before." "Really? Then why do you still have a camera over my head?" "Leon, because then I was treating not your somnambulism, but your psychosis. That's also why your case is so fascinating: you fantasize about doing bad things in your sleep, and this The fear caused by imagination is so great that you resist falling asleep. This fear of sleep is also called 'hypnophobia', and this is what I want to help you overcome through the video. Those videos ultimately do not prove At most, you just put yourself in danger, like bumping into the edge of a table while sleepwalking, or tripping over a cabinet, and the worst consequence is that you hurt yourself with a knife." Wowalt stared at Leon, trying to read some signs from his eyes, so as to guess what was going on in his heart.Then the doctor sighed: "It sounds to me like you're going through a kind of stress test now. Like then, then you're adopted by the right family and things get back on track. Those things that were caused by stress The abnormal behavior disappeared, and I believe it will be the same this time." Leon wanted to refute, but Wowalt didn't give him any chance to speak. "Let me give you a suggestion: you should concentrate on completing the architectural model for the competition first, and then send it out, and give your wife a few days to calm down. When you are calmer, you can come to my laboratory, and we will work for you. You connect the test equipment and do a detailed inspection for you again, okay?" Wowalt took out what looked like a prescription notebook from his back pocket and asked Leon to lend him a pencil.Leon originally wanted to hand him his pen, but he couldn't find it for a while, but he clearly remembered that he had seen it placed on the telephone table in the hallway earlier. "It's okay." Wowalt took out a ballpoint pen from his jacket, scribbled some unreadable words on the paper, then tore it off and handed it to Leon. "what is this?" "A light dose of barbiturates, which are plant-based agents that will give you a good night's sleep. I'll be back in ten days, and this prescription should be enough to last until then." "Applicable to 'patients who are active at night'?" After Wowalt left, Leon felt exhausted, as if he had just swallowed a whole box of medicine.