In the early 1970s, a colleague of Stanford University's William Dement remarked on the resemblance of a narcolepsy patient's symptoms to those of a recent canine patient he had read about. The similarity of the symptoms-excessive daytime sleepiness, sudden switch from an awake state to rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, sleep paralysis, and muscle weakness called cataplexy-prompted psychiatrists at the center to track down a narcoleptic dog of their own to study, and then to gather a kennel full of such dogs to figure out what caused the disease. When Dement bred two affected Doberman pinschers in 1976, he found that their narcolepsy was genetic; many of the puppies had episodes of muscle cataplexy and would collapse into sudden sleep, especially when excited.
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