Bloomberg — Insomniacs, count your blessings.Lying awake may be preferable to what awaits many human beings after they doze off, including paralysis, criminal activity, dietary malfeasance and even “exploding” craniums.

Still, Carlos H. Schenck, a doctor specialising in sleep disorders, isn’t out to make a case for sleeplessness in his survey “Sleep: The Mysteries, the Problems and the Solutions.”

He tells us that at some time during adulthood 58 percent of Americans suffer insomnia, which can result in (among other problems) increased risk of vehicular-related mayhem. Around 100,000 crashes a year, he writes, can be attributed to driving while drowsy.

There’s also general grumpiness and an enhanced likelihood of dozing off as the boss delivers his latest pep talk. Yet, as one reads on, insomnia (and I am among the unsleeping) comes to seem the lesser of many evils.

Early chapters deal with sleep apnea, which Schenck describes as “suffocating repeatedly in your sleep.” This condition is no fun (again, the voice of experience), save perhaps for unscrupulous doctors:

According to Schenck, an “excessive number of unwarranted and therapeutically unproven surgical procedures” to ameliorate the problem are performed each year.

Other maladies, such as sleepwalking, seem ho-hum compared with much of what follows — “abnormal sleepsex,” “sleep terrors,” “sleep paralysis,” “sleep-related binge eating,” “nocturnal groaning,” “obscene shouting,” “bizarre and violent dream enactment.”

Schenck, whose prose will neither cause the heart to race nor the eyelids to droop, uses stories from his files to illustrate some of these conditions.

A woman named Serenity tells of a partner suffering from “abnormal sleepsex” (or sexsomnia), which is largely a guy thing; Schenck notes that some 80 percent of documented cases involve males.

Two times, Serenity relates, her man unholstered his apparatus “and started slapping it against my leg.”

When she asked what he was up to, he “calmly replied he didn’t know, put his man-parts away, rolled over and settled back into a normal sleep.”

In a similar vein, another man was seized by episodes of excessive nocturnal butt-scratching, which Schenck diagnoses as a case of “confusional arousal.”

Some readers may consider both behaviours typically male and wonder if these guys were really asleep.

Yet this is serious business, Schenck warns, writing that sexsomnia can be “downright dangerous” not only to bed partners but also to “anyone who happens to be nearby when the person falls asleep.”

Some sleeping aggressors have actually hurt their victims.

In Toronto in 1989, Kenneth Parks drove 14 miles and killed his mother-in-law with the aid of a tire iron. He also beat his father-in-law, who survived. The defence blamed sleeping disorders and won him an acquittal, later affirmed by the Canadian Supreme Court.

Sleep terrors and paralysis are more common (thank goodness), with 25 percent to 30 percent of Americans suffering the latter. Many of us know the experience all too well: the feeling that someone (or something) awful is sitting on your chest.

Others eat in their sleep, talk in their sleep, shout obscenities in their sleep, laugh in their sleep. And then there’s “exploding head syndrome,” which involves hearing loud noises (crashing cymbals, automobile backfires) in your sleep: “It feels like your brain is a nuclear blast site.”

Nuclear noggin, Schenck assures us, is a “benign” condition that can be treated with medication. Many of us can get a better night’s sleep if we lose weight, cut out nightcaps and learn to sleep on our stomachs — tough medicine, to be sure.

“Sleep: The Mysteries, the Problems and the Solutions” is published by Avery/Penguin (272 pages, $24.95).

‘Sleep: The Mysteries, the Problems, the Solutions’