Sleeping Beauty isn't the only one with problems between the sheets. If you look closely, a number of Disney characters, with their funny idiosyncrasies and dramatic musical numbers, display classic symptoms of disrupted and disordered sleep!
Dr. Alex Iranzo, M.D., a neurologist at the Hospital Clinic Barcelona in Spain, was watching "Cinderella" about seven years ago with his two young children. "They wanted me to sit next to them to watch, so I was forced to be glued to the TV," he writes to The Huffington Post in an email.
He couldn't help but notice that the character Bruno, Cinderella's household dog, was acting out his dreams, an example of REM sleep behavior disorder, or RBD.
"The next week, we had to watch 'Lady and the Tramp' and I saw another dog doing the same dream-enacting behavior," he writes. "I decided to review all the films and shorts by Disney [through the year 2005], trying to find more examples of sleep disorders in the characters."
Along with sleep expert Dr. Carlos H. Schenck and Disney expert Jorge Fonte, Iranzo wrote an entire research paper on the topic, which was published in the journal Sleep Medicine in 2007.
While they are only animated approximations, Disney's most sleep-deprived are eerily lifelike in their symptoms, whether it be Donald Duck's sleepwalking, Gepetto's snoring or Sleepy the dwarf's excessive daytime fatigue. "Walt Disney once said, 'We can recognize ourselves in animals,'" Iranzo writes. "This says all."
Here are some of the best finds from Iranzo and his colleagues. Recognize yourself in any of these?
Disney Characters Who Can't Sleep
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