The Odd Case Of The Sleepy Candidate

New Theory On Republican Candidate’s Peculiarities Draws Interest, Scorn, Yawns From Candidate

Washington (AP) He was once a neurosurgeon. Now he is running for the Republican nomination to vie for the presidency. He also has a tendency to drone on and on, and to sometimes come across as if he’s dozing. An unlikely candidate to say the least, Ben Carson has been suggested in some circles to also be, among other things, certifiably insane. His many remarks on a wealth of subjects suggest that the lights aren’t all on at home, so to speak. Carson suggested that the pyramids were built by Joseph to store grain. He’s put forward the notion that things wouldn’t have been as devastating during the Holocaust if only people in Nazi Germany had been armed.

He’s told tall tales about his history with violent people. Carson has advocated that people should gang up on gunmen in active shooter matters. He’s been stumped on the matter of Cuban immigration. His historical take on the Declaration of Independence, the issue of slavery being as bad as Obamacare, and D-Day have been met by eye rolls and sighs of dismay. His attitudes towards transgender people, gay people, Muslims, the Supreme Court, and calling certain segments of the population stupid have made onlookers wonder... is he crazy? Stupid? Did he do a lobotomy on himself?

Now a new theory is making the rounds. Albert Perkins is a doctor at Johns Hopkins, specializing in sleep disorders. He has never met the candidate, but has made a suggestion based on his work with other patients. “Some patients have a disrupted sleep cycle,” he explained. “They have what we would term micro-sleeps. They close their eyes for ten to thirty seconds, and in that time, they’re asleep. Then they wake up and blurt out something really strange. I mean batshit crazy strange. Come to think of it, I’m a doctor, so I should be using something more clinical than batshit crazy.”

Perkins went on. “I’ve seen patients come out of these micro-sleeps, people who are otherwise completely rational, and blurt out things like ‘lizard people run Con Edison’ or ‘sideways is upside down to the fifth dimension’. These are things that sound like complete nonsense, right? And yet these people are by and large perfectly sane and rational. They just blurt these things out after a micro-sleep. Now think about it. Our dreams are where our minds run wild and where the rules get thrown out the window. When we dream, our imaginations are set loose, and sometimes that imagination will not be rational.” He shrugged at this point.

“My current working theory is that people falling into micro-sleep end up in a dream state. Yes, it’s for mere seconds, but their emergence from it is just as sudden as falling into it. Therefore their minds are still caught up in the aspects of that dream upon waking. And feeling foolish about saying something nonsensical, they rather not address the issue with others. This is my theory with Mr. Carson. I know, I should be calling him Doctor Carson, but between me, you, and your readers, the man’s totally unfit for public office, let alone a medical practice, sleep disorder or not.”

“It’s an interesting theory,” psychologist Rachel Ellison concedes. The esteemed Boston therapist has not sat down with the candidate, but has her own feeling on the issue. “Sleep disorders or not, though, I would have to say he’s insane. I mean, honestly, he doesn’t have the sheepish look of someone who knows he’s said something nonsensical and hopes no one was paying attention. He looks, every single time when he says these things, like he believes it. I mean, honestly, have you ever seen the Great Pyramids of Egypt? Storing grain? How can a rational human being even suggest that? What’s he going to come up with next?”

The candidate himself sighed with dismay when asked if he has any sleep disorders. Then he closed his eyes for a time. “You know,” Carson told reporters in that droning, boring, barely audible tone of his. “This is rubbish. A smear campaign. This is just a liberal attempt to discredit me from serving in the capacity that I was.... that I was...” He closed his eyes again. No one said a word. Reporters looked at each other, wondering if Carson was asleep. This reporter wondered if his boring droning voice would end up putting world leaders to sleep during a speech to the UN General Assembly. Not that it would get that far- Ben Carson, after all, will never win the White House.

Finally after twenty seconds, Carson’s head rose up suddenly and his eyes opened. He blurted out, “Devil’s Tower was the scratching post for Daniel’s lions!”

A collective groan of exasperation rose up from the reporters. “You can’t be serious,” a Reuters correspondent told him.

Carson looked confused. “Serious about what? What did I say?”

An aide ushered Carson off stage, with the candidate yelling, “What you all need to know is if we all gang up on Bigfoot, he can’t run away and we can finally get a good photo of him!”

With that, Carson was gone. Reporters talked it all over, placing bets on how long it would take before Carson would say yet another stupid nonsensical thing.* Sleep disorder, insanity, or just plain old fashioned stupidity, one thing was clear: Ben Carson is unfit for office. One must wonder how he ever pulled off being a neurosurgeon.

*As it turns out, last night in a speech to Iowa Republicans, Carson mused that Noah’s Ark is hidden in a cave in France. “They claim they sealed it off to protect some thirty thousand year old cave paintings from exposure to human interference, but that’s nonsense,” Carson told loyal supporters. “After all, we all know the world’s no older than six or seven thousand years old.”