Most people spend one third of their lives sleeping but for the past three decades, one man in Quang Nam province swears he has never even taken a nap. Could it be true? Thanh Hai investigates the strange case of Thai Ngoc
Day and night, Thai Ngoc works tirelessly. At the end of the day he might pause or sit down but soon he gets bored and starts to work again. What else could you do if you couldn’t sleep a wink? Born in 1942 in Trung Ha Village, Que Son District of Quang Nam Province, 25 km Southwest of Hoi An Town, Thai Ngoc claims that since 1976 he has been permanently awake. His biggest dream is to have a dream. His claims have stirred up curiosity, even outside of Vietnam. Local authorities confirmed this year two foreign news agencies, one from the UK and another from Thailand, visited him. The UK group followed him for two continuous days while the Thai group watched him for four days around the clock with three cameras. The cameras followed him from his bedroom to his rice-field. At night, he continued to work alone, bailing out water from the paddies or pulling out grass or weeds. To check his alertness, the reporters placed nine objects such as glasses, a rice bowl, a hat and some clothes on a table in his sight before hiding them later on. Then they asked Thai Ngoc about the objects. He described the objects in perfect detail. The UK group took him to Danang City’s Polyclinic to check his encephalogram and mental status and the results were normal. Meanwhile, the Thai team sent 10cc of his blood home for further investigation. Before parting, the two teams apparently paid him a nominal amount of money. His house is no more than a small hutch by one side of the Cheo Beo Mountain. Inside there is no bed. His guests have to lie on the ground. To prevent guests from being eaten by ants he pours boiled water around their sleeping mats. After the UK and Thai groups, an Australian news agency representative arrives and proposes to take Thai Ngoc abroad for 18 months of investigations. Ngoc declines, saying he has not left his village for over 60 years and that he was afraid of tests. Thai Ngoc always lived away from the other houses in the village. He came here in search of land. In 1976, at the age of 34, he said he was as strong as an elephant. He could shoulder 100kg of rice over a few kilometres. One day, out of the blue, without any other sign of illness or disease, he discovered he could not sleep. His wife asked a number of doctors for different kinds of medicine that might help him but each one failed. So he took to the bottle but after drinking his fill he would lie down and feel sober. Tired of lying down, he started to stand up and work. His well-organised 5,000sqm plantation is shaped as it is partly due to his disorder. When the farming work was over, he’d go hunting. Night after night, he sat under the stars. He learnt how to predict the weather for the following day. He said he had quit school so he only knew the alphabet. As the other Trung Ha villagers learnt of his insomnia, some of them hired him to work at night. At times, he was hired to play drums or gongs at funerals to cheer up the quiet atmosphere during the night. After 30 years’ of work, he cannot afford to build his own house. In this region, the soil is exhausted and the roads are poor. Nothing is easy to sell here. During football season, other villagers wish they could be sleepless like him so they could watch all the European football matches played in the middle of the night. “My house has no TV set and it’s a long way to walk to a house that has one. But then after a while when everyone else has gone to sleep, I feel bored and return home,” he said. His family has a rice field, some buffalo, and a wine-making kiln. Thai Ngoc works very hard but he cannot afford to send all of his six children to school. For the past few years, his health has deteriortated. “I feel rather bad now. I am like a plant without water,” he said. “My wish now is to have a nap. Half an hour’s sleep would be enough to satisfy me.” Needless to say, his insomnia is a strange tale, but its strange too that thus far, no Vietnamese scientific organisation has come to investigate his case.
