Rudy and the Red Light: A Narcoleptic Tale

Joshua P. Nichols
4 min readFeb 20, 2024
Stock Photo from Canva.com

I’ll be the first to admit that narcolepsy is a funny disorder. I can imagine it feels bizarre and somewhat comical to know or witness the phenomenon of falling sleep, which is something many people struggle with to varying degrees, as something that happens quickly, uncontrollably, and at the most inconvenient of times to a small group of people commonly referred to as narcoleptics.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen the same look of awe and dismay in the faces of others who experience me fall asleep mid-conversation and then experience me suddenly awaken (5–10 minutes later) only to pick back up where we left off. This mostly happens when I’m the passenger in a vehicle. Nowadays, if I’m riding in a car with someone and start feeling sleepy, I give them fair warning that this will likely happen. However, it doesn’t matter how much warning I give them, the first narco-experience for most is, for lack of a better term, comically alarming.

In this article, I’m going to share with you one of my favorite narco-stories (note: not drug-trafficking) that happened somewhere around the Fall of 1998 or the spring of 1999.

Rudy and The Red Light

I was in my freshman year of college at a small Christian university one Wednesday evening. I still had my 1985 Short-Wide Chevy truck. It…

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Joshua P. Nichols
Joshua P. Nichols

Written by Joshua P. Nichols

Writer of All Things Meaningful | Relationship Expert | Family Man | Baseball Player | Scrubs TV Enthusiast | Wood Carver | Empath