Rare Sleeping Beauty condition makes law student snooze for 20 hours a day – even through Christmas

Student Megan has a one in a million condition that causes her recurring periods of excessive sleep.

A law student with a one in a million condition known as Sleeping Beauty syndrome has revealed how she has slept through HALF the Christmases since her diagnosis – often staying in a deep slumber for 20 hours without waking.

Just 13 when she was diagnosed with Kleine-Levin syndrome (KLS) – a complex neurological disorder, involving recurring periods of excessive sleep, altered behaviour and a reduced understanding of the world- while her family celebrate the festivities, Megan Firth, 18, is likely to be found in bed.

At her worst Megan, who lives with her younger brother, Jamie, 13, accountant mum Emma, 50, and logistics director dad, Andrew, 54, in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, has spent months more or less bed-bound – rising only to eat and use the bathroom.

Megan often sleeps through Christmas but likes sleep downstairs on the sofa so she can be near her family (Collect/PA Real Life)

The Nottingham University student, who says her excessive sleeping – known as hypersomnolence – is worse in the winter months, said: “This means I’m often asleep right through Christmas.

“We are always at home and my grandmas tend to come and stay with us. But even if I am in the middle of a sleep episode, I like to at least be around them all and sleep downstairs on the sofa

“They are all pretty used to it by now and know not to bother me, as I can become very panicked when I’m woken up in the middle of a long sleep.”

Megan with her university friends at her halls in Nottingham university (Collect/PA Real Life)

While her condition is dubbed Sleeping Beauty syndrome, at university she feels more like the fairy tale character Cinderella as, like her, she has to leave student gatherings before midnight, to avoid triggering her KLS.

She explained: “It’s quite difficult because you can really feel like you’re missing out, when all these new friends are going out until late each night and you have to be back in bed before midnight.

“Luckily, I have made some really great friends who have been very understanding, but I still have to think about it all the time, otherwise, if I stay up too late, I can trigger another episode and become bedridden for several weeks.”

Megan and Jamie on Christmas Day, before she began to be affected by the illness at the age of 13 (Collect/PA Real Life)

Megan’s first experience with KLS came, aged 13, when a nasty case of flu brought on extreme fatigue and a “brain fog” that left the schoolgirl not being able to tell the difference between dreams and reality.

“I was ill in bed, but then on the second or third day, I became very disorientated, as though I was in a waking dream,” she said.

“As I later found out, this is a classic symptom of the disorder, called ‘de-realisation’, and was the precursor of things to come.”

Megan and Jamie at Christmas time (Collect/PA Real Life)

Following a week with flu, then sleeping for the entire day – only rising to eat and use the toilet – Megan’s anxious parents took her to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.

But test results were negative and, told her drowsiness was most likely due to a particularly virulent strain of flu, when it eventually wore off after six weeks, she went back to her school studies.

Then, a month later, the fatigue returned when Megan, who had just turned 14, had travelled alone to Brisbane, Australia, to visit family friends.

Megan with mum Emma and brother Jamie, summer 2018 (Collect/PA Real Life)

Again, the strange sense of being trapped in a dream returned, accompanied by terrible headaches, which preceded an overwhelming desire to sleep.

“No matter how long I slept for, I still felt tired when I woke up, as though I had only been asleep for half an hour, when actually I had been in bed for 12 hours,” said Megan.

Worried sick, after Megan had slept for almost two weeks, her mum flew out to be with her.

“By this stage my mum and dad were very worried and thought I might have a brain tumour, because the doctors I saw had no idea what it could be,” Megan recalled.

“But then one day my mum was up late Googling my symptoms and Kleine-Levin popped up. It seemed to match perfectly with what I was experiencing, so she suggested it to the doctors in Queensland Children’s Hospital, where I was being treated, who agreed.”

The diagnosis was confirmed by doctors at the John Radcliffe Hospital, who said they had never before encountered the condition which, according to a review published by the Kleine-Levin Syndrome Foundation affects only one person in every million.

Because flying can trigger episodes, Megan and her family now drive to all of their holiday destinations (Collect/PA Real Life)

Megan continued: “I realised that it would be life-changing, but I felt reassured that I wasn’t going mad and that I didn’t have some awful disease that’d kill me – I knew I could live with it.”

Sometimes experiencing bouts of sleepiness as often as every few weeks during the next couple of years, Megan had little energy to do more than study, eat and sleep.

She explained: “KLS has meant sacrificing a lot. I played county cricket for Oxfordshire, but I found that I couldn’t keep that up and do my school work, because I was just losing so much time sleeping.”

Megan with her mum Emma, dad Andrew and younger brother Jamie (Collect/PA Real Life)

She continued: “It even affected our family holidays, as one of my triggers is flying, so we had to drive around Europe when we went away.”

In spite of losing months of classroom time to her condition, astonishingly, Megan landed a university place a year early – starting her studies at Nottingham Uni when she was just 17.

Now approaching the end of her first term there, she has only had two slumbering spells – each lasting a couple of weeks – since she started and her fellow students and tutors have been very understanding.

Megan sleeps for up to 20 hours a day for several weeks when she is having an episode (Collect/PA Real Life)

She said: “I have to think about it a lot and be careful to make sure everyone at uni knows that I have this problem.

“All of my friends are very aware of it, and so is the university, who give me longer to hand in my essays and extra time in exams.

“The worry is that one day I could fall asleep and never wake up, so I text my mum every morning to tell her I’m awake and if I don’t, she’ll ring one of my friends and ask them to wake me up.”

Megan with brother Jamie in Venice, summer 2018 (Collect/PA Real Life)

She continued: “It isn’t ideal and sometimes it does upset me, thinking about all the stuff I miss out on because of KLS.

“But, then again, I feel really proud to have got into a good university in spite of it all and in many ways I don’t think I’d have achieved so much if I didn’t have the illness.

“It pushed me to succeed and now I’m determined to live a normal life.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — After the arrest of a man charged with placing two pipe bombs outside the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic national parties on Jan. 5, 2021, the warning from the Trump administration was clear: If you come to the nation's capital to attack citizens and institutions of democracy, you will be held accountable.

Yet Justice Department leaders who announced the arrest were silent about the violence that had taken place when supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol and clashed with police one day after those bombs were placed.

It was the latest example of the Trump's administration's efforts to rewrite the history of the riot, through pardons and the firings of lawyers who prosecuted the participants of the siege, and of the disconnect for a government that prides itself for cracking down on violent crime and supporting law enforcement but has papered over the brutality of the Jan. 6 attacks on police officers.

“The administration has ignored and attempted to whitewash the violence committed by rioters on Jan. 6 because they were the president's supporters. They were trying to install him a second time against the will of the voters in 2020,” said Michael Romano, who prosecuted the rioters before leaving the Justice Department this year. “And it feels like the effort to ignore that is purely transactional.”

The White House referred comment to the Justice Department, which referred comment to the FBI. The bureau did not immediately respond to an email from The Associated Press on Friday.

FBI Director Kash Patel, as a conservative podcast host during the Biden administration, had called the Jan. 6 rioters “political prisoners” and offered to represent them for free. But on Thursday, he said the arrest of the pipe bomb suspect, 30-year-old Brian Cole Jr., was in keeping with Trump's commitment to “secure our nation's capital.”

“When you attack American citizens, when you attack our institutions of legislation, when you attack the nation’s capital, you attack the very being of our way of life,” Patel said. “And this FBI and this Department of Justice stand here to tell you that we will always combat it.”

Patel's deputy, Dan Bongino, had suggested before joining the FBI that federal law enforcement had wasted time investigating Jan. 6 rioters and anti-abortion activists.

“These are threats to the United States?” he once said on a podcast. “Grandma is in the gulag for a trespassing charge on January 6th.”

Bongino speculated last year that the pipe bomb incident was an “inside job” that involved a “massive cover-up.” After joining the FBI, Bongino repeatedly described the investigation as a top priority that was receiving significant resources and attention.

“We were going to track this person to the end of the earth. There was no way he was getting away,” he said Thursday.

No public link has emerged between the pipe bombs and the riot, and Cole's arrest was a significant development in its own right given that the nearly 5-year investigation had confounded authorities, who are now are assembling a portrait of Cole.

People familiar with the matter told The Associated Press that among the statements Cole made to investigators is that he believed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, which Trump has insisted was stolen from him in favor of Democrat Joe Biden. The people were not authorized to discuss ongoing investigation publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

There was no widespread fraud in that election, which a range of election officials across the country, including Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, have confirmed. Republican governors in key states crucial to Biden’s victory have also vouched for the integrity of the elections in their states. Nearly all the legal challenges from Trump and his allies were dismissed by the courts.

The tough-on-crime words heard during Thursday's announcement about Cole's arrest were at odds with the Republican administration's repeated efforts to play down the violence of Jan. 6, absolve those charged in the insurrection and target those who investigated and prosecuted the rioters.

Trump’s clemency action on his first day back in the White House in January applied to all 1,500-plus people charged with participating in the attack on the foundations of American democracy. That included defendants seen on camera violently attacking police with makeshift weapons such as flagpoles, a crutch and a hockey stick. More than 100 police officers were injured, including some who have described being scared for their lives as they were dragged into the crowd and beaten.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department asked the FBI for the names of agents who participated in Jan. 6 investigations, a demand feared within the bureau for as a possible precursor to mass firings. In August, Patel fired Brian Driscoll, who as the FBI's acting director in the early days of the Trump administration resisted handing over those names.

Trump's administration, meanwhile, has fired or demoted numerous prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases, including more than two dozen lawyers who had been hired for temporary assignments to support the investigation but were moved into permanent roles after Trump won the 2024 election.

In October, two federal prosecutors were locked out of their government devices and told they were being put on leave after filing court papers that described those who attacked the Capitol as a “mob of rioters.” The Justice Department later submitted a new court filing that stripped mentions of the Jan. 6 riot.

One man whose case was dismissed because of Trump’s pardons was accused of hurling an explosive device and a large piece of wood at a group of officers who trying to defend an entrance to the Capitol. Some officers later said they had “believed they were going to die,” prosecutors wrote in court papers, and several reported suffering temporary hearing loss.

Attorney General Pam Bondi, left, and FBI Director Kash Patel stand during a news conference at the Department of Justice, Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

FILE - This image shows part of a "Seeking Information" notice released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding pipe bombs planted outside offices of the Democratic and Republican national committees in Washington on Jan. 5, 2021, on the eve of the attack on the Capitol. (FBI via AP, File)

Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel look at each other during a news conference at the Department of Justice, Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)