A 17-year-old Indonesian girl who occasionally falls asleep for several days at a time has been dubbed a “real-life Sleeping Beauty” or the “sleeping daughter of South Kalimantan.

Echa, who hails from Banjarmasin, in Indonesia’s South Kalimantan region, first made news headlines in 2017, when national news outlets reported that she slept for 13 days straight. She has experienced two worrying episodes since then, when she slept for about a day and a half, but last week Echa’s condition worsened and she fell into a deep sleep for about seven days. Her parents took her to the Ansari Saleh hospital in Banjarmasin, but her tests came out fine. The teenager finally woke up after a total of nine days, but doctors say that she is still very weak.

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The mother of a 17-year-old Colombian girl diagnosed with a very rare condition known as “Sleeping Beauty” syndrome has appealed to authorities for help as she is struggling to look after her.

Sharik Tovar, a 17-year-old girl from the Colombian town of Acacías, has been suffering from Kleine-Levin syndrome ever since she was two. The ultra-rare condition – only 40 cases have been reported worldwide – is characterized by recurrent episodes of excessive sleep as well as cognitive and behavioral changes. In Sharik’s case, hypersomnia episodes can last up to two months, during which time her mother, Marleny, has two liquefy her food and feed her every few hours. To make matters worse, after these long bouts of hypersomnia, the 17-year-old suffers from temporary or permanent memory loss.

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7-year-old Wyatt Shaw, a 7-year-old boy from Elizabethtown, Kentucky, recently woke up from an 11-day slumber that left doctors scratching their heads. When he finally woke up, the second-grader had trouble speaking and moving around, but has since made good progress and is expected to make a full recovery.

After attending his aunt’s wedding and being the life of the party, Wyatt’s mother, Amy, expected him to sleep in the next day, but she never imagined that it would take 11 days for him to finally wake up. She tried waking him up several times, but Wyatt just couldn’t stay awake, and even though he sometimes opened his eyes, it just seemed like he wasn’t really aware of anything.

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Residents of the almost abandoned Soviet town of Krasnogorsk and the areas around Kalachi village, in Kazakhstan, are prone to a mysterious ‘sleeping beauty’ syndrome. The bizarre condition has people suddenly dozing off for as long as six days at a time. It’s like a bad horror film – the illness has gripped these regions and no one knows the reason behind it. Scientists and experts are truly perplexed by the phenomenon.

The weird sleeping illness isn’t prevalent all the time. Instead, it comes in waves – the first one occurred in March 2013 and the second in May 2013. There have been three more since then – around New Year 2014, just after the winter holidays this year, and now again in May. A total of 40 to 60 people have suffered in the scarcely populated region. In most of the cases, the sleep is accompanied by temporary memory loss.

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