Lethargic sleep to this day remains a mystery not only for ordinary people, but also for the "followers of Hippocrates."
Lethargic sleep was often mistaken for the quiet extinction of life and the person was buried alive. Evidence of this was the excavation of graves, where buried people lay in a coffin in an unnatural position, as if resisting something. Those buried as a result of some shock fell into a strange state, and those around them could not say with certainty whether a person was living or had departed to another world, because the boundaries separating life from death are vague and uncertain.
There were also happier occasions. For example, the story of an artillery officer who was thrown by a horse and broke his head. The wound turned out to be harmless, they bled him, took measures to bring him to his senses, but all the efforts of the doctors were in vain, the man died, or rather, was considered dead.
The weather was very hot, so everyone decided to hurry up with the funeral and not wait three days. Two days after the burial, many relatives of the deceased came to the cemetery. One of them cried out in horror, noticing that the ground on which he had just sat was "moving." This was the grave of an officer. Without thinking twice, those who came took up a shovel and unearthed a shallow grave, somehow thrown with earth.
The "dead man" was not lying, but half-sitting in the coffin, the lid was torn off and slightly raised. After the "rebirth", the officer was taken to the hospital, where he said that, having regained consciousness, he heard the steps of people above his head. Due to the fact that the gravedigger carelessly covered the grave, the air penetrated through the loose earth, which allowed the officer to receive a small amount of oxygen.
In a state of lethargic sleep, people can be without interruption for many days, weeks, months, and sometimes even years and, in exceptional cases, for decades.
Dr. Rosenthal in Vienna unveiled a case of a trance in a hysterical woman who was declared dead by her doctor. Her skin was pale and cold, her pupils were constricted and insensitive to light, her pulse was imperceptible, her limbs were relaxed. They tried to drip melted wax on her skin and could not notice the slightest reflected movements. A mirror was applied to the mouth, but no trace of moisture could be noticed on its surface. It was not possible to distinguish not the slightest breathing noise, but in the heart region, listening showed a barely noticeable intermittent sound. The woman had already been in a similar, apparently lifeless state for 36 hours. When examined with intermittent current, Rosenthal found that the muscles of the face and limbs were contracting. The woman recovered after 12 hours of faradization. Two years later she was alive and well and told Rosenthal,that at the beginning of the attack she was not aware of anything, and then she heard talk about her death, but could not help herself in any way.
An example of a longer lethargic sleep was given by the famous Russian physiologist V. V. Efimov. He said that one French girl of four with a diseased nervous system was frightened by something and fainted, and then plunged into a lethargic sleep that lasted 18 years without interruption. She was admitted to the hospital, where she was carefully looked after and nourished, thanks to which she grew into an adult girl. And although she woke up as an adult, her mind, interests, feelings remained the same as before the onset of many years of sleep. So, waking up from lethargy, the girl asked for a doll to play.
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An even longer sleep was known to Academician I. P. Pavlov. The man spent 25 years in the clinic as a “living corpse”. He did not make a single movement, did not utter a single word from the age of 35 to 60, when he gradually began to show normal motor activity, began to stand up, talk, etc. The old man was asked how he felt for many years when lay "a living corpse." It turned out that he heard and understood a lot, but could not move or speak. Pavlov explained this case by stagnant pathological inhibition of the motor part of the cerebral cortex. Towards old age, when the inhibitory processes weaken, cortical inhibition began to decrease and the old man woke up.
In the United States in 1996, after 17 years of sleep, Greta Stargle from Denver, Colorado regained consciousness. "An innocent child in the body of a gorgeous woman" - this is how the vrychi call Greta. The fact is that, according to journalists, in 1979, 3-year-old Greta was in a car accident. Grandmother and grandfather died, and Greta fell asleep for … 17 years.
“Incredible, but true - Miss Stargle’s brain was completely intact,” notes the Swiss neurosurgeon Hans Jenkins, who flew to the United States to meet a recently recovered patient. “The 20-year-old beauty looks like an adult, but has retained the intelligence and innocence of a three-year-old child.”
Greta is smart and learns very quickly. However, she does not know life at all. “Recently we went to a supermarket together,” says Greta's mother Doris. - I walked away literally for a minute, and when I returned, Greta was already heading for the exit with some guy. It turned out that he invited her to go to his house and have some great fun, and Greta willingly agreed. She couldn't even imagine what exactly was meant."
After being tested, Greta is in school today. Her teachers say that the girl gets along well with classmates toddlers.
How the life of the former sleeping beauty will turn out, the future will show …
In lethargic sleep, not only voluntary movements, but also simple reflexes are so suppressed, the physiological functions of the respiratory and circulatory organs are so inhibited that people who are little familiar with medicine can mistake the sleeping person for the deceased. From here, in all likelihood, the belief in the existence of vampires and ghouls originates - people who died "a fake death", leaving graves and crypts at night in order to maintain their half-alive, half-dead existence with the blood of living people.
Until the 18th century, a plague epidemic periodically swept through medieval Europe. The most terrible was the "black death" of the XIV century, which took away almost a quarter of the population of Europe. The merciless disease mowed down everyone indiscriminately. Every day, carriages loaded to the top with bodies carried the terrible cargo out of town to the grave pits. The doors of the houses where the infection settled were marked with red crosses.
People left their relatives to the mercy of fate for fear of infection and left cities in the grip of death. The plague was considered a disaster worse than war.
The fear of being buried alive was especially great from the 18th to the early 19th century. There are many known cases of premature burials. The degree of their reliability is different.
In 1865, five-year-old Max Hoffman, whose family owned a farm near a small town in Wisconsin (USA), fell ill with cholera. The urgently called doctor could not reassure the parents: in his opinion, there was no hope of recovery.
It was over in three days. The same doctor, covering Max's body with a sheet, declared him dead. The boy was buried in the village cemetery.
The next night, my mother had a terrible dream. She dreamed that Max turned over in a coffin and seemed to be trying to get out of there. She saw him fold the pens and put them under his right cheek. The mother woke up with a heartbreaking cry. She begged her husband to dig up the coffin with the child, he refused. Mr. Hoffman was convinced that her sleep was the result of a nervous shock and that removing the body from the grave would only increase her suffering. But the next night the dream was repeated, and this time it was impossible to convince the worried mother. Hoffmann sent his eldest son for a neighbor and a lantern, as their own lantern was broken.
In the second hour of the night, the men began to exhume. They worked by the light of a lantern hanging from a nearby tree. When they finally dug to the coffin and opened it, they saw that Max was lying on his right side, as his mother had dreamed, with folded arms under his right cheek.
The child showed no signs of life, but the father took the body out of the coffin and rode on horseback to the doctor. With great disbelief, the doctor set to work, trying to revive the child, whom he had declared dead two days ago. More than an hour later, his efforts were rewarded: the child's eyelid twitched. They used brandy, put bags of heated salt under the body and hands. Little by little, there were signs of improvement.
In a week, Max fully recovered from his fantastic adventure. He lived to be 80 and died in Clinton, Iowa. Among his most memorable belongings were two small metal handles from the coffin from which he was saved thanks to his mother's sleep.
As you know, lethargic sleep of natural, and not traumatic or other origin, usually develops in hysterical patients. In some cases, healthy people, not at all hysterics, using special psychotechnics, can cause in themselves close states. For example, Hindu yogis, using the techniques of self-hypnosis and holding the breath known to them, can, at their own will, bring themselves into a state of deepest and prolonged sleep, similar to lethargy or catalepsy.
But the Englishwoman Emma Smith in 1968 set the world record for the duration of burial alive: she spent 101 days in a coffin! True … not in a lethargic dream and without using any psychotechnics, she just lay in a buried coffin in full consciousness. At the same time, air, water and food were supplied to the coffin. Emma was even able to talk to those on the surface using the phone installed in the coffin …
Modern society is used to treating myths, legends, tales as fiction. A person is used to judging ancient Civilizations as underdeveloped and primitive. However, some material finds in mines allow us to conclude that representatives of the ancient Civilization, possessing parapsychological abilities, went to the caves of the Himalayas and entered the state of Somati (when the Soul, leaving the body and leaving it in a “conserved” state, can at any time return to it, and it will come to life (this can happen in a day and in a hundred years, and in a million years)), thus organizing the Gene Pool of Mankind.