The burning riddle of lethargic sleep remains unsolved. Today, quantum physics is approaching the identification of its nature.
Unfabulous affliction
Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Dead Princess … There is a lot in common between these characters. An evil, envious stepmother, expulsion from home, wandering through a terrible dark forest, and to top it all off - a poisoned apple. However, in her crystal coffin, the unfortunate woman does not decompose, as it should be for the deceased, but seems to be sleeping.
She is saved by a handsome prince. In a fairy tale, a miracle is performed by his kiss, in fact, an impulse from the outside is important - a touch, a blow, a painful sensation. Awakening is as sudden as falling into a catatonic state - this is how doctors call a spontaneous stupor, when all reactions in the body slow down, but do not stop, and a person becomes motionless. Such oblivion can last for days, or even years.
The stories of those who fell asleep in a lethargic sleep and were buried alive have been passed from mouth to mouth since prehistoric times.
The first documentary evidence falls on the year 1672. The Cretan poet Epimenides quarreled with relatives, offended by the underestimation of his work. He moved into a cave and fell asleep … at 57 years old. (Modern physicians believe that the duration of hibernation is exaggerated.)
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In Russia, lethargic sleep from time immemorial was considered a devilish obsession and was called a sleepyhead. If someone fell ill with this rare ailment, a priest was invited to the house, who read prayers and sprinkled the hut and the patient with holy water, and the relatives asked God to return the soul of the unfortunate.
Our ancestors believed that in a dream, a person's soul temporarily leaves the body and travels to other worlds. But there is a danger that she will fly too far, get lost and not find her way back. Satan leads her astray by sending obsessions. Travel is so dangerous that a person may not wake up at all. An intermediate state between the worlds is a lethargic dream, when it is not too late to correct everything with the help of prayer.
Nowadays, the risk of being buried alive is practically zero. Doctors believe that even in the most severe cases, lethargic sleep and death are two completely different conditions, and only a very inattentive person can confuse them.
If you look closely, a lethargic person has uniform breathing and twitching of the eyelids. Skin color is normal. Pulse is felt, sometimes slow.
The poet Epimenides fell asleep at 57
And only in very rare cases, the pulse becomes barely noticeable, breathing is shallow, and the skin is pale and cold. But even in this case, the reaction of the pupils to pain remains; when exposed to an electric current, the muscles contract; electrocardiograms and electroencephalograms record the activity of the heart and brain.
Little in common with ordinary sleep. Lethargic can be shaken, poured with cold water, an alarm clock can be brought to the ear - it is useless. He does not respond to calls or touch.
The causes of lethargy are different - for example, a mental disorder or a brain tumor. However, it is always provoked by a strong emotional shock. Psychologists say that those leaving for the world of unremitting sleep are people who subconsciously want to escape from life's problems. That is why women are more susceptible to it, more often than a young age. Headache, lethargy, weakness are harbingers of falling into a lethargic state.
Living corpses
Academician I. P. Pavlov described the sick Ivan Kuzmich Kachalkin, who slept for 22 years - from 1896 to 1918. The cause of lethargy, as often happens, turned out to be psychogenic: the patient was a zealous monarchist and fell into hibernation after the news of the murder of Alexander II.
According to the description of Academician Pavlov, he "lay like a living corpse without the slightest arbitrary movement and without a single word." They fed him with a probe. In the end, he began to make independent movements, get up to the toilet and even eat without assistance, but he gave the impression of a living plant. Doctors believed that his dementia was a consequence of a severe form of schizophrenia. But they turned out to be wrong.
Shortly before his death, Kachalkin came to his senses and told the doctors: all these years he "understood what was happening around him, but felt a terrible, irresistible heaviness in his muscles, so that it was even difficult for him to breathe."
A new shock brought Kachalkin out of his stupor: he overheard the hospital staff talking about the execution of the family of Nicholas II. He did not have long to live: an impressionable patient died in September 1918 of heart failure.
Another story happened in the Kazakh city of Tselinograd (now Astana) during a school literature lesson. The teacher made a remark to the student, and she began to cry. With bloody tears. The girl was urgently hospitalized. In the hospital, she felt worse: her arms and legs were numb, her eyes closed, her breath was almost not caught, her features became sharpened.
What to do? And then the weekend, and the examination was postponed until Monday. The drunken orderlies, who considered the patient dead, took her to the morgue. There, the poor fellow came to herself from painful shock when the on-duty pathologists began … to open her. The girl remained alive, but she had to be seen by a psychiatrist for years.
The case of the longest officially registered lethargic sleep, recorded in the Guinness Book of Records, occurred in 1954 with Nadezhda Lebedina, who was born in 1920 in the village of Mogilev, Dnepropetrovsk region. After a quarrel with her husband, she fell asleep for 20 years and regained consciousness only in 1974. At the same time, the woman did not believe that many years had passed: for her, a quarrel had just happened.
The case with the storekeeper of the Grodno regional food base, Granatkin, seems absolutely fantastic. Having quarreled with a friend, he received a strong blow to the head. The attacker found Granatkin dead and buried the "corpse" in the snow.
After 22 days, the loggers who stumbled upon him took the terrible find to the morgue. However, the frozen body was so hard that the autopsy was postponed until morning. In the morning, the pathologist noticed that the pupils of the eyes react to light, the nails turned slightly pink when pressed. At the same time, Granatkin did not have breathing, the pulse could not be felt. And the doctor diagnosed him with deep lethargic sleep due to a blow to the head. The patient was able to recover, and the whole story can be considered a real miracle.
Often, after a lethargic sleep, a person claims to have acquired unusual abilities. Nazira Rustemova fell asleep at the age of four and slept for 16 years. I woke up on August 29, 1985 from a phone call. In her own words, it was not a dream: "I lived there," Nazira said.
In 2001, Nazira gave a long interview to journalists. At that time she was 36 years old
She communicated with her ancestor, who was a granddaughter in the fourteenth generation: “He was the greatest mystic, scientist, spiritual healer and poet of the 12th century,” Nazira said. - His name is Ahmed Yassavi, and a large temple was built in his honor in Turkestan. With him I walked through the gardens and lakes. It was very good there."
Returning to ordinary life, Nazira gained the ability to predict the future, see internal organs, hear the conversations of people several kilometers from her, see what is happening behind the blank walls. Over time, these skills began to weaken, and attempts to activate them caused headaches, fainting, and nosebleeds.
Interestingly, some catatonic people sleep while sitting and even standing. The story of a young woman who suddenly fell into such a stupor formed the basis of the feature film "Miracle", the heroine of which stood like a statue for several months.
This real story, which happened in 1956 in Kuibyshev (now Samara), was included in psychiatry textbooks under the name "Zoe's Standing" - after the girl's name. Panic broke out in the city, there was talk of the end of the world, and the case was taken under the control of the KGB.
Zoya woke up suddenly, remembered almost nothing. Subsequently, it turned out that she heard everything that was happening around her perfectly and even reacted to it: Zoya was convinced that she talked to people, went to work and lived an ordinary life. And it was not nonsense: a huge number of details came together. The case was classified.
Is it really an infection?
“Nothing out of the ordinary has happened,” says Vladimir Vorobyov, Doctor of Medicine, leading researcher at the Center for Mental Health of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences. - Catatonic syndrome, which sometimes manifests itself as tetanus, is usually one of the types of acute reactive schizophrenia. In the 50s and 60s of the last century, it was a very common disorder: there were entire wards in psychiatric institutions. Today they have learned to treat this pathology, so it is much less common."
Zoya subsequently suffered a lot and was often ill, fainted, could no longer work, and died a few years later.
This is a common feature of almost all lethargic people, which completely refutes the assertion that due to a slowdown in metabolism, they do not age and time for them seems to stop. In fact, due to dehydration, muscle atrophy, sluggish work of internal organs and blood circulation, all their vital processes, on the contrary, suffer; these people come to themselves as deeply disabled.
Some doctors consider lethargy a metabolic disorder, others a sleep disorder.
English doctors Russell Dale and his colleague Andrew Church proposed their hypothesis. Comparing medical histories, they found that many of the lethargic patients often suffered from angina, which means they were susceptible to bacterial infection. It also turned out that streptococcus bacteria and their close relatives, diplococci, in all lethargic patients, remain highly active, mutating over the years.
“The bacteria that cause the common sore throat have changed and took a form that provokes lethargy, or, scientifically, Encaphilitis Lethargica,” says Vladimir Vorobiev. - The version is this: the immune system, distracted by an attack on the throat, lets the parasite into the nervous system. The midbrain is affected and inflammation begins. That is, in the opinion of the British, lethargy is an infectious disease, and it can be infected."
At the time of Gogol, they tried to bring bloodletting out of the grievous oblivion and put leeches, which only exacerbated the situation of the sick: after all, those who were in lethargy had very low blood pressure.
In the late 1930s, a new method of treatment was proposed: the simultaneous intravenous administration of a sleeping pill to the patient, and then an exciting drug, after which the person regained consciousness for five to ten minutes. But the effect was short-lived. For awakening, hypnosis sessions are used, as well as injections of psychotropic drugs. However, no universal remedy has yet been found.
Should we treat prophetic dreams?
Doctor of Physics and Mathematics, Leading Researcher of the Physics Institute named after PN Lebedev RAS Mikhail Mensky believes that quantum mechanics can solve the riddle of lethargic sleep. “Our consciousness is the property of the brain to perceive reality as the only existing one. Quantum physics claims that there are an infinite number of them, - explains Mensky. "When we are unconscious, our brain works in a completely different way."
However, there are still more questions than answers. What is the nature of prophetic dreams and other "unconscious" visual sensations? What are clairvoyance and telepathy? What happens to consciousness at this time? If it turns off, what is replacing it? From the same series riddles of lethargy.
“If we consider our world as quantum, where many realities coexist, we can assume that when we temporarily turn off consciousness, we travel to parallel realities,” says the professor. - Our consciousness limits the possibilities of such perception, as blinders prevent the horse from seeing everything that is happening around it. Consciousness is our blinders, without which we, perhaps, would go crazy. Indeed, even a short-term peeping beyond the horizon of our consciousness sometimes causes fright and bewilderment. Thus, it is not the other worlds that appear to us in dreams and unusual states of consciousness that are illusory, on the contrary, the illusion is the belief that our reality is the only one and there are no others."
Many scientists and creative people are familiar with the states of illumination that often come in a dream, recalls Mikhail Mensky. If we take quantum physics into account, then it's not surprising. After all, extra-logical knowledge uses a much wider database than logical one.
Moreover, due to the reversibility of the equations of quantum mechanics in the state of "unconscious" there is access not only to all meanings, but also to all times. We are able to look into the future and see all its options. It's the same with the past.
“Lethargic sleep should not be feared like the plague, but studied and used to expand the boundaries of the perception of the world,” says Mensky. - The abilities that are dormant in each of us can provide the opportunity to travel to parallel worlds without driving ourselves into a trance or a state of drug intoxication. Such an expanded consciousness will be possessed by the person of the future. He will be able to draw any information from other realities, as today we recall last year's vacation or a recently read book."
Natalia Leskova
