People have known lethargic sleep for more than one hundred years. But what is interesting is that the nature of this strange, mystical phenomenon remains unsolved even today. Of course, doctors, armed with modern devices and technologies, are trying to solve the riddle, but each time they face conflicting facts.
Strange disease
In 1892, a very comical story took place in Italy. During the carnival, a respectable man suddenly felt bad, and he fell on the pavement. The poor man was brought home, put on the bed, and a doctor was called. Since the unfortunate man had neither pulse nor breath, the aesculapius ordered his relatives to prepare for the funeral. Even before the burial, the numerous relatives of the deceased had time to thoroughly quarrel over the inheritance, but during the funeral the deceased suddenly came to life and rose from the coffin.
However, many people who fell asleep in a lethargic sleep suffered a much more dire fate. So, when the old English cemetery was reburied, it turned out that the skeletons in some of the coffins lay in unnatural positions (as if the deceased were trying to escape, but could not). And history knows a great many such examples.
Indeed, it is very difficult to distinguish a person who has fallen asleep in a lethargic sleep from the deceased. The heartbeat slows down to two beats per minute, breathing becomes so imperceptible that it does not leave a trace on the mirror brought to the mouth. The body temperature decreases, all body functions slow down 20-30 times, the excretion of urine and feces completely stops. Well, how is it, pray tell, to distinguish a living person from a dead one.
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Hysterical hibernation
The causes of lethargy have not been established to this day. Apparently, an attack can be provoked by various reasons: severe nervous stress, fainting, shock, burnout … The duration of sleep can be different: from several hours to several years.
The lethargic dream of our compatriot Nadezhda Lebedina is recorded in the Guinness Book of Records. The girl fell asleep in 1954 after a serious quarrel with her husband, and woke up 20 years later.
However, modern medicine practically does not use the phrase "lethargic sleep" in relation to this type of sleep, such terms as hysterical lethargy or hysterical hibernation are applied to it. It is impossible to forcefully withdraw from an attack of lethargy, it itself ends as unexpectedly as it begins.
Mental trauma that causes an attack of lethargy can be very severe or very minor, because people prone to hysteria, even small troubles seem to be the end of the world. Disconnecting from the external world with its problems, the patients unconsciously go to sleep.
Be that as it may, but scientists believe that lethargic sleep is due to extreme weakness and extreme depletion of the nerve cells of the brain, which fall into a state of protective "protective" inhibition. The body says: “I'm tired! Don't touch me!”- and stops responding to any irritation.
But this scheme does not really fit the examples of children falling asleep with lethargic sleep. What is the depletion of nerve cells in a young organism that has just begun its formation?
Mass outbreaks
Nor can one explain the "outbursts" that drive several dozen people into lethargic sleep at the same time by nervous exhaustion. Numerous cases of a similar disease were recorded in 1916 and in 1927 in France, in 1948 in Iceland.
Doctors Russell Dale and Andrew Church, studying the histories of these diseases, found that many of the patients who fell into lethargic sleep suffered from angina. And this led them to think about a bacterial infection. Soon, a rare form of streptococcus bacteria was found in all patients. From which the scientists concluded that the bacteria that cause the common sore throat have mutated and provoked a lethargic attack. “The immune system of some people, distracted by the attack of infection on the throat, allows the parasite to enter the nervous system, the midbrain is affected, and inflammation begins,” they wrote.
Sleeping princess
It's sad. But lethargy often stops the process of physical aging. Beatrice Hubert, a resident of Brussels, slept for twenty years. After awakening from her sleep, she was still young. True, this miracle did not last long, Beatrice made up for her physical age in a year and aged 20 years.
In other words, an organism that has woken up after many years of hibernation begins to quickly catch up with its calendar age. Such people grow old, as they say, by leaps and bounds. So, for example, Nazira Rustemova from Turkestan, who fell asleep in 1969 at the age of four, slept in a lethargic sleep for sixteen years. After awakening, she developed into an adult girl in a few months.
Do dreamers dream of lethargic sleep? Nazira says yes.
- In a dream, I talked with my ancestor Ahmed Yassavi, in whose honor a large temple was built in Turkestan. He was the greatest mystic, scientist, spiritual healer and poet, lived in the XII century. We talked with him, walked in the gardens. It was very good there …
Nazira fell asleep in a lethargic sleep when she was four years old. The parents took the girl to the regional hospital, but a week later she stopped showing signs of life, and the doctors decided that the girl had died.
- The night after the funeral, my grandfather and dad heard a voice in a dream, which informed them that they had committed a grave sin, as they buried me alive. According to our customs, people are not buried in coffins or buried in the ground. The human body is wrapped in a shroud and left in a special underground burial house. And the entrance is filled up with bricks. In the morning my parents came for me and saw that the shroud was torn in some places, and my arms were scattered to the sides. This convinced them that I was really alive. I was transferred to a research institute in Tashkent, where I lay under a special cap until I woke up.
It's amazing that the girl woke up from a phone call in the next room. She followed the sound and ended up in the nursing room. The doctors and nurses were shocked! It would seem that in a person who has been lying motionless for several years, the muscles of the body should be completely atrophied. But the girl did not feel any discomfort. In addition, after awakening, Nazira revealed unusual abilities: she understood people and even animals at a telepathic level, sometimes unexpectedly for herself moved in space, could speak and write in different languages … But with every year of waking, all these abilities came to naught, and using them became more and more difficult.
Are you a yogi, my friend?
As you know, lethargic sleep of natural, and not traumatic or other origin, usually develops in hysterical patients. But in some cases, healthy people, who are not at all hysterical, using special techniques, can cause a similar condition in themselves. For example, Hindu yogis, using self-hypnosis and holding the breath, can, at will, bring themselves into a state of the deepest and longest sleep, similar to lethargy.
In 1893, Dr. Walter, in his dissertation, published a translation from Sanskrit of an ancient Indian manuscript on the exercises with which yogis induce prolonged sleep. The exercises consisted mainly in the fact that a person gradually increased the period of holding his breath, and this entailed a temporary cessation of the activity of consciousness.
Academician Tarkhanov was very interested in lethargic sleep as a phenomenon, who believed that some Europeans were able to induce something similar to a dream of yogis - with the difference, however, that they exercised not in stopping breathing, but in holding the heartbeat. “It is difficult to imagine that the heart or blood vessels obey the will, nevertheless, in the medical literature cases are cited indicating the possibility of this kind. Thus, the English physiologists Belle and Cermak could slow down their heartbeats at will.
In the literature, one English colonel, Townsend, is mentioned as a subject who arbitrarily caused his cardiac arrest, so prolonged that he fainted from it. During such an experience, his body grew cold, as if numb, his eyes became motionless, and consciousness at the end completely disappeared. After several hours of this state, he gradually came to his senses. For a long time, such sessions went well for him, but once, having made an experience of this kind in front of many witnesses, he died."
Needless to say, jokes with death, even “imaginary”, are very dangerous …
Before the invention of the electroencephalograph, which records the biocurrents of the brain, the possibility of being buried alive during an attack of lethargy actually existed. This is not surprising, because with a severe form of the disease, the sleeper does not show any signs of life, it is not for nothing that the meaning of the word lethargy is translated from Greek as “imaginary death” or “small life”.
Daria SHTIL