Lethargic sleep is a mysterious disease, the causes of which doctors cannot name even today. Physicians conventionally call it brain inflammation. This state is more like not a dream, but a death. Human skin becomes cold and pale, facial features sharpen, pupils do not react to light. Breath and pulse cannot be detected without special medical devices. In past centuries, in order to determine whether a person was breathing or not, a mirror was applied to his lips. It is clear that this did not always give a result.
There are also mild forms of lethargy, when the patient is motionless and relaxed, but breathing is clearly visible. At the same time, a person is conscious, but cannot control his body, speak or open his eyes.
Attacks begin suddenly, as a rule, after a severe nervous shock or as a result of severe exhaustion, but they also occur in healthy people. Nervous young women especially often fall into lethargic sleep.
Lethargic sleep can last for several days or several years. The longest sleep lasted 20 years. For the life of a person under medical supervision, this condition is not dangerous. It is impossible to predict when exactly a person will regain consciousness. The patient's body functions slowly, as a result of which aging is almost imperceptible. But as soon as a person gets out of the state of sleep, he begins to rapidly catch up with his biological age, aging over several years.
Yogis can cause a state similar to lethargic sleep. But they, unlike the sick, can wake up from sleep at the time that they have set for themselves.
Cases of lethargy have been found throughout human history. Most of all, medieval people were afraid that they would be buried alive, mistaken for the dead. Their fears were well founded: when ancient European cemeteries are being demolished today, skeletons are often found in graves, turned to one side, and the lids of their coffins are covered with deep scratches from the inside. Sometimes those who fell into a state of lethargic sleep regained consciousness literally at the edge of their grave. Often those buried alive were rescued by people who heard the noise that came from underground.
The famous Russian writer Nikolai Gogol was most afraid of waking up in a boarded-up coffin. When in 1931 his grave was exhumed, it turned out that the writer's fears were not in vain: his skull was turned to the side, and his shroud was torn in several places.
Today, such cases are excluded. At the slightest suspicion of lethargic sleep, a person is taken to the hospital, where a number of procedures are performed, in particular, an electrocardiogram and an electroencephalogram, which will certainly register even weak signs of brain and heart activity.
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In England, a bell is installed in all morgues so that a person who has come to himself can call for help. In some countries, a cell phone is placed in a coffin or a funeral is postponed for several days until signs of death become evident.
In the old days, sleeping people were often mistaken for the dead in a lethargic sleep and buried. As a result, when a person came to his senses, he began to make noise, shout, knock in order to attract attention to himself. Probably from here are the roots of stories about the living dead, vampires and other wickedness that gets out of graves and crypts at night.