Hypnos god of sleep was said to live in a cave, where no light, no sound would ever enter.
In this cave the river Lethe comes from and where night and day meet. His bed was made of ebony, on the entrance of the cave grew soporific plants.
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Hypnos was the one who brought the gift of sleep and rest to anyone, and as such he had power over both mortals and gods. And due to their sleep, owned half of their lives.
Sleep deprivation experiment
Dr. William C. Dement, Lt. Cmdr. John J. Ross
1965
For Randy Gardner, a perfectly normal 17-year-old student, the verbal counting problem is not difficult. The neurologist asked him to subtract seven from the number 100, then another one, and so on. But Gardner only got to 65 and shut up. The questioner waited a minute, and then wondered why he did not count further. "What should I count?" - asked the young man. He had already forgotten what he was asked about.
Previously, Gardner never had any mental problems. And now? The neurologist writes: “A face without expression, indistinct speech, devoid of intonation; you have to encourage him to speak in order to get at least some answer. " What happened to the handsome young man from the California city of San Diego? It's very simple: he wants to sleep, as, probably, no one else has ever wanted. After all, Gardner has been awake for the 11th day in a row, he has not slept for 250 hours. He needs to endure just one more night, and he will achieve his goal: he will fall into the Guinness Book of Records as having not slept the longest in the world.
Perhaps after the fifth seven subtracted, fatigue turned off his short-term memory, as happens with people in a state of senile dementia. Or maybe he just fell asleep for a split second. This is too short a period of time for the interlocutor to notice anything, but long enough to erase an arithmetic problem from memory.
Gardner's condition was then kept by neurologist John Ross from the Naval Hospital in San Diego. Together with his colleagues, he undertook to observe the experiment that the young man started. Already on the second day of sleep deprivation, the psychiatrist noticed signs of extreme fatigue in the young man: Gardner was having difficulty “concentrating his gaze on one object and recognizing things by touch. On the third day, the patient fell into melancholy, on the fourth, he had memory lapses for the first time and the inability to concentrate.
Further, the young man had problems with sensory perception, he took the road sign for a person, and himself for a famous football player. However, we are not talking about psychotic hallucinations - Gardner quickly and independently notices his mistake. In the following days, the symptoms intensify. The young man's speech slows down. He cannot remember the names of the simplest objects. Memory lapses are more and more pronounced.
But he still set a hitherto unsurpassed world record. After 264 hours, that is, exactly 11 days, Gardner gives the legendary press conference at 5 am. After Randy went to bed, he slept for almost 15 hours, after which he woke up vigorous and practically healthy.
A Visit to a Sleep and Dream Lab
Read a short description of how the seeping brain is studied
Excerpt from "Understanding Sleep and Dreaming" by William H. Moorcroft, 2005
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Sleep deprivation effects: grouped experiments
from "Sleep" by Ian Oswald
1974
Difficulty
in sustaining attention
A simple task used by the U.S.A. research workers was one in which a series of letters from the alphabet appeared one after another. The task was to press a lever whenever ‘X’ appeared, as it did 160 times among 630 letters. On this task practically no errors were made when testing was carried out before deprivation. After three nights without sleep a quarter of the 'Xs' were missed. On the other hand, the lever was often pressed when the letter just shown had not been 'X'.
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A very similar result followed the use of a task in which the letter was not shown but spoken. Nearly 40% of the 'X's were missed. This time the eyes were closed and the signs of quick little drifts into sleep were found in the EEG, associated with the apparent failures to hear the 'X 's.
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A medical student after 100 hours without sleep, was to address a batch of envelopes. Breaks began to appear in his work. He wrote the name, then the first part of the address, then, coming to the final line which was 'West Lothian', he wrote, 'West Looking'. He had started off all right but could not sustain his attention.
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The sleep-deprived person can briefly be as
capable as a normal one. But he/she cannot sustain an effort of attention.
Audio- and visual hallucinations
Just as visions are common when falling asleep in bed, in the same way, a sleep-deprived person, forced to walk about with eyes open, often describes 'seeing things'. Surfaces of objects seem to swirl and change, the wall-paper seems to come to life, People or faces appear suddenly, only to vanish upon drawing nearer.
Two of sleep deprived volunteers saw crumbs on the table-cloth running about like insects. One man once spent half a minute carefully kicking at cobwebs which appeared to cover a carpet. Three had visions of women peering at them: in broad daylight, almost always unpleasant old women, who appeared to be talking about one of him. The visions would vanish Cheshire-cat-wise, the body before the face, as the deprived person drew near, but after passing he saw them again when he turned round.
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'Hearing things' too is quite common: dogs barking, voices speaking amidst the noise of running water. Longer and more pervasive dream states interfere with ordinary conversation, quite irrelevant replies or remarks being made which seem to refer to a vivid day-dream life rather than to real life.
Dream-like quality of thinking
When eighty hours sleepless Ralph Berger, might have been used the phrase 'first in the field', he remarked, 'That is all right so long as you are first on the green'. He had a mental picture of three golf balls on a green (a 'green' not a 'field'), one being played by Berger.
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Deprived volunteers were asked to turn through the pages of EEG records of all-night sleep, and to write down the time of night at minute intervals. Looking through these records at their efforts one is struck by the many corrections. First 12.31, changed to 12.37 and some illegible letters after it, the whole then crossed out, 12.3 begun and crossed out, 12.30 written down and finally changed to 12.32. Sometimes, instead of times, senseless words or phrases were found to have been written, such as 'story burden' , 'batting by one', 'corminal brier', 'a dorable', 'SBT', and ' 12.81D Cuba here we comerce’.
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The dream-like quality of thinking happens when cortical vigilance is lowered. Any monotonous task extends the drowsiness up to the sleep. More intellectually-demanding tasks at these times keep the brain awake.
Listen to this while sleepless and tell us what you hear
White noise is a random signal having equal intensity at different frequencies, giving it a constant power spectral density. White noise refers to a statistical model for signals and signal sources, rather than to any specific signal.
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Brown noise is the kind of signal noise produced by Brownian motion, which is named after Robert Brown, who documented the erratic motion for multiple types of inanimate particles in water.
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Pink noise is a signal with a frequency spectrum such that the power spectral density is inversely proportional to the frequency of the signal. In pink noise, each octave interval carries an equal amount of noise energy. Pink noise is one of the most common signals in biological systems.
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Dream Catalogue: sound and text excerpts
Dream Catalogue features reoccurring dreams
collected by Myroslava Kuts
What mostly happened was that I was in quite familiar surroundings. But I would run into situations that would sort of foresee a coming danger or coming enemy or coming evil or something bad happening.
And I've always had the idea that I could foresee these things, or that I would be warned. But only myself. And these situations would be marked by by animals appearing and speaking to me.
And I am in an old house with low light. There is a beautiful white staircase made of marble. People are approaching me, but they don't see me.
I listened to a crystal object to break and suddenly I'm transferring in my grandfather's house in the valence. Similar crystal object is in the living room.
I found myself in a super small space, like a closet in the dark, trying to hold the door to protect me from something that was coming after. But I never knew why I was there. And it was always listening, always listening.
And to protect me from the kind of entity that is coming after me, I hold this door. Every time I had this dream, I knew this was the end and that I will soon awake after.
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The last seconds of the dream before I wake up there was a feeling of of absorption and a huge or super loud noise was exploding.
And, and always run into the same room. And the room always turned out to be like a bathroom. And it would transform into an elevator that would start moving up and down between different floors.
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But because the dream occurred quite a lot. Eventually you're figured what to do. The spiders would start dropping down at one point and I realised that if I put on the light quarter of the bathroom, it would destroy them. And
Witches or skeletons or mummies would start coming out from the corners. And I realised if I turn the taps on one night, you start pulling the chain and start manipulating things in the bathroom, it would also get rid of them.
And at this moment, really slowly one half his slipper go down and fall from the cliff really slowly. And it's a big, big, big big cliff long and it's going down to the little river and like like a little stream. And at this moment the camera or the point of view stop and I see myself with a friend from when I was eight years old.
And after that I come back to the little river and I see the slipper going inside the bottle. So it's metamorphosing like water but I see that the slipper taking the form of the bottle to go inside.
But it often happens to me that I feel like I quit a dream into another dream in with a blink of an eye. These are always very, very unexpected acts. For example, I remember a dream.
When I was dreaming about work, I was at my office, and I was at the meeting, listening to somebody talking, and from the from one second to the other, I found myself at a field at night. And I was just sitting there, the only thing I could recognise was that the grass was burnt out.
I must cross the bridge, but I'm really trying to avoid it. Because I know that the moment they start to cross the bridge, the water from the river will come up so much that it will completely swallow me.
This bridge, it's huge and tall. It's very, very long, and the river itself is super wide, very dark. You can't see through that water. Sometimes I have to cross it. And then the water is coming up.
I would be walking towards a stairwell in my house. And when I would be just about ready to start walking down the stairs, instead of walking, I would jump all across all of the stairs and hit the landing at the bottom of the stairs. There would be blackness and then I would immediately wake up.
Because I knew that that would mean that I would wake up I knew that this would be over soon. And then I would start my day.
And there is like some little little object everywhere on the ground, but I can't really see it because it's too far and there's so many. And when I try to go next to it, they start to disappear in the ground.
And when each object disappear on the ground other objects appear. And I can't catch catch anything. Never. The more I walk, the more of them disappear.
I'm always on an airplane. And on this airplane, I hear the pilot announce that the plane is crashing. Normally, it happens just after the plane has taken off from whatever airport. And when the plane crashes, it doesn't scare me at all.
But because I've had this dream multiple times, there's a sort of familiarity that I feel like I've survived the situation before.
It's just this intense feeling that comes out of nowhere that my teeth, my back teeth in my mouth start becoming very loose. And then so I started picking them out of my mouth.
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So even after I take out one, there is a new work new one growing back to the place of the old one immediately. And this just keeps repeating endlessly, until I somehow wake up.
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