Research Notes

Research Notes  

In my search to understand what the virus is I have collected books, articles, research papers, videos, etc. on the subject of sleep science and virology.

  

Soul Sleepers: A History of Somnambulism in the United States, 1740-1840 

by Professor Joyce Chaplin Kristen Anne Keerma Friedman (c) 2014

 

Abstract The strange behavior of somnambulists in the United States between 1740 and 1840 attracted the attention of different emerging professional groups, each of which sought the authority to explain what the condition revealed about the role of volition in governing the human mind, and by extension, the body. Clergy, physicians, and lawyers fought with one another for interpretive rights over the embodied knowledge that somnambulists produced while in their paroxysms. Theologians hoped to use the trance state to appropriate knowledge about the afterlife from the entranced people who claimed their souls had journeyed there. Physicians wished to use somnambulists as instruments to prove theories of mind, including the basis of phrenology. They attempted to fit somnambulism into a diagnostic category with limited success. Lawyers attempted to use the embodied knowledge gathered from somnambulistic acts to create rules managing intent and culpability. Somnambulists themselves asserted authority over containing their own conditions by resisting professional attempts to use their bodies as portals to their unconscious mind. The group most successful at resistance was that of female somnambulists, each of who showed evidence of possessing a dual consciousness. The women whose cases are covered in this dissertation represent the broad failure of any profession to gain ultimate authority over explaining the problematic behavior posed by somnambulists. This dissertation also traces the history of how somnambulists came to be associated with criminality through their primary association with the “night season,” a cultural framework that colonial Americans imposed on their environment to regulate disorderly conduct, especially on the part of women, young men, blacks, and Native Americans. In the United States, somnambulism was seen as a natural phenomenon. In contrast to European artificial somnambulism (a byproduct of animal magnetism), somnambulism in the United States revealed attitudes about what standards an interpreter of nature ought to hold.  

 

"From approximately 1740 to 1840 in the United States, somnambulists – commonly known as sleepwalkers – presented a constellation of vexing behaviors that demanded interpretation." 

 

 Baron Carl von Reichenbach

The Odic force is the name given in the mid-19th century to a hypothetical vital energy or life force by Baron Carl von Reichenbach. Von Reichenbach coined the name from that of the Norse god Odin in 1845. The study of Odic force is called odology.

-Signs that the lack of sleep was affecting their bodies were most likely there but not apparent to the naked eye.  Within the first twenty-four hours of sleep deprivation, the blood pressure starts to increase. Not long afterward, the metabolism levels go haywire, giving a person an uncontrollable craving for carbohydrates.

These videos are not local but are reminiscent of Henry Rowe and Trisha Fox

-If you are woken up while in stage four of REM, you will be disoriented, unable to answer basic questions, and want nothing more than to go back to sleep, a condition researchers call sleep drunkenness.

A virus is a small infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of other organisms. Viruses can infect all types of life forms, from animals and plants to microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea.

About 5,000 virus species have been described in detail, although there are millions of types. Viruses are found in almost every ecosystem on Earth and are the most numerous type of biological entity. The study of viruses is known as virology, a sub-speciality of microbiology.

In the middle of the night,

I go walking in my sleep,

Throug hthe valley of fear,

To the river so deep,

And I've been searching for something,

Taken out of my soul,

Something I would never lose,

Something somebody stole,

REM sleep: the brain is as active as it is when it is awake.  This is when most dreams occur.

The origins of viruses in the evolutionary history of life are unclear: some may have evolved from plasmids—pieces of DNA that can move between cells—while others may have evolved from bacteria. In evolution, viruses are an important means of horizontal gene transfer, which increases genetic diversity. Viruses are considered by some to be a life form, because they carry genetic material, reproduce, and evolve through natural selection, but lack key characteristics (such as cell structure) that are generally considered necessary to count as life. Because they possess some but not all such qualities, viruses have been described as "organisms at the edge of life", and as replicators.

Sleep Paralysis

If the brain doesn’t get the message.  This can lead to waking up in the middle of the night with the frightening sensation that you can’t move your limbs.  In the Middle Ages, this was thought to be a sign that a demon called an incubus was perched on the chest.

At other times, the body doesn’t fully paralyze itself like it’s supposed to.  This is the root of a series of problems called 'parasomnias', of which sleepwalking is by far the most mild.  Patients with REM sleep disorder, for instance, sometimes jump out of a window or tackle their nightstand while they are acting out a dream.  Some patients have resorted to literally tying themselves to the bedpost for fear they’ll commit suicide.

Viruses spread in many ways; viruses in plants are often transmitted from plant to plant by insects that feed on plant sap, such as aphids; viruses in animals can be carried by blood-sucking insects. These disease-bearing organisms are known as vectors. Influenza viruses are spread by coughing and sneezing. Norovirus and rotavirus, common causes of viral gastroenteritis, are transmitted by the faecal–oral route and are passed from person to person by contact, entering the body in food or water. HIV is one of several viruses transmitted through sexual contact and by exposure to infected blood. The variety of host cells that a virus can infect is called its "host range". This can be narrow, meaning a virus is capable of infecting few species, or broad, meaning it is capable of infecting many.

The Ancient Greeks believed that someone fell asleep when the brain became filled with blood, and then woke up once it drained back out again.

-Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, was the twin brother of Thanatos, the god of death, and their mother was the goddess of the night.

Sleepwalking Painter
https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/7342076/sleepwalking-painter-lee-hadwin/ 

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190719-the-mysterious-case-of-the-man-who-draws-in-his-sleep

Example of typical sleep/night-feeding

-Maintaining a healthy sleep schedule is now thought of as one of the best forms of preventative medicine.  See Stanford University first university laboratory center devoted to treating sleep disorders in 1970.

Canterbury Tales: first sleep and second sleep.

Second Sleep - Every night, people fell asleep not long after the sun went down and stayed that way until sometime after midnight.  Once a person woke up, he or she would stay that way for an hour or so before going back to sleep until morning - the second sleep.

-Artificial light we see every day could have some unknown effect on our sleep.

-The Tiv culture in central Nigeria practiced segmented sleep and used roughly the same term for first and second sleep.

-Thanks to Edison, sunset no longer meant the end of your social (or work) life, instead it marked the beginning of it.

-There was no longer a need to leave the workbench idle just because the sun went down.  The twenty-four hour workforce was born.

-After a 1994 earthquake knocked out the power, some residents of Los Angeles called the police to report a strange “giant, silvery cloud” in the sky above them.  It was the Milky Way.

-Two-thirds of the population of the United States and half of Europe live in areas where the night sky shines too brightly to see the Milky Way with the naked eye.

The body’s clock can be reset by any lights stronger than 180 lux.

-We are living in an experiment that is finding out what happens if you expose humans to constant summer day lengths.

-Jodi Mindel: sleep disorders center at CHOP.

-Stan Parks, sleepwalker from Philadelphia was once a beacon of hope for many including myself.  His story contained so many fascinating details it seemed he must have an answer to at least one of my questions.  I read about him in the Inquirer and reached out to him shortly after.

Other examples of sleep-driving:

Sleep driving and other unusual practices during sleep - Harvard Medical School 

New Zealand Woman Drives 200 Miles Through The Night While She Was Asleep

-Human babies in the womb also cycle through REM sleep -- and presumably dreams.

-Hall’s conclusion was the opposite of Freuds: far from being full of hidden symbols, most dreams were remarkably straightforward and predictable

Dreams tend to be unpleasant.  Hall found that the average dream is filled with characters who were aggressive, mean, or violent.

-Antti Revonsuo argued that negative, anxiety-filled dreams were simply an ancient defense mechanism, letting us experience bad things in order to train our brains to react in case something similar happened while we were awake.  Dreams, in this view, are the brains dress rehearsals. (Dress rehearsal for WHAT?)

G. William Domhoff, collected dream journals alongside Calvin Hall and made their vast collection available in the 1990s.

If a woman dreams about walking over a bridge, it is more likely that she literally crosses a bridge during her daily commute, or that she can see one from her window, rather than her brain deciding to broadcast her emotions using figurative images.

The things that you care about are the things that you dream about.

Some grow to fear sleep. This is certainly true of many patients at the clinic.

Sleep can also help the brain to recognize patterns.

Sleepwalking = no sleep = no pattern recognition

Many patients with the virus cannot recognize simple and obvious patterns and changes of behavior.

-Friendly Fire

-Gum is ideal if you really need caffeine in a hurry: it allows the stimulant to be absorbed through the tissues in the mouth and reach the brain about five times faster than a pill or coffee.

“Stay Awake. Stay Alive” 

Pilots routinely take orange “go pills” before night missions, and sometimes take another dose while in the cockpit.  Amphetamines can lead to increased aggression and paranoia.

Sleepwalkers can have their eyes open and react to the events going on around them, but have no conscious thought or memory.

Hypnos

Shakespeare was eerily correct in his description of the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth.  “You see, her eyes are open.” “Aye, but their sense is shut”.

About one in five people sleepwalk in their lifetime.

Some people with sexsomnia, as it’s called, are better lovers while they are asleep than when they are awake.

Parasomnias seem to be a particularly male trait.

Parasomnias run in certain families.  My father told me of his own sleepwalking on the farm where he grew up, in Kansas.  More than once, he woke up in his pajamas in the middle of a cornfield.

"His grandfather would often sleepwalk into the kitchen and start frying eggs and onions on the stove, only to go to bed without eating."

-Cramer Bornemann’s life is spent looking at cases of sleepwalking, sleep driving, and sleep sex.  He is a detective of the human mind. What in essence we’re doing is developing and defining a new field of sleep forensics”

-REM sleep behavior disorder

Identifying sleepwalking as the cause can also trigger life insurance policies that don’t cover suicide.

Several clues suggest which parts of a sleeping person’s brain are within conscious control at a particular moments.  The easiest of these to spot with the naked eye is muscle tone, which is completely absent in REM slep.

Say a witness testifies that a barefoot man came after him with a baseball bat and stepped into a pile of broken glass but didn’t react.

The decision to down alcohol makes it impossible to tell whether a person is truly sleepwalking.

 

 

Mowgli sleepwalking

“This whole business of committing a murder while sleepwalking… I think the best word is sophistry.” - Judge Gary Ferrari

Many will also spend ten minutes in front of a light box immediately before a race, especially if they are competing when their circadian rhythm normally dips.  (stare at a light before shift?)

Biology’s cruel joke goes something like this: as teenage body goes through puberty, its circadian rhythm essentially shifts three hours backward.  Suddenly, going to bed at nine or ten o’clock at night isn’t just a drag, but close to a biological impossibility. Studies of teenagers found that adolescent brains do not start releasing melatonin until around eleven o’clock and keep pumping out the hormone well past sunrise.  Adults, meanwhile, have little-to-no melatonin in their bodies when they wake up. With all that melatonin surging through their bloodstream, teenagers who are forced to be awake before eight in the morning are often barely alert and want nothing more than to give in to their body’s demands and fall back asleep.

Pickwickian syndrome: named after a character in Charles Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers, who palls asleep standing up.

Apnea: from the Greek word for breathless.

In all of medical history, nobody have ever died from lack of sleep.

Halcion linked “traveler’s amnesia”

Anterograde amnesia.  In other words, ingesting the drug essentially makes it temporarily harder for the brain to form new short-term memories.  This explains why those who take a pill may toss and turn in the middle of the night but say the next day that they slept soundly.  Their brains simply weren’t recording all those fleeting minutes of wakefulness, allowing them to face each morning with a clean slate, unaware of anything that happened over the last six or seven hours.

waking up to find candy wrappers in your bed, lit stoves in the kitchen, and bite marks on the pizzas in the freezer.  broken wrists from falls, lists of cellphone calls, ambien.

Zeo headband

In the middle of the night,
I go walking in my sleep,
Through the jungle of doubt,
To a river so deep,

I know I'm searching for something,
Something so undefined,
That it can only be seen,
By the eyes of the blind,