4. THE RUSSIAN SLEEP EXPERIMENT

According to legend, during WW2 the Soviet Union embarked on some pretty inhumane tests to explore the very limits of human endurance. Placing five subjects (political dissidents) into a gas chamber, they filled the room with stimulant gas and told the subjects to stay awake for 30 days. What happened next will ensure you don’t get any sleep either.

Everything was fine for the first five days; the subjects hardly complained having been promised (falsely) that they would be freed if they submitted to the test and did not sleep for 30 days. Their conversations and activities were monitored and it was noted that they continued to talk about increasingly traumatic incidents in their past, and the general tone of their conversations took on a darker aspect after the 4 day mark.

After five days they started to complain about the circumstances and events that lead them to where they were and started to demonstrate severe paranoia. They stopped talking to each other and began alternately whispering to the microphones and one way mirrored portholes. Oddly they all seemed to think they could win the trust of the experimenters by turning over their comrades, the other subjects in captivity with them. At first the researchers suspected this was an effect of the gas itself…

After nine days the first of them started screaming.

By the end of the experiment, the test subjects were eagerly eating their own flesh to staying awake, and they all refused to leave the chamber. When asked why, one simply replied, “We must stay awake.”