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We know that sleep is a vital requirement for us. We also know the effects of going without sleep for a few days. But what would happen if someone went without sleep for a whole month? No, we are not talking about sleeping for two or three hours a day. We are talking about remaining wide awake for a month.

Any sane person would have the same response: it isn’t possible to remain awake for 30 days. When we are sleepy, we automatically doze off after some time no matter how hard we try to stay awake. Even someone with chronic insomnia falls asleep at a certain point.

It’s interesting to imagine what would happen if someone were to really go without sleep for that long. It has obviously never happened, but there are several stories on the internet that claim experiments have taken place in the past to find out the effects of long term sleep deprivation. The most famous among them is the Russian Sleep Experiment story.

What is the Russian Sleep Experiment?

What would happen if someone were to go without sleep for nearly 30 days? That’s what a group of researchers set to find out in 1940s Soviet. In this scientific experiment sanctioned by the military, a group of researchers took five political prisoners and locked them for 15 days in a sealed gas chamber. The subjects were continually administered an airborne stimulant for keeping them awake for at least 30 days. They were told that they’d be set free if they could remain awake for 30 days.

For the first few days, everything seemed normal. The subjects continued to talk to each other as well as a whisper to the researchers who kept monitoring them from outside the chamber. The conversations were electronically monitored while their behavior was monitored with the help of secret two-way mirrors.

It was from the fifth day that things began to change. The prisoners started to show signs of stress and paranoia. They stopped talking to one another and only whispered into the microphone sometimes. From the ninth day, things became worse. Two of the inmates started to run around the chamber and scream so hard that their vocal cords could break.

The screaming, however, stopped suddenly, and then there was eerie silence. The researchers feared the worst and announced their decision to open the chamber. But they heard a voice from inside that said they no longer wanted to be free.

On the fifteenth day, the chamber was opened, but the results were horrific. One of the prisoners was dead. All of them were severely mutilated, with their flesh torn off and abdomens ripped open. They also seemed to have eaten their own flesh.

They refused to leave the chamber and fought back with a force and aggression they did not have before being put in the chamber. They were almost superhuman in their power and even tore off their muscles and bones during the struggle to resist being removed from the chamber and anesthetized. When they were asked why they had done that to themselves, each of them gave the same response: “I must remain awake.”

Even after being removed from the chamber, the surviving prisoners continued to show extreme strength, incredible resistance to drugs and sedatives, unimaginable ability to remain alive even after lethal injuries, and a desperate desire to remain awake and being given the stimulant gas again. The researchers also discovered that when any subject fell asleep, they instantly died.

With two of the subjects were dead, the surviving three were treated for their injuries and prepared to return to the gas chamber. However, within moments, the EEG monitors revealed that all the subjects were brain dead. Just before the chamber was sealed, another prisoner fell asleep and died, while the researcher shot another one dead.

Before shooting the last surviving subject, the researcher asked what he was, to which he identified himself as the evil that resided in every human mind and kept in check by sleep. Soon after, the researcher shot him dead and went about covering up any trace of the experiment.

What Did You Just Read?

To put your minds at ease, here’s the truth: that experiment did not actually take place. Yes, it’s totally made up. But when it first appeared on the internet, it instantly went viral, and people started to debate the authenticity of the story (the debate continues). Part of the reason why it’s so believable is that the military in the Soviet era was known to be inhuman and conducted various experiments in secret. This one, however, wasn’t one of them.

The Russian sleep experiment is an internet horror story that first appeared on a Wiki page in 2010. The author is unknown, but their username was Orange Soda. Wiki is a site where users modify content found on the internet to make them interesting, unbelievable, creepy, or funny. Even the images of the Russian Sleep Experiment found on the internet are all modified versions of random browser-generated images.

Such horror stories and images are called Creepypasta and are meant to scare readers. Creepypastas are short, user-generated content created with the intention to scare people with gruesome stories about death paranormal activities or otherworldly occurrences. The Russian Sleep Experiment is one such Creepypasta, which became so popular that many people believed it to be true. But rest assured nothing of that sort ever took place, not in Russia or anywhere in the world.

Soviet Secret Experiments

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