Jasper County Democrat, Volume 7, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 January 1905 — TWENTY YEARS’ SLEEP. [ARTICLE]

TWENTY YEARS’ SLEEP.

Rip Van Winkle's Cane Map Have Been More Pact Tkaa Fiction. Even superficial students of folklore know that the tale of Rip Van Winkle, supposing that Irving really heard it In the old Dutch settlements along the Hudson, is by no means peculiar to that district, but is found in some form or other all over the world. In other words, the idea that it is possible for a human being to survive in a state of unconsciousness for a very long time would seem to be either a universal fancy or to be founded on some actual experience. Dr. Lancereaux In the Paris Bulletin of the Academy of Medicine reports such an experience, the case of a woman who actually did, so far as intelligent consciousness was concerned, sleep almost exactly twenty years. The patient, of a neurotic aud hysterical family, had always been delicate and nervous. On May 31, 1883, she was severely frightened and fell into violent hysteria, which after twentyfour hours passed into unconsciousness. In this condition, interrupted every month or six weeks by sudden convulsive attacks, she lay until May 23, 1903, kept alive entirely by injections of nourishment. On May 23 she was seized with hysteria similar to that at the beginning of her sleep, and the next day there was another convulsion. On May 25 she began definitely to recover consciousness and by the next day was able to speak intelligently of events before her sleep and could also remember from day to day since her waking. Of happenings during her sleep, such as the drawing of some of her teeth, she knew nothing. On the evening of May 28 she died-peacefully. The particular case is of interest chiefly to the medical profession, but the general fact of survival in unconsciousness for a very long time shows how such tales as those of the Sleeping Beauty, the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and Rip Van Winkle, to mention only ( the most familiar examples, could have originated from actual experience and observation. Very likely such cases occurred more than once. “Truth Is stranger than fiction,’’ runs the old saying. It is undoubtedly more correct to say that fiction Is merely enlarged, reduced, distorted and otherwise decorated fact and that without a fact within general knowledge from which to start fiction could not exist It is entirely safe to conjecture that at some prehistoric period, sleeping not out of doors, of course, but under shelter, and for many weeks and probably months, if not years, there was a Rip Van Winkle.—Chicago Inter Ocean.