CHAPTER 1
Encephalitis Lethargica
The Great Sleeping Sickness
The tragic case of a man being in the world and yet out of it was described to me yesterday. This man, workless and homeless, more than three years ago walked into the West Highland Rest Home. He complained of being terribly tired, and it was obvious that his complaint was genuine. He simply could not stay awake. When the doctor examined him he found he was suffering from sleepy sickness, and he was put to bed right away. He is still sleeping.
THE DAILY POST, 1927
This medical condition is known as encephalitis lethargica, which means "inflammation of the brain that makes you tired." The symptoms start with a fever, sore throat, and headache, and move to lethargy, sleep inversion (night becomes day), catatonia, and — many times — death. It has a 35 percent mortality rate. Those who survive are usually left in a catatonic state that bears a creepy resemblance to sleep, which is where the illness gets its more common and pronounceable name: "sleeping sickness."
While encephalitis lethargica is extremely rare, from 1915 to 1926 an epidemic of it spread across the globe, killing more than five million people. That would be like twenty million today, allowing for inflation (which I imagine is not quite the right term to apply to such a statistic). Think about it: twenty million people suddenly nodding off and never waking up. There has never been anything like it before or since.
Many who survived the epidemic never fully recovered, spending the rest of their lives in a dreary netherworld somewhere between life and death, real and unreal, asleep and awake — and "these patients were put away in chronic hospitals, nursing homes, lunatic asylums, or special colonies; and there, for the most part, they were totally forgotten."
In 1973, Oliver Sacks published Awakenings, a book that detailed his treatment of several dozen survivors of the epidemic who were still alive in 1969, still in cognitive slumber in some rundown mental institution in Brooklyn, New York. Here's how Sacks described the patients prior to treating them with the wonder drug L-DOPA:
They would be conscious and aware — yet not fully awake; they would sit motionless and speechless all day in their chairs, totally lacking energy, impetus, initiative, motive, appetite, affect, or desire; they registered what went on about them without active attention, and with profound indifference. They neither conveyed nor felt the feeling of life; they were as insubstantial as ghosts, and as passive as zombies. ... They were ontologically dead, or suspended, or "asleep" — awaiting an awakening.
It's hard to imagine anyone living in that condition. But I'm afraid we might be.
Sleep Is Not Your Friend
Sleep is a peculiar state, in that you're not aware when you're doing it, which is why sleep aids like Ambien carry warnings not to "operate heavy machinery," of which I can't help but picture forklifts and bulldozers and such. To be aware of the moment you fall asleep isn't physically possible; once you've woken up, you're only aware you were asleep. This defining aspect of sleep is what makes it so applicable or analogous to spiritual life.
The Bible is filled with spiritual metaphors for every illness known to antiquity: blind, deaf, lame, leprous. But sleep and its related cognates (dull, drunk, drowsy) are far and away the most common in the New Testament — and the terms usually attributed to us, Jesus' would-be disciples, not the unbelieving world.
And they went to a place called Gethsemane. And he said to his disciples, "Sit here while I pray. ... Remain here and watch." ... And he came and found them sleeping, and he said to Peter, "Simon, are you asleep? Could you not watch one hour?" ... And again he went away and prayed. ... And again he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were very heavy, and they did not know what to answer him. And he came the third time and said to them, "Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? It is enough; the hour has come." MARK 14:32, 34, 37, 39-41
It's a fitting metaphor. I mean, what better way to describe someone who has been quickened by God's Spirit but remains oblivious and unresponsive to spiritual reality? They're not dead, but they're certainly not alive. They're asleep, or drowsy, or drunk, or dull, or slow ... and the biblical metaphors go on.
To be asleep is to be oblivious to being oblivious. The danger of sleep is the danger of carbon monoxide: It's colorless and odorless, and you're anesthetized before you know it — before you ever hit the floor. And this is why sleep (spiritual unreceptivity) received the sternest and most-repeated warnings from Jesus: "And what I say to you I say to all: Stay awake" (Mark 13:37).
It's difficult not to see something prophetic in the disciples falling asleep in Gethsemane. Why the sudden narcolepsy? Why does Jesus go away, leaving them until he returns? Why do the disciples fall asleep, not once or twice, but three times? What of Jesus' parable about his return — "If he comes in the second watch, or in the third, and finds them awake, blessed are those servants!" (Luke 12:38)? There are certainly hallmarks here of an enacted prophecy or parable. The warning is clear enough: Sleep is a very grave danger to the church and to the disciple. If anything will be our undoing, sleep will.
The Silver Chair
[Jill] was very angry because she could feel enchantment getting hold of her every moment. But of course the very fact that she could still feel it, showed that it had not yet fully worked....
[Jill said,] "We come from another world." ...
"Tell us, little maid, where is this other world? What ships and chariots go between it and ours?" [said the Witch.] ...
Jill couldn't remember the names of the things in our world. And this time it didn't come into her head that she was being enchanted, for now the magic was in its full strength; and of course, the more enchanted you get, the more certain you feel that you are not enchanted at all.
She found herself saying (and at the moment it was a relief to say): "No. I suppose that other world must be all a dream."
"Yes. It is all a dream," said the Witch....
"Yes, all a dream," said Jill.
"There never was such a world," said the Witch.
"No," said Jill and Scrubb, "never was such a world."
"There never was any world but mine," said the Witch.
"There never was any world but yours," said...
