If they are unable to sleep and rest until they die from exhaustion, wouldn’t they just forcibly fall asleep through the power of general anesthesia?
In: 1975
Anaesthesia is nothing like sleep – when you’re asleep, you can still react to external stimuli to defend yourself. Being put under requires going deeper than that. One person on here described it as ‘killing you just enough that you’re still alive’ and that’s kinda stuck with me. It’s about forcing your body into an unnatural state where all your awareness is disabled and the body focuses on survival. It’s been argued that the most difficult job in the operating theatre is the anaesthetist because they have to walk an extremely fine line with the patient and continuously monitor their state.
Sleep consists of 2 states – REM sleep (dreaming) and restful sleep, which alternate in cycles through the night. Anaesthesia skips both of those. The brain does not rest or dream but goes into a deeper state of unawareness – it’s just a skip between being knocked out and waking up. In fact, many patients wake up exhausted after surgery and want to sleep because they haven’t rested at all even if the op took most of a day.
Anaesthesia is brutal on the body and not a substitute for sleep. The only thing that will allow the body to rest is natural sleep, and that’s what most sleep aids do – they try to trigger the brain’s natural sleep functions.
Fatal insomnia is terrifying.
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