Speaker 1: What if I told you that in the late nineteen forties,
Speaker 1: Soviet scientists locked five political prisoners in a sealed chamber
Speaker 1: for fifteen days and refused to let them sleep. That
Speaker 1: they pumped in a powerful stimulant gas designed to keep
Speaker 1: the subjects awake, indefinitely, monitoring their every word, every breath,
Speaker 1: and waiting for them to see what would happen to
Speaker 1: the mind when it was completely deprived of rest. Now
Speaker 1: this is the center of the story known as the
Speaker 1: Russian Sleep Experiment, and it's been shared across forums, blogs,
Speaker 1: YouTube narrations, reddit threads, even used as an inspiration for
Speaker 1: short films in indie horror games, and for over a
Speaker 1: decade it has remained one of the most iconic creepy
Speaker 1: pasta stories, a type of online urban legend crafted to
Speaker 1: disturb us. For a while, many readers thought it was real.
Speaker 1: The story was presented as a declassified document. It was clinical, detached,
Speaker 1: and written the tone of someone reporting facts instead of
Speaker 1: inventing fiction. Now it doesn't name its author. It uses
Speaker 1: just enough historical references like Cold War era Soviet science,
Speaker 1: secret experiments, military oversight. It just gave it a layer
Speaker 1: of the unsettling premise that this could be real and
Speaker 1: it feels like a leaf government file. The story first
Speaker 1: surfaced online in twenty ten on the Creepy Pasta wiki,
Speaker 1: posted by a user named Orange Soda. Like many creepy
Speaker 1: Pasta stories, it was anonymous, freely shared, and never intended
Speaker 1: to be a part of the public record, but it
Speaker 1: caught on right in the era where my interest in
Speaker 1: Internet stories was at its peak. In this episode, we're
Speaker 1: going to be exploring the full story of the Russian
Speaker 1: sleep experiment. After many email requests, comments, and dms. I'll
Speaker 1: tell you where it came from, how it spread, and
Speaker 1: what real science says about its claims. Also, what makes
Speaker 1: this particular horror story endure so long after its first telling.
Speaker 1: So let's begin and just the heads up, this episode
Speaker 1: is pretty graphic. It's fiction, but it's still pretty graphic,
Speaker 1: So if you're sensitive to that kind of thing, please
Speaker 1: take care of while listening to the story. My name
Speaker 1: is Edwin and here's a horror story. Russian researchers in
Speaker 1: the late nineteen forties kept five people awake for fifteen
Speaker 1: days using an experimental gas based stimulant. They were kept
Speaker 1: in a sealed environment to carefully monitor their oxygen intake.
Speaker 1: That way, the gas didn't kill them, since it was
Speaker 1: toxic in high concentrations. This was before close circuit cameras,
Speaker 1: so they had only microphones and five inch thick glass
Speaker 1: porthole sized windows into the chamber to monitor them. The
Speaker 1: chamber was stocked with books and cots to sleep on,
Speaker 1: but no bedding, as well as running water, a toilet,
Speaker 1: and enough dried food to last all five of them
Speaker 1: for over a month. The test subjects were political prisoners
Speaker 1: deemed enemies of the state during World War Two. Everything
Speaker 1: was fine for the first five days. The subjects hardly complained,
Speaker 1: having been promised falsely that they would be freed if
Speaker 1: they submitted to the test and did not sleep for
Speaker 1: thirty days. The conversations and activities were monitored, and it
Speaker 1: was noted that they continued to talk about increasingly traumatic
Speaker 1: incidents in their past. The general tone of their conversations
Speaker 1: took on a darker aspect after the four day mark.
Speaker 1: After five days, they started to complain about the circumstances
Speaker 1: and events that led them to where they were and
Speaker 1: started to demonstrate severe paranoia. They stopped talking to each
Speaker 1: other and began alternately whispering into the microphones and the
Speaker 1: one way mirrored portholes. Oddly, they all seemed to think
Speaker 1: that they would win the trust of the experimenters by
Speaker 1: turning over their comrades. The other subjects in activity with them.
Speaker 1: At first, the researchers suspected this was an effect of
Speaker 1: the gaes itself. After nine days, the first of them
Speaker 1: started screaming. He ran the length of the chamber, repeatedly
Speaker 1: yelling at the top of his lungs for three hours straight,
Speaker 1: at which point he continued attempting to scream, but was
Speaker 1: only able to produce occasional squeaks. The researchers postulated that
Speaker 1: he had physically torn his vocal cords. The most surprising
Speaker 1: thing about this behavior was how the other captives reacted
Speaker 1: to it, or rather didn't react to it. They continued
Speaker 1: whispering into the microphones until the second of the captives
Speaker 1: started to scream. The two non screaming captives took the
Speaker 1: books apart, smeared page after page with their own feces,
Speaker 1: and paged them calmly over the glass portholes. The screaming
Speaker 1: promptly stopped, so did the whispering into the microphones. After
Speaker 1: three more days pass the researchers checked the microphones hourly
Speaker 1: to make sure they were working, since they thought it
Speaker 1: impossible that no sound could be occurring with five people inside.
Speaker 1: The oxygen consumption in the chamber indicated that all five
Speaker 1: must still be alive. In fact, it was the amount
Speaker 1: of oxygen five people would continue to consume at a
Speaker 1: very heavy level of strain as exercise. On the morning
Speaker 1: of the fourteenth day, the researchers did something they said
Speaker 1: they would not do to get a reaction from the captives.
Speaker 1: They used to intercom inside the chamber, hoping to provoke
Speaker 1: any response from the people they were afraid were either
Speaker 1: dead or vegetables. The announced we were opening the chamber
Speaker 1: to test the microphones. Step away from the door and
Speaker 1: lie flat on the floor, or you will be shot.
Speaker 1: Compliance your immediate freedom. To their surprise, they heard a
Speaker 1: calm voice respond in a single phrase, we no longer
Speaker 1: want to be freedom. The bay broke out amongst the
Speaker 1: researchers and the military forces funding the research. Unable to
Speaker 1: provoke any more response using the intercom, it was finally
Speaker 1: decided to open the chamber at midnight of the fifteenth day,
Speaker 1: the chamber was flushed of the stimulant gas and filled
Speaker 1: with fresh air, and immediately voices from the microphones began
Speaker 1: to object. Three different voices began begging, as if pleading
Speaker 1: for life of loved ones, to turn the gas back on.
Speaker 1: The chamber was opened and the soldiers were sent in
Speaker 1: to retrieve the test subjects. They began to scream louder
Speaker 1: than ever, and so did the soldiers when they sobble
Speaker 1: was inside. Four of the five subjects were still alive,
Speaker 1: although no one could rightly call the state that any
Speaker 1: of them were in life. The food rations past day
Speaker 1: five had not been so much as touched. There were
Speaker 1: chunks of meat from the dead test subject's thighs and
Speaker 1: chest stuffed into the drain in the center of the chamber,
Speaker 1: blocking it and allowing four inches of water to accumulate
Speaker 1: on the floor. Precisely how much of the water on
Speaker 1: the floor was actually blood was never determined. All four
Speaker 1: surviving test subjects also had large portion of muscle and
Speaker 1: skin torn away from their bodies. The destruction of flesh
Speaker 1: and exposed bone on their fingertips indicated that the wounds
Speaker 1: were inflicted by hand, not with teeth, as the researchers
Speaker 1: initially thought. Closer examination of the position and angles of
Speaker 1: the wounds indicated that most, if not all, of them
Speaker 1: were self inflicted. The abdominal organs below the rib cage
Speaker 1: of all four test subjects had been removed, while the heart, lungs,
Speaker 1: and diaphragm remained in place. The skin and most of
Speaker 1: the muscles attached to the ribs had been ripped off,
Speaker 1: exposing the lungs through the rib cage. All the blood
Speaker 1: vessels and organs remained intact, but had been taken out
Speaker 1: and laid on the floor, fanning out around the inviscerated
Speaker 1: but still living bodies of the subjects. The digestive tract
Speaker 1: of all four could be seen to be working digesting food.
Speaker 1: It quickly became apparent that what they were digesting was
Speaker 1: their own flesh that they had ripped off and eaten
Speaker 1: over the course of days. Most of the soldiers were
Speaker 1: Russian special operatives at the facility, but still many refused
Speaker 1: to return to the chamber to remove the test subjects.
Speaker 1: Subjects themselves continued to screen to be left in the
Speaker 1: chamber and begged and demanded that the gas be turned
Speaker 1: back on lest they fall asleep. To everyone's surprise, the
Speaker 1: test subjects put up a fierce fight in the process
Speaker 1: of being removed from the chamber. One of the Russian
Speaker 1: soldiers died from having his throat ripped out, and another
Speaker 1: was gravely injured by having his testicles ripped off and
Speaker 1: an artery and his legs severed by one of the
Speaker 1: subject's teeth. Another five of the the soldiers lost their
Speaker 1: lives if you count the ones that committed suicide in
Speaker 1: the weeks following the incident. In the struggle, one of
Speaker 1: the four living subjects had a splened of ruptured and
Speaker 1: bled out almost immediately. The medical researchers attempted to sedate him,
Speaker 1: but this proved impossible. He was injected with more than
Speaker 1: ten times a human doze of a morphine derivative and
Speaker 1: still fought like a cornered animal, breaking the ribs and
Speaker 1: arms of one doctor. His heart was seen to beat
Speaker 1: for a full two minutes after he had bled out,
Speaker 1: to the point that there was more air in his
Speaker 1: vascular system than blood. Even after it stopped, he continued
Speaker 1: to scream and flail for another three minutes, struggling to
Speaker 1: attack anyone in reach, just repeating the word more over
Speaker 1: and over, weaker and weaker, until he finally fell silent.
Speaker 1: The surviving three subjects were heavily restrained and moved to
Speaker 1: a medical facility, the two with intec vocal cords continuously
Speaker 1: begging for the gas, demanding to be kept awake. The
Speaker 1: most injured of the three was taken to the only
Speaker 1: surgical operating room that the facility had. In the process
Speaker 1: of preparing the subject to have his organs placed back
Speaker 1: within his body, it was found that he was effectively
Speaker 1: immune to the sedative they had given him to prepare
Speaker 1: him for the surgery. He fought furiously against his restraints.
Speaker 1: When the anesthetic gas was brought out to put him under,
Speaker 1: he managed to tear most of the way through a
Speaker 1: four inch wide leather strap on one wrist, even though
Speaker 1: the weight of a two hundred pounds soldier was holding
Speaker 1: that wrist. It took only a little more anesthetic than
Speaker 1: normal to put him under, and the instant his eyelids
Speaker 1: fluttered and closed, his heart stopped. In the autopsy of
Speaker 1: the test subject that died on the operating table, it
Speaker 1: was found that his blood had tripled the normal level
Speaker 1: of oxygen. The muscles that were still at t attached
Speaker 1: to a skeleton, were badly torn, and he had broken
Speaker 1: nine bones in his struggle to not be subdued. Most
Speaker 1: of them were from the forest his own muscles had
Speaker 1: exerted on them. The second survivor had been the first
Speaker 1: of the group of five to start screaming. His vocal
Speaker 1: cords destroyed, he was unable to beg or object for surgery,
Speaker 1: and he only reacted by shaking his head violently in
Speaker 1: disapproval when the anesthetic gas was brought out near him.
Speaker 1: He shook his head yes when someone suggested reluctantly that
Speaker 1: they should try the surgery without anesthetic, and did not
Speaker 1: react for the entire six hour procedure of replacing his
Speaker 1: abdominal organs and attempting to cover them with what remained
Speaker 1: of his skin. The surgeon presiding stated repeatedly that it
Speaker 1: should not be medically possible for the patient to still
Speaker 1: be alive when terrified. Nerves assisting the surgery stated that
Speaker 1: she had seen the patient's mouth curl into a smile
Speaker 1: several times whenever his eyes met hers. When the surgery ended,
Speaker 1: the subject looked at the surgeon and began to wheeze loudly.
Speaker 1: Attempting to talk while struggling. Assuming this must be something
Speaker 1: of drastic importance, the surgeon had a pen and pad
Speaker 1: and fetched to the patients so he could write the message.
Speaker 1: It was simple keep cutting. The other two test subjects
Speaker 1: were given the same surgery, both without anesthetic as well,
Speaker 1: although they had to be injected with a paralytic for
Speaker 1: the duration of the operation. The surgeon found it impossible
Speaker 1: to perform the operation while the patients laughed continuously. Once paralyzed,
Speaker 1: the subjects could only follow the attending researchers with their eyes.
Speaker 1: The paralytic cleared their system in an abnormally short period
Speaker 1: of time, and they were soon trying to escape their bonds.
Speaker 1: The moment they could speak, they were again asking for
Speaker 1: the stimulant gas. The researchers tried, asking why they had
Speaker 1: injured themselves, why they had out their own guts, and
Speaker 1: why they wanted to be given the gas again. Only
Speaker 1: one response was given, I must remain awake. All three
Speaker 1: subjects restraints were reinforced and they were placed back into
Speaker 1: the chamber, awaiting determination as to what should be done
Speaker 1: with them. The researchers, facing the wrath of their military benefactors,
Speaker 1: for having failed the stated goals of the project, considered
Speaker 1: euthanizing the surviving subjects. The commanding officer and EXKGB instead
Speaker 1: saw potential and wanted to see what would happen if
Speaker 1: they were put back on the gas. The researchers strongly objected,
Speaker 1: but they were overruled. In preparation for being sealed in
Speaker 1: the chamber again, the subjects were connected to an EEG
Speaker 1: monitor and had the restraints padded for long term confinement.
Speaker 1: To everyone's surprise, all three stopped struggling the moment it
Speaker 1: was let slip that they were going back on the gas.
Speaker 1: It was obvious that at this point all three were
Speaker 1: putting up a great struggle to stay awake. One of
Speaker 1: the subjects that could speak was humming loudly and continuously.
Speaker 1: The mute subject was straining his legs against the leather
Speaker 1: bonds with all his might, first left, then right, then
Speaker 1: left again for something to focus on. The remaining subject
Speaker 1: was holding his head off his pillow and blinking rapidly.
Speaker 1: Having been the first to be wired to the EEG machine,
Speaker 1: most of the researchers were monitoring his brainwaves. In surprise,
Speaker 1: they were normal most of the time. But sometimes flatlined inexplicably.
Speaker 1: It looked as if he were repeatedly suffering brain death
Speaker 1: before returning to normal As to focus on paper scrolling
Speaker 1: out of the brainwave monitor, only one nurse saw the
Speaker 1: man's eyes slip shut at the same moment his head
Speaker 1: hit the pillow. His brain waves immediately changed that of
Speaker 1: deep sleep and then flat lined for the last time
Speaker 1: as his heart art simultaneously stopped. The only remaining subject
Speaker 1: that could speak started screaming to be sealed in. Now,
Speaker 1: his brain waves showed the same flat lines as the
Speaker 1: one who had just died from falling asleep. The commander
Speaker 1: gave the order to seal the chamber with both subjects inside,
Speaker 1: as well as three researchers. One of the name three
Speaker 1: immediately drew his gun and shot the commander point blank
Speaker 1: between the eyes, then turned the gun on the mute
Speaker 1: subject and blew his brains out as well. He pointed
Speaker 1: his gun at the remaining subject, still restrained to a bed,
Speaker 1: as the remaining members of the medical research team fled
Speaker 1: the room. I won't be locked in here with these things,
Speaker 1: not with you, he screamed that the man strapped at
Speaker 1: the table. What are you? He demanded, I must know.
Speaker 1: The subject smiled. Have you forgotten so easily? The subject asked?
Speaker 1: We are you. We are the madness that lurks within you,
Speaker 1: all begging to be free at every moment, in your
Speaker 1: deepest animal mind. We are what you hide from and
Speaker 1: your beds every night. We are what used to date
Speaker 1: into silence and paralysis when you go to the nocturnal
Speaker 1: haven where we cannot tread. The researcher paused, and then
Speaker 1: aimed at the subject's heart and fired. The EEG flat
Speaker 1: lined as a subject weekly choked out so rearly fur
Speaker 1: The earliest known version appeared on Creepy Pasta wiki in
Speaker 1: August of twenty ten, without any accompanying explanation or context.
Speaker 1: That lack of framing is what made it so effective.
Speaker 1: It read like a leaked report of a suppressed government
Speaker 1: file shared anonymously online. It was long by creepy Pasta
Speaker 1: stand far more detailed in structure than most, and didn't
Speaker 1: have supernatural monsters or haunted objects. Instead, it relied on
Speaker 1: something far more unsettling, the limits of the human body
Speaker 1: and the darker corners of the human mind. Not long
Speaker 1: after it was posted, the story began to spread. It
Speaker 1: showed up on reddits, no Sleep, YouTube narrations again, horror forums,
Speaker 1: tumbler posts, and then within a year had become one
Speaker 1: of the most widely shared creepy pastas on the Internet.
Speaker 1: Readers debated whether it could be real. Some swore it
Speaker 1: was based on a real experiment. Others claim to have
Speaker 1: seen the photo that proved it, and that photo, the
Speaker 1: distorted humanoid figure with the pale skin, bulging eyes, and
Speaker 1: twisted grin became permanently linked to the story. It was
Speaker 1: usually presented without explanation, and if you want to look
Speaker 1: for it, it's called spasm spazm dot PNG. That's what is
Speaker 1: usually labeled as it supposed to show one of the
Speaker 1: surviving test subjects. In reality, though the images of a
Speaker 1: Halloween prop. It's a magnequin design for a horror attraction,
Speaker 1: not an actual photograph of a medical experiment, But it
Speaker 1: served its purpose. It made the fiction feel like fat.
Speaker 1: This kind of digital myth making isn't unique to the
Speaker 1: Russian Sleep experiment. Stories like the slender Man, Jeff the Killer,
Speaker 1: and Ben Drowned all gained traction in similar ways. Anonymous postings,
Speaker 1: viral sharing, and just enough realism to make people question
Speaker 1: what they were reading now. What sets the Russian Sleep
Speaker 1: Experiment apart is how effectively it mimics official language. He
Speaker 1: uses all these medical terms, military structure, and psychological concepts
Speaker 1: with just enough plausibility it's going to draw readers in.
Speaker 1: It also avoids a clear narrative voice, just cold, procedural horror.
Speaker 1: It plays on our fear of what institutions are capable
Speaker 1: of when they operate in secrecy, and it echoes real
Speaker 1: world atrocities like Project mk Ultra, the CIA's mind controlled experiments,
Speaker 1: or the war crimes committed by Unit seven thirty one,
Speaker 1: a covert Japanese biological warfare unit during World War Two.
Speaker 1: It feels like it could be true. Let's step back
Speaker 1: from the horror for a moment and ask a simple question,
Speaker 1: what actually happened to the human body and mind when
Speaker 1: we don't sleep? In reality, the effects of sleep deprivation
Speaker 1: are well documented. Scientists have actually studied it for decades,
Speaker 1: and while no one has ever tried to keep people
Speaker 1: awake for thirty days under gas and military supervision, we
Speaker 1: do know what happens to the brain when it's deprived
Speaker 1: of rest or even a short amount of time. After
Speaker 1: just twenty four hours without sleep, most people experience reduced concentration, irritability,
Speaker 1: slower reaction times, and impair judgment. It becomes harder to
Speaker 1: pros as information or make decisions. You feel foggy, emotionally unstable,
Speaker 1: and drained. After forty eight to seventy two hours, the
Speaker 1: effects become more severe. People begin to experience micro sleeps,
Speaker 1: brief and voluntary lapses in consciousness that last just a
Speaker 1: few seconds. The brain is so desperate for rest that
Speaker 1: it shuts down small sections of itself while the rest
Speaker 1: of you remains awake. Now by the third day, hallucinations
Speaker 1: often begin. Some people report seeing shadows moving at the
Speaker 1: edge of their vision, hearing phantom sounds, or feeling like
Speaker 1: the surroundings are shifting. Mood swings become extreme, and logic
Speaker 1: breaks down. By the fourth or fifth day, the brain
Speaker 1: may start to lose its grip on reality entirely. Paranoia, delusions,
Speaker 1: and full blown psychosis can emerge. People begin to misinterpret
Speaker 1: events and perceive threats where none exist. They may become
Speaker 1: more aggressive, unpredictable, or to sociative in extreme cases. For long,
Speaker 1: sleep deprivation has been used as a form of torture.
Speaker 1: It disorients, destabilizes, and eventually breaks down the ability to resist.
Speaker 1: But even under those conditions, what happens is psychological collapse,
Speaker 1: not supernatural transformation. The longest scientifically documented period a person
Speaker 1: has voluntarily stayed awake these eleven days or two hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty four hours. That record belongs to Randy Gardner,
Speaker 1: a high school student who did it in nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: four as part of a science fair experiment. By the end,
Speaker 1: he was mentally and physically impaired, experiencing hallucinations, memory lapses,
Speaker 1: and slurred speech, but he made a full recovery after sleeping.
Speaker 1: There is no known case in medical history of someone
Speaker 1: remaining awake for fifteen or thirty days and surviving in
Speaker 1: any functional state. The body simply would not allow it.
Speaker 1: What about the stories more grotesque claims, right, like people
Speaker 1: ripping out their own organs or continuing to function after
Speaker 1: the heart has stopped, Well, those are just medically impossible.
Speaker 1: The story's portrayal of people immune to anesthesia or screaming
Speaker 1: minutes after death crosses the line into body horror, a
Speaker 1: deliberate exaggeration designed to disturb and not really inform sleep
Speaker 1: is one of the most essential, vulnerable parts of human life.
Speaker 1: We spend nearly a third of our lives unconscious, unguarded,
Speaker 1: and unaware. And the idea that's something anything could interfere
Speaker 1: with that cycle, and that could trap us in our
Speaker 1: own waking nightmare, it's terrifying. The story takes that fear
Speaker 1: and magnifies it. It shows us what might happen if
Speaker 1: the mind was stretched past that breaking point, and it says,
Speaker 1: this is what's hiding beneath the surface of your consciousness,
Speaker 1: just you without sleep, sanity, or limits. The Russian Sleep
Speaker 1: Experiment is just a horror story about an ethical time
Speaker 1: scientific trials gone terribly wrong. But beneath that gore and
Speaker 1: the gas, it's doing something more deliberate. It's exploring a
Speaker 1: set of psychological and philosophical fears that have haunted humanity
Speaker 1: long before the Internet gave them form. So here are
Speaker 1: two themes, right, Let's start with the central one, madness.
Speaker 1: What makes part of the story terrifying is the sense
Speaker 1: that people inside the chamber have lost their minds, and worse,
Speaker 1: they know it, and they don't fight to escape. They
Speaker 1: fight to stay awake, and when given the chance to
Speaker 1: be freed, They say, no, this is completely opposite to
Speaker 1: what we're used to. Normally, a victim wants to survive,
Speaker 1: to escape the threat, but here the threat becomes sleep itself,
Speaker 1: the one thing we all need to survive, So that
Speaker 1: reversal is very unsettling. Are that second major theme is
Speaker 1: control or the loss of it. The prisoners agree to
Speaker 1: the experiment because they've been promised freedom, but it's a
Speaker 1: false promise. Right from the beginning. They are being controlled
Speaker 1: by the researchers, the ask the confinement, and eventually by
Speaker 1: their own unraveling mind. Even the researchers lose control, they
Speaker 1: said the conditions they oversee the experiment, but as things
Speaker 1: are going wrong, they're powerless to stop it. Their protocols fail,
Speaker 1: and their moral boundaries collapse. By the end, they're just
Speaker 1: as complicit as a gas that broke the subjects down.
Speaker 1: I don't know about you, but the part about the
Speaker 1: last subject that is asked about what he is, and
Speaker 1: he says, we are you. We are the madness that
Speaker 1: lurks within you, all begging to be free at every
Speaker 1: moment in your deepest animal mind. It just brought me
Speaker 1: back to when I first heard it that feeling that
Speaker 1: something's off, not because it's completely different or impossible, but
Speaker 1: because it's almost normal, like a warped mirror of what
Speaker 1: we recognize. It's what we call the uncanny, and that
Speaker 1: it's in ourselves basically. In this story, what scared me
Speaker 1: the most was the way consciousness becomes its own enemy,
Speaker 1: and the way the human need to stay alive becomes
Speaker 1: a compulsion that destroys the now. That's the horror that
Speaker 1: is always capable inside of all of us, that mindset.
Speaker 1: It's the scariest part. Now, more than a decade after
Speaker 1: it first appeared online, the Russian Sleep Experiment is still
Speaker 1: one of the most well known creepy pastas in existence,
Speaker 1: and unlike many viral stories that burn out quickly, this
Speaker 1: one has stuck around. It continues to resurface the new forms,
Speaker 1: new platforms, shared by new generations of readers, who often
Speaker 1: encounter it with the same question is this real? Is
Speaker 1: it the first time you hear about it? Now? I
Speaker 1: like to think of the Russian Sleep Experiment as a
Speaker 1: modern myth, like the urban legends that came before it,
Speaker 1: stories of vanishing hitchhikers, cursed videotapes, shadowy government programs. It
Speaker 1: plays on anxieties we don't always talk about out loud.
Speaker 1: It asks what are the limits of the human mind?
Speaker 1: And what happens when we stop sleeping, stop dreaming, stop resting,
Speaker 1: and start unraveling. Is that inside of each of us
Speaker 1: is something darker, something desperate to emerge. Is it something
Speaker 1: that only silence, sedation, or sleep keeps buried? And that's why,
Speaker 1: no matter how many times we remind ourselves that it's just
Speaker 1: a story, we can't quite let it go, because deep down,
Speaker 1: part of us still wonders what if it isn't. This
Speaker 1: episode of horror Story was researched and written by me
Speaker 1: Edwin Kovarubias based on requests from our horror Story listeners.
Speaker 1: Now let me know what you thought about it by
Speaker 1: sending me a message through horror story dot com or
Speaker 1: in the contact information and the description of this episode. Also,
Speaker 1: thank you for your support for our previous episode, How
Speaker 1: Governments Disappear Humans. It was a very tough episode to
Speaker 1: come up with with you all the search and finding
Speaker 1: out about all these atrocities that are happening, and it
Speaker 1: became even worse once I started comparing all of the
Speaker 1: all of the patterns, but we'll leave it at that,
Speaker 1: and if you have comments of there's something you want
Speaker 1: to talk about, please email me Edwin at scarystory dot com. Anyway,
Speaker 1: thank you very much for listening and for your support.
Speaker 1: Keep it scary everyone, See you soon.