“Night without Mercy” is a novel by Kurt Sander, based on which an idiotic film was made in the Soviet Union, which distorted the novel to the uttermost.

My scribble is devoted to a completely different subject: “Sleep without mercy,” often deadly.

What is the explanation for this kind of dreams, painful and hopeless? I think the body is suffering from some kind of illness at these moments, chronic or temporary: heart pain, sleepy suffocation (stopping breathing during sleep), abdominal pain, all this transforms into a painful nightmare. And usually it’s connected with some kind of search for something and you just can’t find it. And this is a search for something extremely necessary and important. Based on these considerations, it is necessary to reconsider death in a dream as the “death of the righteous” – easy, instantaneous and without suffering.

In general, about dreams.

I think dreams can be divided into two categories: “internal” dreams related to the mental or physical state of the dreamer.

Dreams are “external”. These dreams are spontaneous telepathic transmission, when the dreamer accepts someone’s telepathems, even those that are not addressed to him. Such dreams are transmitted by temporal waves and excite certain images in the Superconscious, which may remain in the Superconscious, unknown to us. And under some favorable circumstances (favorable in the sense of opening contacts-synapses between the Superconscious and Consciousness), they already enter Consciousness and excite in it certain images, events, and experiences completely unfamiliar to the dreamer.

Here is a dream that one of my friends had.

He walks barefoot along a sandy beach near the very edge of the bay or sea water. Suddenly he steps on something soft and warm. He looks and discovers with horror that he has stepped on the shoulder of a huge man, almost completely buried in the sand. Confused, he looks around and sees a lot of people wandering aimlessly through the wet sand. Not far away, he sees a girl with a calm, impassive face walking towards him. Her face is kind of detached, as if her thoughts are in some other world. Rushes to her and asks WHAT IS IT???

She explains that this giant man grows out of an ordinary one in wet sand, comes out of it and starts playing with people wandering along the beach. The game is called “Blanket”. He tries to throw this blanket over one or a small group of people and kills and eats those who fall under it.

Dreamer hears this whole story from a girl, with whom he continues to walk along the sand. He asks: What happens to a person who has had such a dream in reality? If he got under the blanket in a dream? She explains to him that in real life he is also dying. In a dream! Because no one can, even in a dream, endure the feeling of being killed and eaten! Suddenly, he turns around and sees that the giant he accidentally stepped on has already climbed out of the sand and is unwrapping a blanket, all covered in some dark spots, either blood or fat.

He says to the girl: Let’s get out of here!

Grabs her by the hand and pulls her along – to get away, to escape from this monster! But the girl’s hand slips out of his palm, she turns and walks back to the group of people who are already “playing” this terrible game. He’s shouting at her not to go there! To come back! But she’s already in the band, and a dirty blanket with disgusting dark spots covers her too…

The dreamer woke up in horror from the dream he had seen. And his first thought was: I woke up, and she???

After a while, he wrote a story: “Dead in a dream.” I dedicated it to one of my good friends, M.B., a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A very middle-aged man who was born in April 1917 in St. Petersburg. (He probably wanted to listen to Lenin’s “April Theses,” which he read out while standing on an armored car.) This professor, a deeply erudite man who knows literature very well, read the story and criticized it to the nines. The language of the story is monotonous and wretched, and the descriptions are completely far-fetched, and the conclusions about the causes of death in a dream are completely non-scientific, but fantastic and unrelated to reality.

My dreamer friend was genuinely surprised, AMAZED, by the aggressive and unfriendly reaction of his friend, the professor. Even if everything was correct in his criticism, the rejection reaction was clearly far superior to what one would expect from reading a weak literary work. Years later, he realized WHY! The professor was an old and sick man, and he probably also had terrible dreams that clouded his consciousness with “bells from the other world.” And the story of our dreamer just came very inconveniently! That’s why there was a reaction – poorly hidden fright, panic at the mere reminder of a dream of this kind!

That’s how it is, as one of my good friends likes to say.

2 II 2015

A common sleep problem increases the risk of premature death by 3 times

A new study has shown that people who suffer from regular nightmares have a three times higher risk of premature death than the average person.

It turned out that weekly nightmares are a more significant indicator of early death than smoking, obesity, poor nutrition and low physical activity.

It is noted that children and adults who often have nightmares experienced faster biological aging. This explains about 40 percent of the increased risk of early death.

Even those who have nightmares once a month are at risk.

Scientists from Imperial College London, who conducted the study, said that this link is likely due to the harmful effects of disturbed sleep and stress caused by nightmares on body cells.

Dr. Abidemi Otaiku, a researcher at Imperial College London, said: “This stress response can be even more intense than anything we experience while awake. Our sleeping brain cannot distinguish dreams from reality. That’s why nightmares often make us wake up in a sweat, with rapid breathing and a pounding heart-because the fight-or-flight response is triggered.”

He added that nightmares lead to prolonged increases in cortisol levels, a stress hormone associated with accelerated cell aging. They also disrupt the quality and duration of sleep, which reduces the body’s ability to recover and repair cells during the night

26 VI 2025