Past event!
This event has already taken place. Find all current events for this promoter here.

Sleepers Awake!

Presented by: London Fortean Society

0	LONDON: The Bell
P	Tuesday 27th February, 2024
N	7:30pm

Event information

In this illustrated talk Prof Roger Luckhurst of Birkbeck, University of London, explores the puzzling history of states of unnatural sleep, anomalous conditions that have shadowed the rise of modern medicine since the late 18th century. Franz Mesmer’s claims to put patients into a state of suspended animation to treat their illnesses with “animal magnetism” caused a scandal in Paris in the 1780s, even before his student the Marquis de Puységur began to suggest that the artificial sleep of the trance state was associated with supernatural powers – mind-reading and clairvoyance. Such claims delayed the acceptance of what became known as hypnotism until the 1890s, but even then the early pioneers of medical hypnotism were associated with the Society for Psychical Research.
More conventional medicine has tried to explore so-called “catatonic states”, yet the uncanny nature of artificial sleep has continued to puzzle doctors, right up to the current rise of teenage children in Scandinavia who fall into sleep states that can last years, called Pervasive Refusal Syndrome.