On the other hand, let us remember what happened after the battle of Aspern, the first he lost after a series of seventeen victories: He fell asleep after a long, unsuccessful struggle with drowsiness and for thirty-six hours could not be aroused.
His biographers also mention that when his life dream was shattered at Waterloo and he was sent into exile on a remote island, he began to sleep as many hours as the average, normal man.
After Aspern and after Waterloo, reality had become such, that an escape from it, via the unconsciousness of sleep, must have been welcome. That the reaction of defeat must have been more keenly felt by the young man who lost Aspern and who presented strong neurotic traits, than by the more settled man who lost Waterloo, can be easily understood.
Nansen in his Polar exile slept twenty hours a day. He certainly was not in need of rest or recuperation, for his idleness was complete, but the reality of ice and snow which kept him a prisoner, was one from which he was glad to withdraw his attention.
I personally observed two cases in which sudden fits of sleepiness could be interpreted as an escape from reality.
A gambler could go for several days and nights without sleep, provided he was winning. After a heavy loss or a period during which his earnings were offset by his losses, he would go to bed and sleep as much as four days and four nights at a time, arising once or twice a day to partake of some food and returning at once to his slumbers.
A neurotic with a strong inferiority complex was overwhelmed by sleepiness every time he encountered a defeat of a sexual or egotistic nature. After a quarrel, or whenever a discussion in which he took part turned to his disadvantage, he had to lie down and “sleep it off.”
This is probably the key to the enigma of Casper Hauser’s case. He was born in Germany at the beginning of the last century and brought up in complete solitude, in a small dark room. At the age of seventeen, he had never seen men, animals or plants, the sun, moon or stars. He then was taken out of his cell, and abandoned on the streets of Nuremberg, dazed and helpless.
All the efforts made by kind Samaritans to develop his mentality proved futile. They had only one result: to make him fall asleep. Accustomed for years to the peace, quiet and safety of his cell, he reacted to a new, troublesome and complicated environment as newly born infants do, who in incredibly long periods of sleep, in no wise explainable through fatigue, escape reality and return to the perfect happiness of the fetal state.
In certain forms of the disturbance known as sleeping sickness, people merge into a sleep which continues for weeks, months or even years, and which sometimes culminates in death. (In many cases, however, the sleepiness may be totally lacking.)