I Don't Know Who My Neighbor Is Anymore

First of all let’s be clear that English is not my native language, so probably this may sound sometimes weird to some people, but anyways I felt that I had to tell this to someone and maybe this way some of this studies can be continue, regardless how painful for some of us these were. I’m from a small town that now is part of Hungary but some decades ago I was just an assistant scientist working for the Germans (WWII Germans). Nowadays I’ve lived during two years in Demecser but I’ve moved from town to town during decades afraid that someday someone could find me and take away all the material I kept with me after the war. Other towns where I lived were Rákóczifalva then Ócsa, Pécsvárad and even in Ercsi.

Now I’m nearly ninety years old and I’m very sick. My young neighbor is a popular journalist in internet and he decided to help me tell this story. But as I suggested him, I prefer that he just publish this letter and not to write the story himself due to the dangers that I think this will present for him. During the war one of our biggest enemies were working on a sleep deprivation experiment that got filtered almost as fast as the experiment has to be concluded by force. A group of, as they’ve said, volunteers were being kept in a chamber and a gas based stimulant was injected in the air in a light dosage. And also the oxygen on the chamber was being monitored in order to maintain them alive regardless the constant inhalation of a normally toxic gas. In the filtered documents they’ve said that the subjects suffered intense brain damage after four or five days, but that some subconscious characteristics showed similarities with the differences we were finding in other studies between experimental subjects and control subjects in an impostors detection cognitive program. In our program a series of questions were developed for a two hours length interview where we could detect an impostor with almost a hundred percent of accuracy. Our problem was that the questionnaire could detect impostors regarding the war or even in family environments, such as a husband that hides a concubine and he feels as an impostor for his wife. But the enhanced results evidenced in that sleep deprivation experiments showed us an opportunity to perfecting the accuracy of our questionnaire. The only difficulty we had was that this two hours long questionnaire was very stressing and subjects often reported signs of depression and sleeping problems during several weeks after the questionnaire was used. And that’s why we started using war prisoners as subjects, and that’s when everything started. Now I have to take pills every day in order to stay focused after what we’ve found. Please do not spread this letter to the general audience before making the proper peer reviews first.

The experiment was reduced from thirty days of sleep deprivation to only one week in order to avoid further damage to the brain of the subjects. First we tried different cognitive tests in order to detect any difference in the psychology of the subjects after the first days of the experiment. Every test gave the same expected results regarding levels of awareness of the environment and cognitive capacities but the results regarding memory showed some interesting results. At first the memory alteration was just as we expected except by some details. When crossing the resulting data from the memory tests and the level of awareness or self conscious results, some numbers didn’t matched with the usual results. After analyzing the results and interviewing some of the subjects they reported a different perception of their own memories. Some of them said that “I feel that only one or two days passed” after actually five or six days have passed. At first we thought that that was just due some time perception alteration, but the consciousness levels tests showed that the problem was that apparently they were much more close connected with their memories than a normal subject with normal periods of sleep. They also reported that they felt their memories much more “strong” than usual, as every single memory the recall was lived just a few hours ago, and that that was too much information. When the subjects were interviewed by the non scientific personnel (military) they talked normally but they were very excited to talk about the things they were doing during the past days. What called our attention was that those and a series of other attitudes matched with some of the alert signals in the original impostor detection questionnaire; although we certainly knew that they weren't impostors.

The military said that they wanted to apply the original questionnaire to the subjects, suspecting that we were using actors, at which we refused but at that time we weren’t in a position where we could argue with them. The results were confusing, because in order to apply that test, an experimental group (the war prisoners) had to be tested along with a control group (volunteers that we all knew weren’t impostors), and at that opportunity we concluded that the experimental and control groups showed no significant differences. That was what we told to the military, but that “non relevant” differences we detected were differences -we liked it or not- and that was not normal. According to the results, the experimental group was more likely to be impostors that the control group.

After that, we monitored the brain activity in the consciousness areas of the subjects during the experiment and after the days limit concluded. The first night they slept they showed in the monitors that their consciousness levels dropped significantly (more than usual) during the first deep sleep period, almost as that part of the brain almost died. And right after, less than a second later, the levels jumped to a high level like a electric shock in the brain. Next day we applied the questionnaire again to half of the subjects with the same level of margin error as the last time (a very low margin). Nobody passed the test, showing the same results as the previous control groups.

While we were applying the questionnaire to half of the subjects, the other half in a separate chamber was recorded with hidden microphones. During the first minutes after they’ve all wake up, they started talking about how comforting that night of sleep was. At first we thought that that was just normal talking, but then we noticed some sentences such as: “I couldn’t wait to arrive” or “I thought that he would never die”. At first we thought that they were talking about their times being troops, but some other sentences were more revealing: “I’m here now” or “I like this body”. A couple of hours later and after discussing what they could mean, we interviewed the other subjects again but they didn’t reported any memory of that kind. After that we interviewed the second group but no one of them recalled those phrases. We then played them the recordings. They were all in a closed room listening to the recordings. As the sentences were repeated by the speakers, some of them started to cry, some other started to see the faces of each other and started to shake and finally everyone started to seizure, one after the other as a chain reaction. The personnel entered the room to contain them and prevent them injuring themselves. They were taken to separate rooms to rest during the day. They were extremely exhausted and we putted them in ordinary personnel rooms thinking that they couldn't represent any danger to the laboratories, although there were still guards on the hallways of the building. Next morning every single of them were dead; they’ve all committed suicide inside their rooms. Some hanged themselves with sheets tied to the wardrobe bars, others drowned themselves in the bath, others just sliced their wrists with any piece of sharp edge they could found in the room; even by biting their wrists with their teeth.

After that episode a meeting between the chief scientists took place and they decided to continue with more tests with the remaining first group. For that all the assistants were discarded, including me. The experiment was extended by some weeks until an imminent attack of our enemies from the east were announced. I went to the labs to retrieve some of my personal effects, but the building were being evacuated. I went to the back of the building and a group of soldiers were burning boxes of papers in a pig pile in the middle of the garden. Some scientists were helping burning all the studies. I don’t know if it was my appreciation but I’m sure I saw a dark look in their eyes, some of them showed signs of recently being crying in their eyes and some of them had their eyes completely red and big circles under their eyes, as they were depriving themselves of sleep too. One of them saw me and apparently he recognized me. He walked towards me with his hands crossed over his chest. When he was just a meter from me he opened slightly his coat and showed me a thick folder. He handed it to me very discretely and I hid it under my jacket. Then he said strangely loud: “I’m sorry young man, this is a restricted area! if you are looking for your stuff you have to ask to the soldiers in the front” and he looked at me moving his head, as saying "get out now". I got the message and got out of there as soon as I could. Then I went back home and read the papers on that folder. That was a draft of a report regarding some of the findings. I knew that that was information that I shouldn’t had received. I knew that sooner or later someone would start looking for me. From that day until now, leaving my family behind, I started to move from one small town to another. I can’t remember every town where I lived: Sellye, Tét, Enying, Igal and even in Nagybajom (ironically, its name could be translated to “my problem”).

This is what I learned that afternoon: every time the studied subjects went to sleep, if their levels of consciousness were monitored with sensitive enough instruments, they could measure what they’ve called the “consciousness continuum”, or the continuity of their consciousness even when they were sleeping. Even in the better sleep conditions, everyone showed an interruption of this continuity. And in less than a second later, this almost unnoticeable level of consciousness started again with no external stimulus on that part of the brain, almost as if a new consciousness were supplied by an external source. The subjects deprived from sleep didn’t showed this phenomena. The subjects that slept normally, as all of us, would never pass the impostor detection questionnaire that we’ve used (and burned later), because we, using the word “we” as the people that are self conscious right now, exist only since that last consciousness continuum interruption -that we detected-. We can’t feel our memories with the strength the experimental subjects felt it, because we are only retrieving memories from the brain we are using right now, we actually never lived them. Tonight when you go to sleep, you, as your current self consciousness, will die. Tomorrow another consciousness will remember everything and will think that he is you, but you, you will be dead. Imagine that someone records all your memories, kills you and then put all the memories in a subject with a blank mind. That person will believe that he is you; but you're still dead. That’s what happens to all of us every night. Don’t worry about tomorrow.

Some of my colleagues are dead now; suicide. Others are still in treatment for depression. Others tried to stop sleeping as long as they could; some of them suffered enough brain damage to end up in a psychiatric institution permanently; others died. I’m a slave of my pills and decided to never again contact any friend or family, or any other impostor. If someday they found me, it will doesn’t matter to me; the person that filtered this experiments, is not me.