Paul Kern: The Hungarian soldier who didn't sleep for 40 years after being shot

Insomnia. Each of us has at least once lain in the dark, staring at the ceiling and listening to the mockingly even ticking of the clock. Thoughts are confused, the body aches, and the morning alarm clock seems like a torture device. Hard, right? Now imagine that this state does not end in the morning. It doesn't end in a week. It lasts forty years.

Sounds like an exquisite curse from ancient myths. But for Hungarian official Paul Kern, this became normal life. No magic. Only World War I, trench mud, and a nine-millimeter bullet that forever broke the biological clock in his head.

Shot to the frontal lobe

It was 1915. The Eastern Front was bursting at the seams. Paul Kern, a young and promising cadet in the Hungarian army, was part of a shock detachment near Chortkov. Russian troops were attacking. Then - chaos, screams, the roar of artillery. And a sharp, blinding flash of pain.

A stray bullet pierced Kern's helmet and went straight into his right temporal bone, hitting the frontal lobe of his brain. According to all the laws of physics, anatomy, and common sense, he should have died on the spot. Instantly. But the human body is a stubborn thing.

Paul woke up in a hospital in Lemberg (modern Lviv). Opened his eyes. Saw a white ceiling, scurrying nurses, felt the sharp smell of carbolic acid. A normal awakening of a seriously wounded man. With only one small detail.

He never really closed his eyes again.

Sleeping pills for an elephant

When the wound began to heal, doctors noticed a strange anomaly. The patient was not sleeping. At all. At first, it was attributed to post-traumatic shock and pain. He was injected with morphine. Given horse doses of bromides and the strongest sedatives of the time. Doses capable of knocking out a company of soldiers.

Kern's reaction? He just lay there and blinked.

"I don't feel tired, doctor. Not at all," he repeatedly told surprised psychiatrists.

Professor Frey from the University of Budapest, to whom the unique patient was later transferred, almost went crazy trying to solve this mystery. An X-ray showed that the bullet simply tore out a piece of the brain. Probably that tiny area that was responsible for inhibiting the nervous system and transitioning to the sleep phase. Neurology of the early 20th century was a harsh and largely blind science - doctors just shrugged. Kern was discharged. Physically, he was perfectly healthy.

Night shift for life

What does a person do who suddenly has 24 active hours in a day? Paul returned to Budapest and got a job in the pension department. During the day, he was an ordinary clerk. Shuffled papers, talked to colleagues, drank coffee. No one could have imagined that this polite man in a strict suit had not slept since the war.

But the real test was the nights.

You know, the night in a big city is beautiful only on postcards. When you are the only one awake in a multi-million metropolis, the silence begins to press on your eardrums. The wife falls asleep. Neighbors fall asleep. The streets die out. And you sit in a chair in the light of a dim lamp. In complete, absolute solitude.

To avoid going crazy from boredom, Paul began to read. He devoured books by libraries. Studied foreign languages. Walked along the deserted embankments of the Danube, listening to the splashing of water. The only rest he allowed himself was to close his eyes for one hour a day. Just to give the optic nerve a rest. At the same time, the brain continued to work at full capacity.

The curse of a clear mind

Modern science claims that sleep deprivation kills. Rats in laboratories die after a couple of weeks without sleep. A person begins to hallucinate as early as the third day. Focus is lost, memory is impaired, organs fail. Sleep is a reboot, a cleansing of the brain from toxins accumulated during the day.

But Paul Kern's body seemed to have made a deal with the devil. He didn't feel tired. His intellect remained sharp as a razor. He did not suffer from depression, did not see ghosts. He just... lived.

Although, perhaps, the psychological burden was much heavier than the physical one. Think about it. Sleep is the boundary between "yesterday" and "today." We fall asleep with a problem, and in the morning it doesn't seem so scary anymore. For Kern, this boundary did not exist. His life turned into one endless, continuous day. 1915 smoothly flowed into 1920, then into 1930. He watched with his wide open eyes as empires collapsed and World War II began. No saving oblivion.

Final stop

The medical community never could explain his phenomenon. Kern was examined in Austria, Germany, Switzerland. Doctors tried to find a catch, to prove that he suffered from microsleep (falling asleep for fractions of a second with his eyes open). But the equipment showed: the brain is awake. Always.

Paul Kern lived a full life and retired in 1955. He was 71 years old. But if you calculate his real waking time - the time that ordinary people spend sleeping - it turns out that he lived more than a hundred years.

He finally fell asleep. For the first time in forty years. And this time - forever.

We often complain that there are too few hours in a day. We don't have enough time for work, for family, for ourselves. The story of the Hungarian soldier who received all the time in the world in exchange for the ability to close his eyes makes you think. Maybe these eight hours of darkness and silence, when we disconnect from reality, are not an annoying waste of time, but the only way to remain human.