Since the Earth is proven to be 4.5 billion years old, it seems unlikely that wood carbon dated at 4,800 years old is aged enough to be Noah’s Ark. Biologist and Christian creationist Todd Wood believes finding the Ark will most likely never happen. “It would have been prime timber after the flood. If you just got off the Ark, and there’s no trees, what are you going to build your house out of? You’ve got a huge boat made of wood, so let’s use that. So, I think it got torn apart and scavenged for building material basically.”6
Whatever you believe, there is still no proof that the wood found at Mount Ararat is from the famed Ark. But, perhaps advances in archaeological and scientific practices in the twenty-first century will unearth more authentic religious relics.
The first known image of Mount Ararat ever to appear in print. London, 1686.
While the soul cannot be proven by science in our modern era, there is no doubt that the concept itself is a hot commodity. Leland Gaunt, a demon, feeds on the souls of the innocent, much like how the vampire Barlow in Salem’s Lot feeds on blood. While the residents of Castle Rock believed the objects they held in their hands were the most precious of items, it was really their soul, the invisible yet vital essence which makes them unique, that is the true treasure.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Insomnia
We’ve all had some sleepless nights in our lives. Whether it was forcing ourselves to be up in order to cram for a test, or staying awake with a sick child, our bodies felt it the next day. In Stephen King’s Insomnia, Ralph Roberts is suffering from many sleepless nights and this gives him some otherworldly abilities. Spurred by a bout of insomnia himself, King spent a sleepless four months writing the book in 1990 before abandoning the project. In an interview with Wallace Stroby for Writer’s Digest in 1991, he said, “it’s a long piece of work, it’s about five hundred and fifty pages long. It’s no good. It’s not publishable … the last eighty or ninety pages are wonderful. But things just don’t connect, it doesn’t have that novelistic roundness that it should have. And maybe someday you’ll read it, but it won’t be for a long time.”1 Insomnia did end up getting finished and was released in 1994.
The record for the longest time going without sleep is held by Randy Gardner who stayed awake for eleven days and twenty-five minutes.
How much sleep does the human body need? Experts say adults between the ages of twenty-four and sixty-five need between seven to nine hours of sleep per night. Newborn babies and up to three months old require fourteen to seventeen hours per night while teenagers require eight to ten hours. Why is sleep so important? Our bodies use sleep as a time to repair itself and store up energy for the following day. Our minds and our moods are also affected by the quality and quantity of our sleep and sleep deprivation can have lasting negative effects.
How much sleep do other living creatures need? Cats sleep an average of fifteen hours a day while rats sleep a whopping twenty hours per day. Some animals are able to sleep using unihemispheric slow wave sleep, which allows half of their brain to stay awake while the other half sleeps. Dolphins utilize this type of sleep as well as some other aquatic mammals and birds. Imagine how much we could get done if we could utilize this strategy! Studies show that this type of sleep also improves memory, brain plasticity, and overall immune system health.2
Elaine Esposito stayed in a coma for thirty-seven years and 111 days before succumbing in 1978, which is the longest-ever coma, according to Guinness World Records.
Insomnia may affect all of us from time to time but there are several different types that exist. Acute insomnia is described as a brief episode of difficulty sleeping. It could be caused by a life event that is stressful, or by travel. This type of insomnia usually resolves itself without any treatment. Chronic insomnia is a long-term pattern of difficulty sleeping. If a person has trouble falling asleep or staying asleep at least three nights per week for three months or longer, they are considered to have chronic insomnia and may need to seek help. Comorbid insomnia is insomnia that occurs with another condition. Anxiety and depression are known to be associated with changes in sleep as well as other medical conditions. Onset insomnia is a difficulty falling asleep at the beginning of the night while maintenance insomnia is the inability to stay asleep. In the book Insomnia, Ralph is considered to have this last form as he is unable to return to sleep.
In the novel, Ralph is able to see people’s auras. Charles Webster Leadbetter is credited with popularizing the concept of auras after he studied theosophy in India in the early 1900s. He believed he could use his own clairvoyant powers to make scientific discoveries and see people’s auras. (He also claimed that men come from Mars but more advanced men came from the moon!) The concept of aura photography began in 1939 by Russian scientist Semyon Kirlian. Kirlian discovered that a mysterious energy would appear when an object was placed on a photographic plate. The plate was connected to a source of voltage and the object seemed to be surrounded by something, which began the study of energy fields generated by living things. Kirlian published his first scientific paper on the subject in 1961, in the Russian Journal of Scientific and Applied Photography. We spoke with an aura photographer, Annette Bruchu, to understand more about this art.
Aura is defined as the distinctive atmosphere or quality that seems to surround and be generated by a person, thing, or place.
Kelly: “In Stephen King’s book Insomnia, a character is able to begin seeing people’s auras. Tell us how you got into aura photography and/or reading auras.”
Annette Bruchu: “‘You can see aura?’ is a question that I am frequently asked. The dreamer, the visionary, the one with the big imagination. Or is it my reality of seeing the space between the spaces of all the energy around everything that is alive, from people, electrical wires, animals, trees, the ground, and water flowing in the stream? As a child I was surrounded with color, imagination, laughter, and fun. This halo, what I called it, I could see around and in front of people was not only a white light, but has color. The color was stronger when the conversations were stronger or more intense, when more excitement was happening.
I didn’t realize that others were not seeing color aura until people would come up to me and ask me ‘what color is their aura’ or ‘I think you need to get your eyes looked at.’”
Meg: “That must have been eye opening, excuse the pun, for you to discover you were seeing something no one else was!”
Annette Bruchu: “At the ages of six, seven, and eight I felt very normal and everyone else was off because they often questioned me about the halos they had. I felt like I had a pretty relaxed childhood and loved to stay up late. I would often find myself mesmerized with the TV or watching the fireplace very zoned out. As an adult, I began to watch people and their behaviors and reactions, and I began to better understand the colors by the moods people were in.”