Visions in the Alaskan Interior

(photo from Denali National Park)

By the time Dee Dee Jonrowe arrived in the town of Iditarod, activity was already in full-swing. Gold-rush miners carried gold and weighing scales from building to building. Cooks prodded at charcoaled fires, sending wisps of smoke into the sky. Other dog-sled teams rested to regain the strength to continue onwards. No one was permanent at Iditarod—thousands of people flowed through it every year; its gold attracted hopeful prospectors and dog mushers sought its respite.

But Jonrowe was at least a century late. The town was abandoned decades ago when the gold-rush burst. Now, it is only a derelict abandoned checkpoint buried within the lonely Alaskan interior on the way to Nome. Jonrowe was hallucinating.

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The Iditarod is a race through the Alaskan interior over 950 miles long. Mushers face white-out blizzards, wind chills of nearly -100 F, and encounter moose and bears. But weather and wildlife aren’t the only challenges on the trail—sometimes the mushers need to be wary of their own minds. Hallucinations like Jonrowe’s aren’t unusual among Iditarod race mushers. It’s not that they have a clinical mental illness. It’s that they’re severely sleep-deprived and dehydrated.

“Sleeping 2 to 4 hours per day is about as good as it gets out on the trail, aside from the longer, mandatory layovers,” wrote mushers Anna and Kristy Berington on their blog. Some mushers will even tie themselves to their sled, so they don’t fall off if they accidentally fall asleep on the trail. The same year as Jonrowe’s ghost town hallucination, musher Ramey Smyth, the second-place winner, told reporters that he had only slept 5 hours in the 6 days before the finish line. These mushers are no strangers to sleep deprivation.

Scientists have shown that sleep deprivation does lead to hallucinations, even in healthy people. In a review of long-term sleep-deprivation studies, Dr. Flavie Waters, a neuroscientist who researches sleep-deprivation-induced hallucinations at the University of Western Australia, showed that 90-percent of healthy people hallucinate under certain sleep-deprivation conditions. The more sleep deprived a person gets, the more frequent and severe the hallucinations.

The consequences start after only one sleepless night. Dr. Waters revealed in a paper published in Frontiers of Psychiatry that more than 20-percent of people started experiencing visual distortions, such as seeing objects as bigger or smaller than they are, seeing objects move when they weren’t, and even seeing duplicates (two cups of coffee when there’s only one). And that’s just from one night without sleep. After two sleepless nights, people started to experience actual hallucinations—not just distortions. They began seeing things like people, crowds, and cars.

But the visual hallucinations are just the first to arrive. In an even more sleep-deprived state, people start hearing things, like someone calling their name or hearing barking dogs. These hallucinations can gradually become more and more complex as the person goes longer and longer without sleep.

“When awake and healthy, the brain functions at its best. It’s connected in all the right places and deals with information in the right way. Under conditions where the brain is not operating 100%, that’s when the brain starts to produce random thoughts, ideas, and sensations,” Dr. Waters explained to me in a personal email. “If the frontal lobe—the front bit of the brain which controls everything—is not functioning either, it may believe these thoughts, ideas, and sensations to be real. That’s why healthy people can experience hallucinations.”

And it’s not just the sleep deprivation working against the mushers; a bored brain also plays a role. Stretches of the Iditarod race are in a vast, flat, unchanging landscape. Without natural external stimulation, the brain makes up its own images.

While sleep deprivation is a serious cause of hallucinations, dehydration can trigger hallucinations as well.

“[Back in the day], most of us didn’t pay that much attention to our hydration,” Jonrowe said in a phone call interview. “All of the gear we were wearing made it really awkward to go to the bathroom on the trail.”

Mushers started paying attention in the 1990s after Jonrowe and other mushers participated in a hydration study through the Arctic Research Lab that connected dehydration with hallucinations.

“Hydration is a big, big deal,” Jonrowe said. “Hallucinations [from dehydration] are now a lot less numerous.”

Another solution could be as easy as sleeping more often. In 1973, Dr. Richard C. Friedman and his team published a study done on medical interns. The interns worked 32-hour-long shifts and then were allowed two hours of sleep. Not a single intern reported any changes in perception—no distortions or hallucinations. Dr. Waters and her research team have commented on why the studied interns didn’t show symptoms.

“A number of reasons may have contributed to a lack of symptoms in that group,” her team wrote the aforementioned Frontiers of Psychiatry paper, “including the short period of sleep which may have served to reduce the impact of sleep loss on brain functions; an attentional focus on tasks of high importance which may have acted to maintain perceptual stability; or a negative response bias because of the risk to be perceived as unprofessional or unfit for duty.”

In other words, maybe the sleep was enough for the interns, maybe their focus and tasks protected them from hallucinations, or maybe they were afraid of being seen as unprofessional or incapable of being a doctor. But perhaps the mushers could adopt a similar sleep regimen and see where it gets them.

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With the hallucinations, sleep deprivation, and the brutality of the Alaskan interior, why do mushers flock to the race, year after year? Perhaps thrill-seeking and adventure is part of it, but the motivations are deeper for many mushers.

“I knew a lot of the guys who ran the original serum run [that saved the town of Nome from diphtheria in the 1920s].” Jonrowe said. “I went to a potluck once, and every person in that room had depended on a dog team. I’m really moved by that.”

“For me the Iditarod is still a celebration,” she told Reuters in 2016. “It’s the celebration of the culture of Alaska.”

Dogs and dog-mushing are an integral part of Alaskan history and culture. Without the sled dogs, there would be very little of Alaska as we know it. The dogs tracked game with Native Alaskans, brought supplies, and delivered messages throughout the Alaskan interior. During World War II, the dogs served as sentries and did search-and-rescue missions. Even today, the sled dogs provide travel in certain parts of Alaska.

“The race pits man and animal against nature, against wild Alaska at her best and as each mile is covered, it is a tribute to Alaska’s history and the role the sled dog’ played,” said the Iditarod’s official website. “The Iditarod is a tie to that colorful past.”