Suspended animation in fiction which is indistinguishable from death. In American fiction, the first story to deal with suspended animation is the tale of Rip Van Winkle, a short story by American author Washington Irving published in 1819 as well as the name of the story's fictional protagonist. In the story, a British subject in the American colonies wanders into the Catskill Mountains in the years before the American Revolutionary War, and finds a group of fairies, whose moonshine he drinks. He then falls asleep for 20 years, and returns to his village in what is now the United States, finding his home town
Sleep the Christian legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, in which seven Christians flee into a cave during pagan times in order to escape persecution, but fall asleep and wake up 360 years later to discover, to their astonishment, that the Roman Empire is now predominately Christian. The American author Washington Irving's short story "Rip Van Winkle", first published in 1819 in his collection of short stories "The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.", is about a man in colonial America named Rip Van Winkle who falls asleep on one of the Catskill Mountains and wakes up twenty years later