According to CNN’s Alan Duke, a sleep specialist testified on Thursday that Michael Jackson is the first individual he’s ever heard of who has gone two months without Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep.

Jackson allegedly referred to propofol, the potent anesthetic that contributed to his death in 2009, as his “milk.” According to CNN, Charles Czeisler, M.D., Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School’s Division Of Sleep Medicine, testified at the trial against concert promoter AEG Live that the drug disrupts normal sleep cycles and deprives the body of rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep while making a person feel as if he or she has gotten a full night’s sleep.

Katherine Jackson, the King of Pop’s mother, is suing AEG Live for employing and overseeing Dr. Conrad Murray, who was convicted of manslaughter for administering propofol infusions to Jackson for 60 nights.

(Image: Mirrorpix)

Dr. Conrad Murray allegedly gave Jackson 60 nights of propofol injections to address his sleeplessness, something a sleep specialist claims no one has ever experienced.

“The symptoms that Mr. Jackson was exhibiting were consistent with what someone might expect to see of someone suffering from total sleep deprivation over a chronic period,” Dr. Charles said Friday at AEG Live’s wrongful death trial.

He went on to say that the absence of REM sleep may have already killed The King of Pop, pointing out that lab rats die after five weeks without REM sleep.

“It would be like eating some sort of cellulose pellets instead of dinner,” Czeisler explained. “Your stomach would be full and you would not be hungry, but it would be zero calories and not fulfill any of your nutrition needs.”

The body goes through four phases of sleep during the night: three non-REM periods and one REM state (for more on what happens during each stage, click here). According to Phillip Gehrman, Ph.D., clinical director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program, each cycle spans around 90 minutes and usually ends in REM sleep. According to WebMD, the initial REM cycle is roughly 10 minutes long, and the cycles become longer during the night, up to an hour or more.

According to Gehrman, brain activity during REM sleep resembles that of alertness, earning it the moniker “paradoxical sleep.” “Your eyes are moving rapidly around as if you’re scanning your environment,” he explains. The body’s muscles are temporarily immobilized to prevent you from acting out your dreams during this stage of sleep. (This helps to explain why people occasionally experience sleep paralysis when they are awakened from REM sleep.) When that paralysis doesn’t happen properly and a person acts out his or her dreams, another sleep disorder called REM behavior disorder might develop.)

His inability to do standard dances or remember words to songs he sang for decades, paranoia, talking to himself and hearing voices, and severe weight loss were among the symptoms documented by e-mails among show producers and testimony from his chef, hairstylist, and choreographers, according to Czeisler.

“I believe that that constellation of symptoms was more probably than not induced by total sleep deprivation over a chronic period,” he testified.

Jackson, the world’s most successful artist, was gearing up for a massive tour.

According to Czeisler’s evidence on Friday, if the singer hadn’t died on June 25, 2009, of an overdose of the surgical anesthetic, the absence of REM sleep would have killed him within days.

Czeisler stated that depriving someone of REM sleep for an extended length of time makes them paranoid, anxious, unhappy, unable to learn, distracted, and sloppy. They lose their sense of balance and hunger, while their bodily reflexes slow down by ten times and their emotional reactions become ten times greater,’ he explained.

Those symptoms match “descriptions of Jackson in his last weeks as described in e-mails from show producers and testimony by witnesses in the trial,” according to Duke.