Members of DOS are told when they may or may not sleep.
All of them are required to awaken within one minute of being texted.
Some people identify members of DOS because they have to have their cell phones with them 24 hours per day in the event that their master contacts them.
It is part of the training that the slave women are able to live with little sleep.
It has long been told to the students that Keith Raniere had virtually dispensed with sleep.
A woman who never lived to get the chance to be part of DOS was Kristin Marie Snyder.
From November 2002 to February 2003, she was a student of NXIVM, a multi-level marketing company which teaches the philosophies of Mr. Raniere.
She lived in Alaska and was an environmental consultant and took NIXVM classes in Anchorage and in Albany. When she came back to Anchorage, she took more NIXVM classes. In the three months that Ms. Snyder took classes, she paid $14,000 for the two 16-day courses and an additional $2,000 for two weekend courses.
Among the skills she learned was to sleep less. She attempted to emulate Mr. Raniere and dispense with sleep altogether.
Mr. Raniere “doesn’t sleep, so I don’t need to sleep,” she wrote.
During her training, as she gradually dispensed with sleep, she said she came to learn she had been sexually abused as a child [something she never knew or remembered before].
More disturbingly, she became aware that her negative psychic energy was released into space on February 1, 2003 and was responsible for the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia which disintegrated upon reentering Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven crew members.
Filled with regrets, Miss Snyder tried lying in the snow for an extended period to purportedly kill herself. She failed.
On February 6, at approximately 4:00 p.m. Miss Snyder left the NIXVM seminar she had been attending. And was not seen again.
Her friends discovered her vehicle at a campground near Miller’s Landing at Resurrection Bay in Seward Alaska on February 7. A note inside the vehicle said:
“I attended a course called Executive Success Programs [also known as] NXIVM based out of Anchorage, [Alaska] [and] Albany, [New York]. I was brainwashed [and] my emotional center of the brain was killed/turned off. I still have feeling in my external skin but my internal organs are rotting. Please contact my parents…if you find me or this note. I am sorry…I didn’t know I was already dead. May we persist into the future… No need to search for my body.”
An old kayak was missing from the landing.
On February 8, and February 9, 2003 a large search effort to find her body was conducted in and around Resurrection Bay by Alaska State Troopers, US Coast Guard, and others without success.
An Anchorage District Court jury determined that cause of death was
suicide.
Mr. Raniere and his followers said that Ms. Snyder faked her death to escape a drug ring and was in hiding.
Mr. Raniere employed several operatives to hunt for Ms. Snyder but was unable to find her.
There was no evidence offered that Ms. Snyder was involved with drugs or drug sales.