Unable
to secure a good night’s rest, poor sleepers can search for consolation
in the creative and prolific souls—the Brontës, Baudelaire, Kafka,
Proust, Nabokov—who shared their affliction.
“Are
you awake?” So runs the perpetual 3 A.M.
question of the sleepless to the seemingly slumbering partner. “No!”
the partner replies, turning over and away, indicating both the fact
of being awake and the state of being still asleep, unavailable for
conscious activities. The insistent insomniac, desperate for a chat,
usually sighs, accepts the verdict, and slumps back into
sleeplessness. (Carrying on with the conversation is a path toward
divorce, not the desired diversion.) The exchange, muttered by
countless couples in countless beds, reminds us that sleep is not a
neat off-and-on switch but a fully human and fiendishly manifold
activity: social, complex, and governed by as many psychological
intricacies as any other natural act. We can be asleep and still
sense that something is stirring around us, or be awake and still say
“No!” and mean it.
“The
importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man
as the animal who cannot sleep,” E. M. Cioran once wrote.
Sleep—which, when things go well, consumes a third of our
lives—poses two opposed existential perplexities. The first is
about consciousness: we know that we sleep, but cannot know that we
are sleeping, since sleep is, in its nature, non-present. The second
perplexity has to do with what we can, in fact, remember, and that is
the experience of dreams. While engaged in the non-knowable act of
sleeping, we also learn nightly that it is possible to know that we
have had vivid, intense, unforgettable experiences that are, at the
same time, delusions. Sleep tells us that there are black holes
outside the possibility of narrative description; the dreams we have
when we’re sleeping tell us that our entire existence might be a
narrative fiction. “How do we know it’s not a dream?” is the
perennial philosopher’s question, the red-pill dilemma. We’ve all
felt that initial squeeze of relief—oh, it was just a dream!—turn
into sadness: Oh, he’s not alive again. It was only a dream. And so
the contradiction: we cannot narrate our experience of sleep, even
though our dreams are so much our primary experience of narration
that we use them as a metaphor for our most extreme actualities. “It
was like a dream,” we say of something piercingly happy; “It was
a nightmare,” for something piercingly sad.
Inevitably,
we turn to the scientists, as medieval people to the stars, in the
hope of finding truth and comfort about our unwaking states. In 'Why We Sleep' Matthew Walker, who runs the Center for Human Sleep Science, at
Berkeley, offers a fine condensed account of what students of
consciousness know about its absence. He is at pains to show that
there’s a complex architecture of unconsciousness. It isn’t just
that deep sleep is followed by REM
sleep, or dreaming sleep; these two states firmly oscillate back and
forth in the hours we are asleep. We learn not just about melatonin,
as a marker of our circadian rhythm, but about adenosine, which
accumulates during our waking hours and produces the “sleep
pressure,” or homeostatic sleep drive, that makes us drowsy.
Caffeine, we’re told, does its work by preventing adenosine from
doing its
work. (It’s a powerful drug! Walker reproduces terrifying drawings
of webs woven by spiders under the influence of various substances:
spiders do O.K. even on LSD but go completely crazy on the strength
of a couple of lattes, spinning wildly incoherent webs that would
never catch a fly.)
Veteran
insomniacs seeking reassurance in these pages—it’s no big deal;
people manage fine with minimal sleep; it gets better—will find
none. Instead, we are warned that the consequences of not sleeping
are even worse than we’d feared. Everything goes wrong when we
don’t sleep. The damage to our immune system is astounding; Walker
cites a study of healthy young men that showed how a four-hour night
of sleep “swept away 70 percent of the natural killer cells
circulating in the immune system.” Sleep-deprived mice—it seems
cruel to keep even mice awake, but we do, possibly by showing them
Election Night on MSNBC over and over—will have a
two-hundred-per-cent increase in tumor growth. Nor is cancer the only
risk. “You don’t need a full night of total sleep deprivation to
inflict a measurable impact on your cardiovascular system,” Walker
explains, delivering details with what sounds suspiciously like
professional delight. “As your sleep-deprived heart beats faster,
the volumetric rate of blood pumped through your vasculature
increases, and with that comes the hypertensive state of your blood
pressure,” he writes. “Adding insult to real injury, the
hypertensive strain that sleep deprivation places on your vasculature
means that you can no longer repair those fracturing vessels
effectively. . . . Vessels will rupture. It is a
powder keg of factors, with heart attack and stroke being the most
common casualties in the explosive aftermath.” That’s the kind of
reading that can keep you up at night.
Insomniacs
tend to couple up neatly with good sleepers, but even those good
sleepers are probably not sleeping as much as they should. Walker
suggests that humans are made for “biphasic” sleep—that is, two
sleep sessions per day. People in traditional communities where
everyone naps live longer than people in modernized ones where they
don’t. The siesta is lifesaving. Walker even conjectures that our
peculiar sleep patterns may explain our evolutionary advance. We
sleep less than other primates, but get relatively more REM
sleep, and the dreams it brings, than our monkey and ape cousins. It
is during REM
sleep, Walker insists, that we engage in “emotional processing.”
The mnemonic collisions during this phase forge new connections among
our experiences, and we wake not merely refreshed but revived and
enlightened by our re-wrought neural networks.
That’s
if you sleep, of course. Insomnia seems to descend, alarmingly like
schizophrenia, in the late teens, when self-consciousness of all
types descends. I suffered my own first serious bout with
sleeplessness around the age of eighteen, when, coming home from a
family voyage to Europe, my eyes would not shut. The reason was
obviously jet lag, but, instead of accepting the cause, I
internalized the panic.
Decades
later, I recall good sleeps the way other people recall good meals.
(I have luckily had too many good meals to recall almost any.) The
one morning when I slept past nine; that other when the kids had to
wake me at eleven. Few phobias can be quite as psychologically
painful as sleeplessness. The body simply won’t lose consciousness,
and losing it is something that cannot be willed into existence, or,
rather, into nonexistence. And so one begins to envy desperately not
just the sleeping spouse but everyone in the world who is not awake,
from children to the henchmen in old heist movies who are thumped on
the head with the butt of a gun by Steve McQueen and immediately
faint away. (Not something that can actually happen.)
The
odyssey that the insomniac undergoes every night, passing from
bedroom to living room and back again, is, in a curious way, a parody
of sleep, as Walker depicts it, with a conscious architecture of its
own. Not being able to sleep and being awake are two distinct
settings. Insomniacs seldom just get up, work for an hour, enjoy the
silence of the house. This implies a state of serenity that’s
exactly what we don’t have; if we could be that calm, we’d be
asleep. No, we are inclined to seek out sleep in the same oscillating
stages that sleep itself presents, even if that means walking
fretfully, or listening to podcasts on early Christian history, or
watching late-night television, searching out things that will be
sufficiently distracting to keep us from dwelling on the fact that we
are not sleeping without being so agitating as to keep us up even
more.
Indeed,
when two insomniacs share a house or an apartment, they are often
acutely conscious of each other’s affliction without seeking each
other’s company. Hearing the other move around, flick the light
switch on and off, pound the floor, the insomniac empathizes while
recognizing that to commiserate would be to bar the door to oblivion
for both. For we insomniacs are not living the waking life; we are
seeking
sleep.
As much as the actual sleeper in the bed beside us, we have a nightly
passage that we know too well—and one that does, eventually, yield
to sleep, if never enough.
Star
insomniacs, for there are such people, tend to feel free to
externalize their own nightly odyssey. The basketball player Wilt
Chamberlain was chronically sleep-deprived. He would talk about how
little sleep he’d had, and crankily, not boastfully. The
nineteen-seventies were “probably the best time of his life because
he had people who could stay up all night with him,” a friend of
his has said. “But he’d wear people out because all the rest of
us had to sleep.” There were compensations: he couldn’t have
slept with so many women—many, many thousands, he estimated—had
he actually slept. (This double use of “sleep,” which occurs in
many languages, is a significant substitution, sex being both an
alternative before and a soporific after. Perhaps he slept with so
many in order to sleep alone.)
What
afflicts the great star of the court can equally afflict the great
star of the quad. The eminent philosopher of personhood Derek Parfit
served himself a nightly concoction of pills and vodka in an effort
to knock himself out. According to his biographer, David Edmonds, the
druggings were accompanied by another ritual, in the pre-AirPods era,
when Parfit was a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford: “Each night,
as other Fellows retired to bed, he would start playing
Wagner—usually The Ring Cycle, Tristan and Isolde,
or Parsifal—and the music would float across the
North Quad for several hours.” Wagner would be a
sleepless highbrow’s favorite; the long, lush, unbroken lines of
music share with the white-noise hum of the air-conditioner or the
thrum of the painstaking lecture the quality of being absorbing
without offering undue eventfulness. It doesn’t seem to have helped
Parfit any more than early Christian history has helped me.
The
exasperated experts, right here, begin to fire off e-mails and D.M.s,
tutting at the eminent philosopher’s obvious failures of sleep
hygiene. Of course if you drink vodka you’ll awake
at midnight! Walker, in fact, explains that one of the by-products of
alcohol metabolism is a class of chemicals, known as aldehydes, that
are especially prone to impede REM
sleep. But trust us, doctor, we have tried it all. The Mayo Clinic
has just published a brand-new guide to sleeping, which rehearses yet again the familiar remedies and
warnings: no caffeine within nine hours of bedtime (done); no alcohol
within four hours of bedtime (done); exercise, but at least two hours
prior (done); no screens before bed (done). Meditation can help (it
does, sort of), and calculation can comfort—see how much you’re
really sleeping by keeping a record, and you’ll be vaguely
encouraged that it’s more than you know. Melatonin, the cautious
man’s Valium, may or may not work, and the gummies may contain much
less or much more of the active ingredient than the label promises.
The veteran insomniac may arrive at a neat little stack of
health-food-store supplements—CBD gummies (with or without THC),
L-theanine, kava, valerian root, and so on—and is perfectly aware
that, more likely than not, it works, if it works, as a placebo. (One
would think that placebos, to work, couldn’t be known as such, but
it seems that, when we need something badly enough,
we welcome anything.)
The
inevitable reaction to the universalizing claims of natural science
is the particularizing claims of cultural history: sleep, we can be
certain, will be shown to have as many cultural styles over time as
the pajamas we wear, or don’t wear, to enjoy it. Though food is
biologically necessary, we accept that it has innumerable local
styles—there may be a universal grammar of a pungent protein piled
upon a neutral starch, but it encompasses everything from pizza to
cassava with spiced ants. Can sleep have something like the same
tribal variety? Is there a peculiarly Sri Lankan siesta, an
especially Swedish kind of slumber party? Right on cue, we have
Sebastian P. Klinger’s "Sleep Works : Experiments in Science and Literature 1899-1929''. It’s an attempt to cross the wires of experimental sleep science
with those of literary production, set as the nineteenth century
turned into the twentieth. A devout “culturalist,” Klinger quotes
approvingly the statement that there is nothing natural about going
to bed, and yet if anything
is natural—that is, common to almost the entire animal kingdom—it’s
sleep. Although beds in our modern sense of four-footed furniture
with a springy surface may have a particular history, the familiar
use of “bed” to mean something soft that animals choose to lie
down on is obviously wide-reaching. Hibernating bears do not lie on
jagged rocks.
The
statement means, really, that the way we sleep is more inflected by
our beliefs than we might think, as touched by our private yens as
our public yawns. Klinger’s subsequent thesis, not a terribly
surprising one, is that insomnia is the consequence of the
mechanization of leisure by capitalism, and that we became sleepless
in the fin de siècle because we were being forced to work and shop.
Insomnia is the occupational disease of enslaved mind workers, with a
predictable spillover into the aesthetes who mock it yet participate
in it.
But
surely insomnia was, as it remains, an outlier issue—Henry Clay
Frick appeared to have slept fine, and Frederick Winslow Taylor, who
slept poorly as an adolescent, doesn’t seem to have slept worse
after he pioneered the methods of industrial efficiency. In ancient
Rome, Juvenal complained about being kept up all night by the city’s
noise. Perhaps the special connection between insomnia and modernity
is something we want
to be true.
Insomnia
seems no more a generally modern complaint than it is a capitalist
one. It is specifically a romantic complaint, which began to be heard
in full right around the start of the nineteenth century and, like so
many romantic complaints, became most intensified as it passed from
country to city. If Shakespeare produced, in Lady Macbeth, the first
great insomniac of English literature—albeit one who sees the
condition as a punishment from God—it was Wordsworth who wrote our
first real poem about insomnia. It’s disarming in its narrator’s
search for some form of the white noise that sometimes helps the
sleepless. He was trying to find pacifying country sounds even in the
Lake District, the kind that are now synthesized on Spotify:
“A clock of sheep that leisurely pass by, / One after
one; the sound of rain, and bees / Murmuring; the fall of
rivers, winds and seas, / Smooth fields, white sheets of
water, and pure sky; / I’ve thought of all by turns, and
still I lie / Sleepless.” What is essential is the taste
to testify to the extremes of experience; Coleridge’s somnambulist
and Wordsworth’s insomniac are two sides of a single phenomenon.
Klinger,
to his credit, recognizes that the opposite side of the failure to
sleep is the fetishization of sleep. Proust’s insomnia, though
debilitating, was made, in classic wound-and-bow terms, into the
engine of his art. And so with Kafka and Cioran: not being permitted
to sleep by the lights of modernity, we make a melancholy playground
out of the prohibition. Klinger also points out that this era marks
the birth of the sleeping pill, the Communion wafer of the new
century, with all its attendant miseries. Although sleeping draughts
have an ancient history—evolving into the “stupefactives” of
medieval medicine and then, starting in the sixteenth century, the
much consumed tincture of opium known as laudanum—the twentieth
century was a time of unexampled innovation in this area.
We
are soon launched into the series of hypnotics—the barbiturates,
the benzodiazepines, the “Z” drugs (such as zolpidem), and, most
recently, the orexin blockers (notably, Belsomra). Like the rakes in
a Jane Austen novel, they all began with great charm, and then soon afterward
earned the most terrible reputations. You would think we’d avoid
the next generation of pills after seeing the toll extracted by the
previous one, but we don’t. The essayist Wilfrid Sheed wrote, in
the nineteen-nineties, a funny, agonized book about his betrayal by
benzo—in his case, Ativan, which promised much and ended up, in
collaboration with alcohol, sending its otherwise well-balanced user
off to a procession of rehabs.
Sheed
called New York “the world’s insomnia capital.” This may be
true, but what sane person would exchange the gleaming city at 3 a.m.
for the farmhouse at 9 P.M.,
with all the exhausted hoers and threshers briefly asleep until the
next dawn’s labor begins again? When our own country cousins come
south from Canada, they emerge from the spare bedroom of our New York
apartment hollow-eyed and sleepless, politely incapable of
understanding how anyone can sleep amid the noise of ambulances and
car alarms and honking cabs and city buses sweeping up the avenue
right outside. Among the New Yorkers, both the good sleepers and the
bad sleepers don’t notice it.
What
of the dreams that sleep brings? If anything is universal, it is the
belief, across cultures, that dreams are parables and portents—Freud
became famous in Klinger’s fin-de-siècle modernity for seeking
symbolic significance in dreams, but it is hard to find a single
culture that does not include some version of this belief. The
ancient Greeks thought that dreams held powers of prophecy; Hindus
have apparently found encouragement in dreams of Lord Krishna. We
want dreams to mean something, even though, yet another slumber
paradox, they mainly puzzle us by their disjuncture of logic and
meaning. Thus the dream relater (there is usually only one in a
relationship) always begins, “I had the strangest dream last
night . . .”
To
find out what the new science of dreams suggests, we have "This Is Why You Dream" by Rahul Jandial, whose name on the dust jacket is suspiciously
followed by both M.D. and Ph.D.—a good rule of reading being that
the more credentials on the cover, the less convincing the claims
inside. Yet Jandial’s book, though perhaps breezier and less
cautious than that of the more typical sleep scientist, is filled
with empirical information that may seem dreamy without ever feeling
wholly hallucinated. And so we learn of the “Halle Berry neuron,”
a discovery of the neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, who found
that, in one experimental subject, a single neuron fired to the
invocation, or even the mention, of Halle Berry. The larger point
being made, very much in harmony with Matthew Walker’s theory of
human nightly emotional processing, is that our dreams are what
Jandial calls thought experiments. We focus with such neural
narrowness on Halle Berry—or on Brad Pitt—because having fantasy
figures play roles in the stock-theatre company of the night helps
prepare us to ensnare the real thing in our waking hours.
If
there seems less evidence than we might want for such a confident
claim, Jandial does make a plausible case that our dreams work in
tandem with our “theory of mind”—our ability to grasp that
other people are thinking and feeling in the same way as ourselves.
At night, we rehearse the day’s actions, and our imaginations, so
to speak, ruminate through the activities of those others we have
encountered as though they were our own and try to make lateral sense
of them. Throughout, Jandial is arguing against the “continuity
hypothesis” of dreaming—the idea that dreams are basically
extensions of our daily life in coded form. Instead, he thinks that
the purpose of dreams is closer to the vernacular meaning of the
word: it’s what we want, not what we got—the outer edge of our
imagination, not the fabric of our days rewoven.
Sometimes,
to be sure, dreams are obviously rooted in anxiety. We dream
repeatedly of having signed up for a course that we forgot to attend,
with the exam now drawing near. This may be the mind’s simple
Post-it reminder not to do this, or anything similar. Others are more
plaintively compensatory: a standard dream of New Yorkers is to have
found an extra room in their apartment—a dream often elaborated
with a Narnia-like act of pushing back coats and clothes to find a
secret door in the back of a closet. We awake, sadly, to the same
space we had before. (To this dream, one might add another, also
seemingly peculiar to this city: having acquired a bigger apartment,
we dream of having been forced back to the smaller one.)
But
most dreams are less shapely in their signalling, tending to be the
jangle of mixed-up stories and abruptly abbreviated actions which
puzzle us in the morning. And so Jandial arrives at a highly
hypothetical but agreeably plausible explanation, modelled, as such
explanations usually are, on the most recent available model of the
mind. In our case, that model is provided by artificial intelligence:
when a system of machine learning becomes overly tethered to the
material it is dredging and, Jandial writes, grows “too rigid and
formulaic in its analysis,” it proves useful to “inject ‘noise’
into the information used to teach the machine, deliberately
corrupting the data and making the information more random.”
Dreams, therefore, “are much like the noise injected into the
machine’s data.” Freeing our minds, dreams force us into new
channels of possibility, which might, in their apparently surreal
inconsequence, lead to the type of thinking that “looks at a
problem in a completely novel way” and help us “find adaptive
solutions to unexpected threats.” The illogic of dreams is not a
riddle to be solved but a noise that can reveal the meaningful
signal. We are readied for the unexpected by the nightly experience
of the inexplicable.
But
there’s also something to the old saying that “dreams go by
contraries.” Far from being continuous with our daily life, they
are often compensatory. One abashed sleep scientist long ago,
anticipating that the leaders of an expedition to Everest would have
the most epic dreams, discovered that the meekest and most
incompetent followers dreamed heroically of the summit, while others’
dreams tended to be far more anxious—a Walter Mitty effect that
should have been predictable to any reader of fiction. Jandial urges
us to take advantage of dream disjunctions by making a conscious
effort to record our unconsciousness—writing down the previous
night’s dreams, to which we are usually made amnesiac by the
reëmergence of the “executive function” of the brain in
wakefulness, so that “retreating into our dreams can expand our
minds in ways impossible in lived experience.”
On
the farther shore of sleep, Jandial writes encouragingly of the
willed practice of lucid dreaming—that is, of shaping our minds so
that our dreams are not merely orderly but intentionally helpful. We
focus on “seeing the divine,” and we’re told that some version
of the divine will be seen that night, though Hindus will see Krishna
and Christians Christ. The practice of lucid dreaming—for what it’s
worth, it apparently can be aided by a drug called galantamine—would
seem to clash with Jandial’s earlier theory of useful randomness in
dreaming, but then why should dreams be any more subject to a unitary
principle than any other part of life? This particular non-lucid
dreamer made an effort, after reading Jandial, to dream the divine,
but I kept getting instead the missed exam and the extra room in the
apartment—perhaps evidence that dreams will elude the strictures of
lucidity, or perhaps evidence only that, for a New Yorker, the extra
room is
the image of the divine.
A
skeptic might insist that dreams have no real content at all and are
more like bits and pieces of film in the cutting room of the mind.
The morning-after recitation might be the dream—that is, the moment
when the clips are run through the projector and we patch together a
narrative. The mind, then, might make
purpose in dreams rather than find it there. How much are those
purposes affected by our situation? According to the clinical
literature, prisoners in Auschwitz dreamed of continued suffering, in
which the misery and horror persisted—supporting a version of the
continuity hypothesis—or had positive dreams of escape that they
could share with other prisoners. One prisoner after the war
described a dream in which he met his murdered brother on a
stream—the deep river that represents the passage from sleep to
death in countless mythologies—and his brother handed him a “fiery
fish.” “I can’t carry it, I can’t carry it,” the dreamer
remembers crying. “You’ll carry it, you’ll carry it,” his
long-gone brother insisted. The dream, he said, gave him courage and
helped him survive.
Those
of us stuck on the wheel of sleeplessness eventually discover what
the scientists concede: that nothing is gained, past a certain point,
in trying to sleep, since the one sure thing is that none of us can
will ourselves to sleep. The best remedy for insomnia, as with most
things in life, is learning to live with it. In time, we come to
understand that the psychological cost of stressing over
sleeplessness is greater than the physical cost of not having slept,
and so we adjust. The fact of not having slept turns out to be
tolerable. Exhaustion gives way to normal energy, and adrenaline
kicks in when we have to perform.
We
cope. Is there a more dispiriting but mature reflection? Yet, on the
whole, we do cope, and find comfort. Insomnia is a mark of the
insubordinate imagination. On the thirteenth-century tomb of Eleanor
of Aquitaine, she is shown wide awake and reading, while her dull and
kingly husband sleeps for all eternity. Doubtless some medievalist
will explain this as a conventional funerary trope, but one cannot
help but feel, looking at it, that it is an allegory about the
virtues of sleeplessness. Eleanor can read a book or, these days,
scroll through her phone; her mind is secretly and subversively open.
“I
simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity,
genius. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with
consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.” So declared Nabokov,
and though, as often with that great exile, there is a note of
overcompensating defiance in the affirmation, still, he had a point.
There is glory in this view of life which involves extending its
conscious moments, fighting for every second of awareness that our
mortality can afford us.
The
one thing the insomniac does not envy is the unconscious dead. The
universe, after all, is asleep. Trees and vegetation are always
slumbering, helpless at the woodman’s axe or the casual munching of
a ruminant. And the great mass of inanimate matter is flattered by
even being called asleep; it has no potential for animation. To be
awake is to be alive. Mind racing at 3 A.M.,
we are in tune with what may be the truly unique,
only-once-in-the-universe gift of consciousness. That’s some
comfort. We’ll sleep long enough soon enough.
What an Insomniac Knows : What’s
really going on when you can’t power down?
By Adam Gopnik. The New Yorker, January 20, 2025.
