%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
 |    Not for the faint of art. |
| One way to fall asleep, presumably, is to read a long, boring, technical article. Hopefully, this one from aeon doesn't qualify. Falling for sleep  When wakefulness is seen as the main event, no wonder so many have trouble sleeping. Can we rekindle the joy of slumber? Well, those of us with a tendency toward sleep paralysis might not get much "joy of slumber," but, soul-chewing demon aside, I do like my sleep. The usual notes for context here: The article is from 2016, but the passing of nearly a decade hasn't changed the human need for sleep; also, it's a not-so-stealth ad for a book published in 2014, which I can't be arsed to find out if it's still available. In antiquity sleep was personified, transcendent, even romantic. I'm going to put $100 on the Industrial Revolution being the primary societal impetus for changing that. Both Nyx and Hypnos had personality. Nyx was beautiful, shadowy and formidable – the only goddess Zeus ever feared. He certainly had no fear of his wife, Hera, which had to have royally pissed her off. But Hypnos was also gentle and benevolent, an androgynous mamma’s boy. Of all the sentences in the article, that one stands out as the one most likely to be rephrased today. But I'm not here to discuss gender theory today. Occupying a liminal zone between sleep and waking, he often seemed a bit dreamy. You can tell the author is an academic from his use of the word "liminal." Today, mother and son have been largely forgotten. Nyx has been in exile for well over a century as our night sky is eroded by light pollution. And Hypnos is remembered mainly by his namesakes, hypnosis and, surely to his chagrin, hypnotics. We also have the adjectives hypnagogic and hypnopompic, but those are relatively recent descriptions of the pre- and post-sleep states, respectively. You know, the liminal zones.Sleep has been transformed from a deeply personal experience to a physiological process; from the mythical to the medical; and from the romantic to the marketable. I mean, what hasn't? Hell, even love is a commodity now. Despite decades of innovative sleep research, escalating numbers of new sleep specialists and clinics, and an explosion of media attention and public health education initiatives, the epidemic of insufficient sleep and insomnia appears to be getting worse. Well, yeah. Those specialists and clinics and whatnot need to continue to make money, and they won't if we actually fixed sleep. See also: diet promoters. People with insomnia also suffer immensely by night. Beyond obvious frustrations around their thwarted efforts, and growing anxieties about the consequences of ongoing poor sleep, many also experience loneliness, shame and hopelessness. One hopes the correlation/causation relationship of those things is supported in the science. Because it seems to me it could go either way. The Industrial Revolution radically transformed our perception of sleep from a gracious, transcendent experience to a mechanistic, biomedical process. I'll take my $100 now, thanks. Industrialisation encroached on night and sleep. While the skies of antiquity were populated with a wild pantheon of gods and goddesses, the heavens today are crowded with flying machines, including tens of thousands of aircraft and satellites. Yeah, well, pros and cons, you know? It's great to make up stories, but ascribing natural phenomena to gods or a God is one thing it's good to have (mostly) changed. During the height of industrialisation, sleep was debased as an enemy of civilisation. Thomas Edison led a popular charge to dominate and even eliminate sleep. Sure, just think of how much more productive you could be for your overlords if you could work instead of sleep! And today, like a pet, sleep is fenced in, caged or corralled. We constrict sleep with delayed bedtimes and advanced rising times policed by a mechanistic alarm clock. Would we consider setting an alarm to truncate other natural human experiences? Imagine setting an alarm to limit time spent enjoying a meal or making love. Well, to be fair, we don't set alarms for those things because we're (usually) awake for them and can look at a clock to know when it's time to move on to the next thing on the to-do list. (Also, lots of people set alarms as reminders, especially now that it's easy to do so with smartphones.) We compulsively tweak our sleep with an endless stream of expert tips from countless books, articles and blogs. When these patchwork fixes fail, which they inevitably do, we are vulnerable to the seduction of direct-to-consumer advertising for sleeping pills. And this is where I note I'm not part of this "we" bullshit. We are mired in a pre-Copernican-like, wake-centric era regarding consciousness. We presume waking to be the centre of the universe of consciousness, and we relegate sleeping and dreaming to secondary, subservient positions. This bit, though, I'll admit to being guilty of from time to time. There's a lot more at the link, and it continues to switch between the Nyx/Hypnos metaphor and modern science. I'm not ragging on that; as I said, the stories we tell ourselves are important. Hell, one of the techniques I use to help me fall asleep is to tell myself a story (which I'll never write). But a couple of things occurred to me upon reading the article, things that might help shift perspective: First, I've seen medical advice suggesting "7-9 hours of sleep each night." I'll give the association with night and sleep a pass, since most of us do the one during the other, though exceptions like night owls and night-shift workers should be acknowledged. But what if we rephrased that? Instead, think of it like the advice about calories or alcohol: "As humans, we should not be awake for more than 15-17 hours a day." This, I think, puts the emphasis back on just how bad for us being awake can be, and how sleep is restorative. There's nothing scientific about that. I'm really saying the same thing in a different way, kind of like glass-half-full or glass-half-empty. But as with that metaphor, the perspective makes all the difference. Incidentally, the 2-hour slop in there is, as I understand it, to account for a variation in human sleep needs. Personally, I feel better being able to go to sleep when I'm tired and wake up when I'm no longer tired, a luxury I can usually afford. No fixed schedule. (I do have sleep apnea, so I see a sleep doc every year who asks me what time I go to bed and wake up and whatever, and my answer doesn't fit into her little tick boxes that give the insurance company a reason to continue to cover my CPAP.) Point is, with that method, even accounting for the occasional drinking binge, I usually get 8 hours of sleep a day. Okay, it's normally in two separate sessions, but this entry isn't about being biphasic. Second, I've always had a problem with the expression "beauty sleep." But until I read this essay, I never could really articulate why. I'm still not sure I can, but I'll give it a shot: I see it as kind of sarcastic, like the only reason someone sleeps is to keep one's skin from getting wrinkly or falling off or whatever. It dismisses the vast importance of sleep in our daily lives, and reduces it to mere vanity. Like if we wanted to, if we weren't worried about getting saggy eyelids or acne or some other superficial blemish, we could just... not sleep, and everything else would be just peachy. So, no. It's just sleep. But it's also not "just" anything. It's as much a part of who we are as language, sex, or getting in arguments online. Probably even moreso, considering some people are nonverbal, asexual, or not online; but, as far as I know, without exception, everyone sleeps. Which makes the controversy and neuroticism surrounding it all the worse. |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
