A Thousand and One Sleepless Nights
By PATRICIA MORRISROE
NYT
All-Nighters is an exploration of insomnia, sleep and the nocturnal life.
In Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Now I Lay Me,” Nick Adams, the writer’s alter ego, stays up at night listening to the silk worms feeding on mulberry leaves outside his army tent in Italy. During World War I, Hemingway had himself developed insomnia so severe that he was afraid to go to bed with the lights out. And he struggled with sleeplessness the whole rest of his life, although this issue was often hard to separate from his other ailments — including severe depression, chronic alcoholism and diabetes. “I myself did not want to sleep,” he writes, “because I had been living for a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my soul would go out of my body.”
When someone says “I don’t sleep,” what exactly do they mean?
Sleep and death have long been intertwined, with the ancient Greeks creating a colorful genealogy to explain it. Nyx, the goddess of the night, gave birth to twin boys: Hypnos (sleep) and Thanatos (death). Hypnos fathered Morpheus, the god of dreams, who lived surrounded by opium poppies, the giver of dreams. While there would be no Morpheus without Hypnos, the Greeks weren’t very interested in sleep per se, but in its magical offspring: dreams. They made pilgrimages to special “dream temples,” where, after offering sacrifices and bathing in sacred waters, a healing deity would appear to them in sleep, curing whatever troubled them. The Chinese believed in two different souls — p’o and hun — that represented the physical and spiritual worlds. The hun, which could separate from the body during sleep, often visited the land of the dead, where it brought back news of deceased ancestors. According to Robert L. Van de Castle, in his book “Our Dreaming Mind,” if the soul failed to return to the body before the dreamer woke up, “dreadful consequences would follow.”
At the turn of the 19th century, insomnia was depicted as a horrible torture that often led to suicide. An 1888 article in The Washington Post explained that “it is a well known fact that loss of sleep, carried to [sic] far, will produce insanity.” It was believed that something called the “nerve fluid” was produced at night, and if one didn’t get a sufficient quantity of it, the nerves would become “abnormally sensitive and irritable — almost as if they were bare” — and the victim would go crazy.
(More here.)
NYT
All-Nighters is an exploration of insomnia, sleep and the nocturnal life.
In Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Now I Lay Me,” Nick Adams, the writer’s alter ego, stays up at night listening to the silk worms feeding on mulberry leaves outside his army tent in Italy. During World War I, Hemingway had himself developed insomnia so severe that he was afraid to go to bed with the lights out. And he struggled with sleeplessness the whole rest of his life, although this issue was often hard to separate from his other ailments — including severe depression, chronic alcoholism and diabetes. “I myself did not want to sleep,” he writes, “because I had been living for a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my soul would go out of my body.”
When someone says “I don’t sleep,” what exactly do they mean?
Sleep and death have long been intertwined, with the ancient Greeks creating a colorful genealogy to explain it. Nyx, the goddess of the night, gave birth to twin boys: Hypnos (sleep) and Thanatos (death). Hypnos fathered Morpheus, the god of dreams, who lived surrounded by opium poppies, the giver of dreams. While there would be no Morpheus without Hypnos, the Greeks weren’t very interested in sleep per se, but in its magical offspring: dreams. They made pilgrimages to special “dream temples,” where, after offering sacrifices and bathing in sacred waters, a healing deity would appear to them in sleep, curing whatever troubled them. The Chinese believed in two different souls — p’o and hun — that represented the physical and spiritual worlds. The hun, which could separate from the body during sleep, often visited the land of the dead, where it brought back news of deceased ancestors. According to Robert L. Van de Castle, in his book “Our Dreaming Mind,” if the soul failed to return to the body before the dreamer woke up, “dreadful consequences would follow.”
At the turn of the 19th century, insomnia was depicted as a horrible torture that often led to suicide. An 1888 article in The Washington Post explained that “it is a well known fact that loss of sleep, carried to [sic] far, will produce insanity.” It was believed that something called the “nerve fluid” was produced at night, and if one didn’t get a sufficient quantity of it, the nerves would become “abnormally sensitive and irritable — almost as if they were bare” — and the victim would go crazy.
(More here.)
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