Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

by Ben Holden

  For Salome, George and Ione –

  my dreams-come-true.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Seize the Night

  1. Eventide

  2. Once Upon a Time

  3. Hook, Line and Sinker

  4. The Dead Spot

  5. Be Not Afeard

  6. Tread Softly

  7. Ashore

  Afterword by Diana Athill

  Notes and Illuminations

  Author Biographies

  Further Reading

  About Readathon

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Copyrights and Credits

  Introduction

  SEIZE THE NIGHT

  The house was quiet and the world was calm.

  The reader became the book; and summer night

  Was like the conscious being of the book.

  The house was quiet and the world was calm.

  Wallace Stevens

  While I sleep I have no fear, nor hope, nor trouble, nor glory. God bless the inventor of sleep, the cloak that covers all man’s thoughts, the food that cures all hunger, the water that quenches all thirst, the fire that warms the cold, the cold that cools the heart; the common coin, in short, that can purchase all things, the balancing weight that levels the shepherd with the king, and the simple with the wise.

  Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

  Each evening, before the lights are turned out but after the blind is drawn, I read my young children a story. The long day done, they quieten down and listen to me. They sometimes hang on my every word, if it is an especially good tale, interrupting me only to ask valid and wide-eyed questions, such as, ‘In real life, what does that mean?’

  Little do they know that the true joy of our routine is mine. I love curling the words out for them, my inner troubadour piping up, as I too – the writer’s mouthpiece – grow absorbed in the stories. Sometimes I have been known to make one up myself for them, my brain rushing to and fro to find the right twists and turns.

  More often than not, though, we will read a classic. Many of them I recall from my own childhood. Old favourites that I have dusted off – Lear, Wilde, Barrie, Dahl and the like – remember themselves to me, unheard from since I was a boy. Characters will jump out from behind corners of the page, smilingly, exclaiming shared memories. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, sure, but this is something altogether more precious. I commune with my own childhood and parts of myself long forgotten.

  I am reminded of how my own mother or father would read to me. They would make sure that Micky, my favourite bear, to whom my daughter is now guardian, was by my side. Having tucked me in and bid me good night, they would leave the night light on at my request, its soft glow a further blanket, the sepia shadows it cast on my walls benign, and – like Peter Pan – still lingering in my mind today.

  Wafts of adult activity would then slip up the banister to my bedroom. The routine complete, bedtime story told and mind taken off things, the hum of the grown-up world would lull me into innocent sleep.

  Similarly, my twin son and daughter now are lolled into a true sense of security by my reading them a story. Nocturnes complete, the light goes out and the glow-in-the-dark solar system on their ceiling – astrological stickers bought from the Science Museum and positioned by me while precariously atop a ladder – twinkles their very own night sky of little stars and planets. On their cupboard doors, fluorescent sheep – one black – vault over one other.

  Before they fall asleep, the adult activity that my own children might hear this evening is likely to be the television. A faint white noise of Mum and Dad’s viewing entertainment will seep past the ajar door and serve as a last subliminal, distorted lullaby.

  They won’t see me eat ravenously and then slump, the workday done, in front of something good on TV, often a film. I’ll check my social media, digits fidgeting over the bright touchscreen of my smartphone, while the show unfolds on our big television screen. I might then attend to some final work-bound emails on my laptop.

  My wife and I will retire to bed, teeth brushed, and both reach if not for each other, then for a book, magazine or – increasingly – our phone or tablet, yet again, before turning off our bedside lamps.

  I will try to read something in print form: a chapter of a novel, say, a short story, or a long-form article. Sometimes, though, a glowing device of some sort will be the last thing I see. When my eyes weaken, I know the time has come to succumb to night and sleep.

  I go out, mostly, as fast as the light itself.

  I have long valued sleep. It takes up a third of my life. Should I reach sixty, approximately six years will have been spent dreaming vividly.

  It is true that people do need different amounts of sleep. We each have our own slumber number, just as we have different chronotypes (which refers to the fact that some of us are night owls, while others are morning larks), yet it is also widely acknowledged that we adults generally need seven to nine hours a night. Humans are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum for animals’ sleep requirements, which, apparently, more or less comes down to size: the bigger the creature, the less shut-eye needed. We certainly sleep more than horses, who average two hours, but less than the two-toed sloth (twenty hours). Grown-ups need to sleep at different times from teenagers, whose body clocks slip later during adolescence. I think back to my outrage at my mother drawing open my curtains early on a weekend morning and realize now that my indignation was utterly justified.

  I know from those teenage years of staying out all night what pain the following day can bring. Similarly, I look back on the not-so-distant years when my twins were babies and acknowledge now that I was spending my working hours in something of a foggy fug. I know from night shoots on film productions what shift workers go through and, from long-haul travel, the hazards of jet lag.

  Yet my experiences, however compelling as validation of my long-held instinctive arguments about the importance of sleep, are trivial compared to the cold facts.

  The advent of electric light, a mere hundred or so years ago, allowed us to unhook our body clocks in a dangerous way. Today’s computer technology means we live in a whirr of twenty-four-hour connectivity – rolling news, constant consumerism, ceaseless social media and communications. We can be reached anytime anywhere. Every day, we create some 2.5 trillion bytes of data. Increasingly, in this fast world of bite-size, digital interactions and electronic content, whenever and wherever – circadian rhythms be damned – a way of ‘resetting’ the brain in anticipation of a good night’s sleep seems as important for an adult as a child.

  Don’t take it from me. Ask the scientists. Professor Russell Foster, CBE, of the University of Oxford, a current champion of the value of sleep, says: ‘We are the supremely arrogant species; we feel we can abandon four billion years of evolution and ignore the fact that we have evolved under a light/dark cycle. What we do as a species, perhaps uniquely, is override the clock. And long-term acting against the clock can lead to serious health problems.’

  This body clock is innate. Insects, plants, even bacteria have circadian rhythms. What makes us so special to think that we can ignore them and still thrive? We humans have a built-in clock: it is as tick-tock present as Hook’s crocodile’s, only ours is the size of a pinhead and located not in our belly but deep in the centre of our brain, just north of the pituitary gland within the hypothalamus. It is called the suprachiasmatic nucleus.

  Once we override that tiny pendulum, which sets itself primarily by light and darkness (clocked, in turn, by our eyeballs’ melanopsin receptors), we lay ourselves open to all manner of diseases. Sleep is the great leveller and straddles horizontally whole columns of illness: ca
ncer (particularly breast cancer), diabetes, strokes and cardiovascular disease, to name but a few.

  It is well documented that most major industrial accidents or man-made disasters occur at times when we shouldn’t be awake, let alone at work (from Chernobyl to Exxon Valdez to Challenger). These catastrophes are as alarming as the statistical studies of the proportion of more everyday medical and surgical errors that occur during long shifts for our doctors.

  Of course, is it no accident that sleep deprivation is the first tool in the torturer’s arsenal nor, conversely, should it surprise anybody that problems with sleep are also found to accompany (and contribute to or exacerbate) many psychiatric disorders, from mania, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder to post-traumatic stress disorder.

  US studies recently showed that adults are sleeping on average a whole hour and a half less during weeknights than fifty years ago. So why are we blasé about the fact that we are sleeping less and less? Indeed why do we grown-ups fight sleep? Especially when – as, for instance, Japanese culture markedly celebrates – it is such an innate joy for our species.

  Still not convinced? If the medical statistics won’t persuade you, just listen to your own body. Many of our genes, the very building blocks of life, have a twenty-four-hour pattern of activity that influences so much of who we are and what we do.

  So why do I – as so many grown-ups do – disregard the very balanced, easy and sensible bedtime routine of our childhoods, one that we now, if parents, insist upon repeating for our own offspring?

  I would never dream (not even in a nightmare) of letting my kids play with my phone or tablet before turning the light out; not least because I know that artificial light is a terrible idea for anyone wanting to get a good night’s sleep (especially someone who is still growing). Moreover, the short wavelength bright blue-green light emitted by such devices is the last thing we should be gawping at last thing before sleep, as it has been shown to diminish the amount of melatonin that the body produces, the hormone that is crucial to regulating our sleep cycles.

  The night is time to switch off – devices but also ourselves. Today, there is a delicious rebellion in turning the mobile phone off. Logging off allows for a Cartesian splendour, in which we can lose ourselves, in the knowledge that others will fail to get hold of us. This is not about ‘hell being other people’ but about reconnecting with ourselves rather than Facebook or Twitter: ‘heaven is ourselves’, you might proclaim instead.

  Such rebellions against the digital apparatus of the modern age have led many adults to reconnect by disconnecting. More ‘analogue’ pursuits have recently taken wing: mindfulness and meditation. Many men and women have rediscovered the ways of childhood: in publishing, notably, the bestseller lists have been dominated by adult colouring books and in the UK, as I write, ironic grown-up Ladybird picture-books.

  Let us all grow up then, together, and take our minds off things. Forget the ignorant protestations of people, including prime ministers or presidents, who blag and brag that they ‘get by on little sleep’ or need only a few hours a night. People have variable slumber numbers, sure, but there are also simple, baseline minimums required for good health. Listen to your body when the alarm goes off.

  Let’s instead find a simpler path through this forest to sleep, so that we can see the wood for the trees again come the morning. We might even climb a beanstalk or two on the way! I want to help you restore and consolidate your memory and illuminate a neurological path for your brain to process yesterday’s events and information – so that you can more ably deal with the challenges of the waking, squawking day with a refreshed constitution.

  I suggest we overtly hark back to our childhood routine: bedtime reading of (preferably) a printed book. Let’s tell ourselves a story.

  Storytelling, after all, is the engine that motors our daily existence, as we construct narratives for our lives or, more simply, stop to have a gossip with a mate. The oral tradition, of which the bedtime routine is arguably the most powerful mainstay, has been venerated since the Ancient Greeks. Recent research has proven that various fairy tales, which still dominate a child’s bedtime routine and feature regularly on our grown-up big screens, have their origins in times before even the English, Italian or French languages existed – some harking as far back as the Bronze Age.

  While our minds might drink more deeply words written on a page – and often literary works demand we see the written rhythms rather than hear them – at least one recent medical study shows that people to whom stories are read are more absorbed in the details, and subsequently retain more information about the tales, than if they had read silently to themselves.

  Indeed, those children who benefit from a regular bedtime-story routine are proven to perform better academically.

  Yet this routine represents far more than a means to sharpen the mind or, more simply, to get the little ones to sleep with minimal resistance.

  Bedtime storytelling verges on a primal need.

  In making this claim, I am not only thinking of Carl Honoré, distinguished author of In Praise of Slow, who decided to change radically his entire life upon the cataclysmic realization that he was so pressed for time by workaday concerns that he was scheduling ‘one-minute bedtime stories’ for his young children; or of the mother who lost her daughter and now heartbreakingly craves, above all else, to be able to read her child ‘just one more bedtime story’; or the other mum whose life was cut short by cancer but, before she died, insisted on recording a ghostly bank of bedtime stories for her toddler children; or, finally, of the thousands of imprisoned dads who have managed to develop a loving relationship with their young children despite being absent behind bars, by reading stories to camera (thanks to the brilliant organization, Storybook Dads).

  No, I am also making the point that storytelling doesn’t stop once the lights are turned off. After all, when we dream, and vital neurological faculties are restored and repaired during REM, our brain tells itself a story!

  In these ways, the volume you now hold in your hands is designed to be the perfect bedside book. We have to relinquish control when we get into bed. It’s no accident that we fall asleep, just as we fall in love. This anthology should provide a safety net beneath your brain, like the pillow under your skull, gently cushioning that drop downward.

  (The most important part of any journey is the point of departure. You have made it this far without nodding off, evidently. I’ll keep going then . . .)

  It is an anthology of pieces designed to set your adult mind at ease. The selections – which are eclectic in that they include poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction, short stories and extracts from longer works – are not intended to stimulate anything more than contemplation or meditation. Perhaps they will ignite a sense of delight or wonder at our human faculties through the beauty of poetry or prose, before the light goes out. Some are funny, others rather elegiac and sad. Many of the pieces themselves began life as bedtime stories or are by wildly successful authors who have acknowledged a debt to the oral tradition of storytelling. They are not all about night, sleep or dreams. Yet, of course, just as the day’s events will inform a night’s dreams, they are nocturnes at heart and so many touch upon moonlit states of mind.

  My choosing of pieces may have led to some personal emphases in tone and literary milieu, not always by design. I ask forgiveness if any reader should detect any narrowness in my choices and outlook. To temper this inherent subjectivity, some truly great storytellers and writers – several of whom have written tales for younger and older readers alike or are master practitioners of the short-story form – have generously lent me a hand. These kindly experts have themselves chosen a personal favourite, something that they would recommend to you as the perfect bedtime story or happily have read to them as a last tale before the light goes out.

  We have offered introductions to the poems and short stories and passages herein, to explain the selections. I have tried to explain many of my own selections, b
ut not all. It is not wise to write over the top of everything. Some things simply can’t be explained and others, like the punchline to a good joke, just shouldn’t be.

  As an anthology, this book is intended to be dipped into. You can open it almost anywhere, I hope, and find something to enjoy. There is nothing here that should make you feel on edge or stressed. The gothic imagination is explored: it would be remiss for us not to have anything that at least skims over those darker welled waters of the soul. Honestly, though, the last thing I want to provoke is a nightmare. Indeed, I have spent many of my working hours exploring the gothic recesses of our imaginations, via the development and production of supernatural feature films for Hammer Films, and this anthology is intended as a personal departure from those old haunts.

  Some of the pieces, though brief, will stretch out time (just as we lose such elasticity when we sleep). A drop of great poetry can fill an entire ravine of imagination. Such concentrated, pure depth of thought or emotion elongates time: much as you plonk the book onto the bedside table, turn off the light and, then, as if in the blink of an eye, awaken in the morning, refreshed for a brave new day!

  All that aside, should you choose to read Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups beginning to end, let alone in one sitting, you will discover that I have sought to replicate in these pages the patterns of a night’s sleep. Just as we like to analyse our dreams, I want to try to graft a logical structure onto this diffuse whole. I have attempted, in some instances more wilfully than others, to order my selections as well as those pieces chosen by contributors, in mimicry of the course of a night’s sleep (albeit a single, rather potted cycle of sleep, whereas in fact our brains run several such circuits during the course of a night).

  The first pieces echo evening and the close of day.

  Then, we will tell ourselves a story, and explore bedtime as a routine. A number of more traditional bedtime-story archetypes are showcased. I urge you to read some of them (and anything else in the book that takes your fancy) aloud to your bedfellow, if you have one.