Snooze

by Michael McGirr

  On the night of October 22, 1879, he got a bulb to burn for over twelve hours; within days, he had one that burned for one hundred hours. On December 28, Joel Cook, a reporter for the Times of London, which took the story to the other side of the Atlantic, wrote with amazement, “I ate my supper and wrote the draught of this telegram by Edison’s light Saturday night.” It would not be long before eating by candlelight became something special. By Christmas, the world was beating a path to the magical kingdom of Menlo Park. Over the next few years, Edison would move heaven, earth, and New York City to create a commercial network for electric light. Now the whole world could stay up late.

  Like Macbeth, Edison had murdered sleep. He was part of a gang of assassins who have been at work since light divided night from day.

  Of course, we sleep because we are creatures. But trying to understand what sleep is all about has been one of the engines that has shaped our culture.

  One of the stories that gave birth to western culture is Homer’s Odyssey, a work that continues to provide fodder for comic strips and popular culture almost three thousand years after it started to take shape—somewhat longer than the average life expectancy of books these days. Though Homer’s identity is lost in the shades of time (it’s possible that Homer is an amalgam of different people who contributed to an oral tradition), legend has long held that the visionary Homer who sang The Odyssey into life was blind. That may be why The Odyssey whispers in the dark.

  At its root, The Odyssey is a book about getting home to bed. The hero, Odysseus, leaves the rocky island of Ithaca, where he is king, and goes off to fight the Trojan war. He makes an appearance in Homer’s prequel, The Iliad, where he has the clever idea of using a wooden horse to smuggle soldiers into the besieged city of Troy. Once the war is won, Odysseus has to get back home—and this is the plot of The Odyssey.

  It takes him quite a while to find his way home; by the time he gets back to Ithaca, he has been away for twenty years. His queen, Penelope, has been waiting patiently all that time, beset by a pack of sleazy suitors who have wanted her to agree that her husband is dead and team up with one of them, a prospect she doesn’t relish. Like Odysseus, Penelope is in search of rest. For three of the years Odysseus is away, she uses her insomnia to keep the suitors at bay, telling them that she can’t possibly marry until she has completed the shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes, which she works on every day, crafting a “great and growing web.” At night, she stays awake, undoing “by the light of torches” the work she has done on the shroud that day, in order to give herself an excuse for the work continuing the next day. (Perhaps even more effective than telling would-be suitors she was shampooing her hair.)

  Penelope is more faithful than Odysseus, who, along the way, has been held for seven years by the nymph Calypso, who has forced him to have sex with her. The divine Circe also requires sex from Odysseus against his will and only lets him go on condition he visits the underworld, where he encounters his dead mother; it must have been a blow to Circe’s self-esteem that he accepted such terms. There is no account of Penelope being told these parts of the big adventure, and whoever Homer really was, it’s not hard to see a male hand at work in these fantasies. Being forced into sex by a goddess is at the risky end of the spectrum of excuses for being home late.

  Odysseus survives endless experiences, some of which—like the story of how he tricked the one-eyed Cyclops, Polyphemus—are familiar even to children whose classical education depends on McDonald’s placemats. Eventually the king does turn up in Ithaca again, dressed in rags and looking like a beggar. Only his dog, Argos, recognizes him. Twenty years is long enough for a human but even longer for a dog. Argos used to be a fine hunting hound but is now a bag of bones. When he sees his master back home, he thumps his tale in anticipation. Sadly, the excitement is too much and the old pooch drops dead.

  Odysseus will eventually clean out the suitors and be reunited with Penelope just in the nick of time. But the way the story is told, the point to which Odysseus returns is not his island, nor his throne nor his banquet hall nor his wealth nor his servants nor even his wife, although Penelope and Odysseus do have nice welcome-home sex. The point toward which Odysseus has been traveling through storm, disaster, bloodshed, and confusion has been his bed. When Penelope requires positive proof that this stranger is her husband, she asks, within Odysseus’s earshot, for their bed to be shifted. Only Odysseus would know that the request is impossible. He gets angry and says that of course their bed can’t be moved. The reason for this is that he himself carved it in situ from the stump of an old olive tree whose trunk had taken centuries to reach the width of a pillar, and he built the walls of their chamber around it. Clearly, Odysseus had never wanted his wife to waste time mucking round with the furniture.

  The bed has roots deep in the earth. This is an evocative image, one which gives bedrock a literal meaning. Odysseus’s bed is part and parcel of the rocky soil on which he was born. The entire world of his travels is anchored to it.

  A quick flick through a paperback version of The Odyssey soon shows how carefully the theme of sleep is incorporated into the bones and sinews of the poem.

  Odysseus’s friend and guide among the gods, Athena, is the bringer of sleep. Odysseus gets into bother for sleeping in the wrong place, such as when he nods off within site of Ithaca itself but before his work is done—that is, without having made landfall. His sailors take the opportunity to look at his loot and untie the bag he has been given, which contains the four winds. The ship is blown back to square one and Odysseus must endure yet more suffering. But when the right moment comes and Odysseus does make final landfall, he immediately falls into a deep, delicious sleep on the sand, undisturbed by the memory of what he has been through.

  Nevertheless, Odysseus’s moral stamina is seen in his ability to forego false luxury, to refuse beds that are not his rightful resting place. For example, on return to Ithaca he first seeks shelter from Eumaeus, an old swineherd who has remained loyal throughout the king’s absence. Eumaeus doesn’t know who the hell this stranger is but, a model of hospitality, still offers him his own bed. Odysseus refuses and sleeps outside. Along the way, there are many accounts of Odysseus finding sleep and often these are a foretaste of his ultimate homecoming. Hospitality, kindness to travelers, and offering refuge are the timbers from which Homer built The Odyssey, a ship that is anchored to the wanderer’s bed.

  The point of The Odyssey is finding rest. It is curious that western storytelling, a treasure trove of restlessness, a vast anthology of itchy feet, begins with a tale whose substance is so different. Of course, there is a lot of seepage between the ideas of finding rest and death. But the hero of The Odyssey is a guy who has cheated death. He has come home not to die but to sleep. He has come home to bed.

  Once upon a time, before my wife, Jenny, and I got married and had our three children, I was a Catholic priest. On one occasion, I fell asleep during one of my own sermons, an accomplishment that is easier than it sounds.

  I said Mass on Sunday evenings in a parish full of wonderful young families. I thought I was doing everyone a favor by keeping the sermon short, a discipline I achieved by sticking to topics I knew something about. Generally, my wisdom had petered out by the end of the third minute.

  One day, after the service, a mother of three young boys took me to task for my brevity. The woman’s problem with me was practical. She put good money on the collection and wanted better value. Mass was her only chance on the weekend to have a rest, and by late Sunday afternoon, she was totally exhausted and facing the weekly prospect of getting the lunches cut, the boys to school, and herself to work the following morning. The sermon was her only chance for a bit of a nap. Would I mind stretching it out a bit longer? She’d be grateful if I could. She needed the rest. I said I would do what I could.

  The great Irish satirist and author of Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift, was annoyed by people who fell asleep in church. He was an eminent churchma
n who made a career out of turning up his nose and being appalled. Swift divided the world into those who stayed home on Sunday to sleep there and those who went to church and slept there. He wrote a diatribe called On Sleeping in Church. It’s hard to imagine the topic raising a sweat these days. Swift wrote,

  Of all misbehavior, none is comparable to those who come here to sleep. Opium is not so stupefying to many persons as an afternoon sermon. Perpetual custom hath so brought it about that the words of whatever preacher become only a sort of uniform sound at a distance, than which nothing is more effectual to lull the senses.

  Swift had a point. I grew up hearing a story about a politician who used to come to our church. One time, he fell asleep during the service and began snoring loudly. His wife was embarrassed and dug him in the ribs to wake him up. Assuming he must have been sitting in the chamber, he immediately called out, “Hear! Hear!” The congregation was distracted because the priest had just begun to wonder aloud what words Jesus might have said to the deaf girl in that day’s gospel reading— and “Hear! Hear!” was not a bad suggestion. The problem was that the priest was not open to suggestions; all the questions in our church were rhetorical.

  Sermons are not the only cause of untimely sleep. Speeches, meetings, PowerPoint presentations, and children’s ballet concerts can all have the same effect. The Internet has plenty of images of people who have fallen asleep at awkward moments, including a judge who dozed off during sensitive testimony in a trial for a violent crime. One poor anchorman fell asleep at his desk while on air. This may not mean it was a quiet news day. It could mean the opposite—that he was working too many hours, trying to keep up with the endless flow of wisdom that comes from the mouths of politicians and celebrities.

  We inhabit a culture that keeps people on the brink of falling asleep and yet inhibits them from doing it properly. Swift wasn’t really concerned just about church. He was concerned about people who were too exhausted by what was happening on the surface of the world to keep an eye on its foundations.

  Heaven knows what Jonathan Swift would have thought when I nodded off during the sermon I was delivering myself. This may be divulging a trade secret, but once a sermon gets beyond a couple of minutes, it reaches a delicate point at which the preacher has no idea what he or she is going to say next. In the Jesuit tradition of which I was a part, this point normally came much closer to the start of the sermon than the end. The Jesuit custom was to keep the sermon ticking until something popped into your head, a practice known as “relying on the spirit.” It was a risky way of going about things, especially when the most likely thing to pop into your head was either what you’d already said or what you’d soon wish you’d never said. Another strategy when stuck for an idea was to pause briefly and invite the congregation in a reassuring tone to reflect on what you had just been saying. This bought a bit of time to come up with something else. It was on one such occasion that, with my hands joined devoutly on the lectern, my head started to nod. My eyes closed. My breathing slowed and deepened. It was only when I bumped into the microphone that I woke myself up and noticed that the congregation was giggling. I remember thinking that I must have said something funny and wondered what it was.

  (This wasn’t the first time that I had amused a congregation when I thought I was being serious. Soon after I was ordained, I was asked to preside at a service on Good Friday, the day Christians ponder the death of Jesus on the cross, hardly the happiest moment in human history. I wanted to make the point that the message of Jesus was hard to reduce to a few choice slogans. Unfortunately, what I said was that Jesus was a hard man to nail down.)

  At least now I had a bit more experience under my belt: it appeared that I could give a sermon in my sleep.

  The incident was part of a bigger picture. I wasn’t just falling asleep during my own sermons; I was falling asleep anywhere and everywhere. I would go to bed early, get up as late as possible, and yet, by ten o’clock in the morning, there was nothing I wanted more than to go back to bed. After lunch, I’d crawl under my desk at work and grab some shut-eye. It was getting harder and harder to stay awake. At the same time, my snoring was getting worse and worse. I could make a monastery sound like a factory. I was like the Giant in Jack and the Beanstalk who rocked the entire castle with his snoring.

  I underwent my first sleep study in January 1997 at the age of thirty-six. The cheerful technicians stuck a suite of electrodes to my scalp, chest, and legs and put a band around my chest to measure my breathing. They also put a microphone somewhere to record my snoring. (This, I presumed, was how they made sound effects for disaster movies.) The electrodes were all connected to an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine, which traces brainwaves, drawing a picture of what the brain is doing during sleep; this computer was kept outside in a command booth. Then, trussed up like a turkey at Thanksgiving, I was asked to get as good a night’s sleep as possible. I knew at once that this was a ridiculous request. I wasn’t going to sleep a wink. Nobody had advised me to bring my teddy bear.

  When I got the results, I discovered it had taken me nine minutes to fall asleep, an interval known as sleep latency. Even in the comfort of your own bed, if you fall asleep in less than ten minutes it’s an indication of sleep deprivation.

  There were more results as well. The following morning the technicians came in with big smiles and said that they had big news to tell me.

  “Oh,” I asked warily. “What’s that?”

  “We can’t tell you.”

  “How come?”

  “You have to see the doctor in a couple of weeks.”

  “The suspense will kill me.”

  It wasn’t suspense that was going to kill me. It was sleep, or at least what was happening in my sleep. When I turned up for my appointment with the doctor early on the day after a public holiday, his waiting room was packed, suggesting I was not the only person in the world with problems. Meeting the doctor, John, was one of those experiences—a bit like what I imagine it is to discover that your partner has been having an affair for years—when you realize that you have known very little about a major part of your own life. John produced an impressive little pile of printouts, technically known as a polysomnogram, that were generated during my night in the sleep lab. He started circling parts of them with a magnificent black Mont Blanc fountain pen that I began to covet.

  “How do you think you slept in the lab?” he asked.

  “All things considered, not too bad,” I replied.

  “Were you aware of waking in the night?”

  “No, I reckon I slept right through.”

  “Undisturbed?”

  “Totally undisturbed.”

  He was writing all this down with his Mont Blanc. He then put the cap on the pen with a small flourish, indicating it was time for him to stop listening and start speaking.

  “Actually,” he said, “you woke up 287 times.”

  I found this hard to believe. Perhaps he’d mixed up my results with those of a young mother somewhere. The Mont Blanc reappeared and circled the key statistic, to impress upon me that 287 was a very big number and not to be joked about. I noticed the pen had a broad nib, the type that requires skill to wield without making a mess, altogether a very nice writing instrument. I wished we could talk about that.

  “You slept for a total of five hours and forty-nine minutes. This means you were waking up on average forty-nine times an hour or, in other words, almost every minute.”

  “What about the snoring?”

  “This is related to the waking. I’ll explain how that works in a minute. We were recording you at well over eighty decibels, which is the same as traffic noise or shouting. Normal conversation is sixty decibels; hearing damage starts at ninety decibels. You weren’t far short of that. It was quite a racket, I believe.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yes, ‘wow’ indeed.”

  There were some important things I needed to understand. The 287 interruptions to my sleep were called apneas
, a word of Greek origin that means the cessation of breathing, and I had a condition called obstructive sleep apnea, which, in those days, was not well known. That situation has changed dramatically in recent years, as the ailment has reached epidemic proportions in well-fed countries. Sleep apnea is a condition that more commonly afflicts men, although their partners also suffer. It does affect women themselves as well, although it is one of the few maladies for which men are more likely to go looking for help, usually with considerable urging from home. Dr. Christopher Worsnop, a sleep physician, explains that the classic interview with a couple goes like this:

  Doctor: “Do you snore?”

  Man: “She says that I do.”

  Doctor: “Does she snore?”

  Man: “She says that she doesn’t.”

  Being overweight is a significant risk factor. As a luggage handler once said, I had a bad case.

  Sleep apnea is in large measure the result of a design fault in the upper airway. The human throat is a floppy tube, something that distinguishes us from all other species, which have rigid throats, a situation that is thought to have come about because of the human need to speak. While you are asleep, your tongue and soft palate, which is the fleshy part at the top rear of your mouth, relax and your throat collapses. Your uvula, which is the bit that hangs over your tongue like a stalactite and which you can see when you gargle, also flops in the way, as do your tonsils. As a result of so much slack behavior behind your teeth, the passage of air to your lungs may be blocked, especially if you’ve had a bit of alcohol or if your throat is narrow. Why might your throat be narrow? Perhaps you’re a bit chubby: the body stores fat in visible places and also invisible ones such as the walls of the throat. On the other hand, it might just be a matter of luck. People with jutting jaws are more likely to have open throats and hence be less susceptible to snoring and sleep apnea. Dr. Worsnop points out that superheroes such as Superman and Batman are often drawn with strong jutting jaws, a feature that, since the time we lived in caves, has been seen as attractive to women. I personally think the reason women may be attracted to jutting jaws may have nothing to do with jutting biceps or jutting anything else; it simply makes it less likely that they will have to put up with snoring.