Snooze
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The one piece of advice we heard over and over was to never sleep in the same bed as the kids. And I can promise that we did what they said. We may have been in the same bed but we never slept a wink.
Aristotle is one of those people who had an opinion on absolutely everything, including sleep. He thought that the hour leading up to midnight was a time of special calm, especially the minute before. This was because earthquakes were most likely to strike at midnight; failing that they would strike at midday. His meticulous observations of the natural world often led him to advance with supreme confidence toward some strange conclusions. He likened the earth to a living body and earthquakes to the exhalation of wind. So a seismic tremor was a bit like someone farting in the middle of the night.
Aristotle is seldom on anyone’s list of favorite writers. His books have a hard edge to them: he was a collector of data, and in so far as he wanted to make a big picture of life, the universe, and everything, it was going to be made out of this raw material. He was an intellectual bower bird, and his philosophy was built like a nest, twig by twig, scrap by scrap. Aristotle covered a vast field, but in any area, from logic to biology, from ethics to cosmology, his work is meticulous but generally devoid of human warmth or storytelling. He engages the issue not the reader. It is curious that Aristotle chose the line of work he did because he didn’t suffer fools gladly. Philosophy is the wisdom of suffering fools.
Perhaps Aristotle’s turn of mind owes something to the fact that his father was a doctor in an age, the 4th century before Christ, when the most helpful thing doctors could do was tell you what they saw. So the boy grew up with an appreciation of the power of observation. For Aristotle, the whole natural world was a book of symptoms. If you watched them closely enough, eventually you’d be able to describe something like a general condition.
Just as significant in turning Aristotle into Aristotle was the fact that he went to a good school. The Academy was an institution that is said to have started in an olive grove, a place of rest, once sacred to the goddess Athena. Athena was the girl who steered Odysseus back to his bed.
The Academy was founded by Plato, and by the time Aristotle arrived there from Macedonia at the age of seventeen (around 367 BC), it had been going for about twenty years. The Academy has since given its name to a dizzying number of places that are nothing like it, least of all the one that hands out awards to badly dressed actors with lots of people to thank. The original Academy didn’t have a syllabus, a prospectus, an enrollment policy, or a policy on the availability of nuts and chips at the tuckshop. It didn’t have resources, facilities, mission statements, values documents, or projected outcomes. Nor, despite popular belief, did it make students think. On the contrary, it allowed them to think. There’s a difference. The Academy didn’t want to change the world, only to understand it. As a result, it changed the world.
Aristotle studied under Plato until the latter died in the middle of the century. Plato’s output diminished after his death, which was rare in those days. It was not the case, for example, for Plato’s own teacher, Socrates, who, thanks to Plato and his dialogues, did some of his best work posthumously. Once Plato was dead, Aristotle then spent the rest of his life trying not to be Plato. He returned to Macedonia but later came back to Athens and started his own school, called the Lyceum. The Lyceum also began in a garden and students did their philosophy by walking around, thus coming to be known as the Peripatetics. They preferred a restless philosophy, one of inquiry rather than contemplation.
Plato and Aristotle have come to be seen as opposites, bookends on the shelf of Western thinking. And they had different ideas about sleep.
It is not surprising that Aristotle should write a treatise on sleep. Sleep has always been widely practiced in philosophical circles. When I was at university, tutorials in philosophy were always held after lunch, when the circadian rhythms of the body tend naturally to dip toward sleep. The cultural practice of the siesta originates less in a need to escape hot weather and more in a willingness to honor what the body wants to do anyway. I discovered a long-held belief among undergraduates that the purpose of philosophy was to create rest, not disturb it. Students soon learned that the most comfortable way to sleep in an upright chair is with your hand placed on your brow like a visor, keeping the light out of your eyes and at the same time making it hard for others to know if they are open or closed. Almost as effective is the practice of resting your elbow on your knee and then putting your chin on your hand, furrowing your brow in a parody of concentration. This is the posture of Rodin’s famous thinker, a statue that, when you look twice, appears to be an image of a man engaged in the futile struggle of humanity in the face of existential confusion—that is, the struggle to stay awake after lunch. With a bit of practice, you can be fast asleep but still look like you are deep in thought, which may indeed be the case. The mind can be more active asleep than awake. And more creative, too.
When I was studying Philosophy 101, one of my fellow students spent the entire course asleep. He always arrived before the rest of us and remained behind when we left, so some of us wondered if he lived in the room that had been occupied by our teacher, a near contemporary of Aristotle, since ancient times. The student seemed so comfortable that, at the start of the year, some of us had thought he might be the tutor.
This impression was underlined by the fact that Ann, the real tutor, a woman of some standing in the world of philosophy, also spent the whole year fighting sleep. She was a pacifist. So she didn’t fight very hard. In her case, however, sleep was a pedagogical technique. She had found that the best way to keep a class on its toes was to doze off yourself.
While the professor slumbered fitfully, the rest of us talked about anything and everything, whether or not it was relevant to the lecture we had heard before lunch. That’s the beauty of philosophy. There’s nothing that’s not on the course. Philosophy is rather like French cooking. It requires a lot of raw material. In my experience, French cooking involves a whole morning of shopping. Tired and cranky, you get home with a carload of food and then spend a long afternoon in the kitchen. After a ten-hour day and a trolley load of groceries, all you end up with is half a cup of gravy.
Our professor believed that first-year tutorials were mainly the shopping and chopping part of the exercise. She slept while all the great issues of life flew around her ears in a frenzy of adolescent self-importance. She’d heard it all before, many times, especially the learned opinions about sex delivered by students new to the game. About the third week of the term, she did intervene to ask if someone could lend her some coins for the parking meter. Then, at the end of the course, she announced that those of who came back next year would be ready to start real philosophy. The recidivists discovered that that was when the arduous work of distillation began. Philosophy goes through a lot of junk in the search for an essence. But you need the junk to start with.
Only one person in our tutorial group failed to speak all year. He just slept. He didn’t even stir when one of the young women in the room, an advocate for “reading culture,” “reading society,” “reading movies,” “reading fashion”—reading, it would seem, everything except books— posed the question of whether or not he really existed. To be heckled by a girl on the grounds of nonexistence would have excited a reaction from most males. But not this guy. He was an ideological sleeper, and nothing was going to budge him from his position.
Some of us were a little surprised when the gentleman in question topped the year. Perhaps he had the only mind that had remained unsullied by use; perhaps he had discovered sooner than most that the best philosophy is generous with thought but mean with words. Meanwhile, the young woman who wondered if he existed or not had gone out of her way to get proof one way or the other. She was pregnant by him by the time the results were published. She told her friends that the only way to get him to wake was to sleep with him. She went on to write a thesis in praise of Platonic relationships.
Aristotle w
as a great one for counting stars, Plato for looking beyond them. If Plato said one thing about sleep, Aristotle was bound to say the opposite. It’s not that sleep was the biggest problem either of them encountered. But sleep is one of those issues in the history of philosophy, perhaps because it is so commonplace, that helps brings basic attitudes into focus. People reveal a lot of themselves when they start talking about sleep and even more when they tell you why they can’t sleep.
Take Descartes and Hume for example, often seen as sitting in opposite corners of the boxing ring of the history of philosophy. This may not be the kindest analogy: philosophers fight without gloves. René Descartes was a man of profound doubts, which he expressed as certainties. Meanwhile, the Scot David Hume (who wrote in the 1700s) was a man of certainties that he expressed as doubts.
Descartes didn’t like getting out of bed in the morning, seldom did so before midday, and would, in the end, believe that the insistence of his patroness, the Queen of Sweden, to see him one morning at 5:00 AM gave him the cold that cost him his life. Whenever Descartes did drag himself out of bed, he wondered if he was still asleep. His famous dictum—“I think, therefore I am”—arose in answer to the conundrum “How do I know that I am awake right now and not dreaming all this?” His response was that famous use of the vertical pronoun: if there is an I in the driver’s seat, then you are awake and conscious. Descartes was using the notion of thought in a broad way. His position is not refuted by pointing to people who don’t think but still seem to exist.
Descartes was known as a rationalist because he thought philosophy began in the mind. Hume was an empiricist because he thought it began with experience, with things that can be empirically measured. His dictum was more “I am, therefore I think.” Hume was one of the more affable people to overturn the Western mind: Immanuel Kant said that reading Hume “interrupted my dogmatic slumber.” Hume’s astringent thought was at odds with his own pleasant character. Le bon David wanted people to be glad to know him. This was despite the fact that his radical skepticism led him to conclude that it wasn’t really possible to know anyone. Or anything. Hume believed that just because the sun had risen millions of times before, there was no logical necessity for it to rise tomorrow. A thousand examples of a connection between two things could never be extrapolated to entail a causal connection between them. So, if Descartes got out of bed wondering if he was still in it, Hume got into bed each night with no philosophical conviction that he would ever get out of it. One day, he didn’t. He died in full possession of his doubts.
For Plato, doing philosophy was a bit like waking up well rested. Dawn is a key image in his work. One of his dialogues, Crito, deals with the impending execution of Plato’s mentor, Socrates. The relationship between Socrates and Plato was, incidentally, anything but platonic. This dialogue begins with the wealthy Crito visiting Socrates in prison at dawn. Crito says that he has been watching with envy while Socrates slept peacefully. Unlike Crito, who has been unable to sleep, Socrates is represented as a figure of order and moral calm. His integrity is reflected in unblemished sleep; his clear-sightedness is evident at dawn. Similarly, in his final dialogue, The Laws, Plato portrays an ideal city called Magnesia, a name that implies greatness. Plato enjoyed toying with the concept of an ideal state. He was the first writer to describe the lost continent of Atlantis. In Laws, the supreme authority in Magnesia is a “council of the night,” a gathering of elders and philosophers that meets every day between first light and sunrise, the time when members would be most wide awake and least preoccupied by mundane affairs. Fresh from sleep, this group would discuss ideas. Plato’s idealism is evident in his belief that, if you jailed prisoners within earshot of this meeting, their behavior would be corrected simply by hearing about The Right Thing To Do.
In Plato’s ideal world, philosophy is the work of dawn. He distrusted night. In his best known work, The Republic, Plato discusses sleep in the same breath as describing the “tyrannical character” that forms part of an “imperfect society.” He says that sleep incapacitates “the reasonable and humane part of us” and allows the “bestial” part to do its worst. In other words, he is suspicious of dreams, which lack both “sense and shame.” The answer is this: as you get near to sleep, discipline your mind and feed your reason with “intellectual argument and meditation.” These days, most sleep therapists would give precisely the opposite advice. They would also avoid attaching moral judgment to insomnia in the way Plato does, although they might concede that mental preparation for sleep can make a significant impact on the quality of sleep. But for Plato, there is no such thing as the sleep of reason. The body may rest. But the mind needs to be controlled until dawn. Indeed, the most famous image in The Republic is the image of the cave. Plato likens human existence to people living in a dark cavern, looking at shadows of animals and other figures. These shadows are but poor copies of real animals, the ideal forms at whose existence the shadows hint. We may in our lives get to know good people and from this begin to understand what goodness might be. But a good person is only a shadow of an ideal called “the good.” For Plato, true knowledge is of ideals such as “the good.” The journey of philosophy is from the cave into the first light of dawn.
For Aristotle, on the other hand, philosophy is not the work of dawn but of high noon. It needs the hard light of day. Like Plato, Aristotle had a lot to say about the way human beings should organize themselves into communities. Plato’s Laws begins with one person asking another whether or not God is the originator of laws. Aristotle’s best-known work on the same subject, Politics, begins with the line “Our own observation tells us that every state is an association of persons formed with a view to some good purpose.” In other words, while Plato starts in the abstract—in the realm of the ideal—Aristotle starts with observation, with experience. One looks at his feet, the other beyond the far horizon.
The result with Aristotle is a colorful melange of sense and nonsense. In his treatise On Dreams, he says that the surface of a mirror will always appear red to a woman when she is having her period. This is because her eyes are full of blood at that time. But in the same breath, he suggests evocatively that dreams are caused because the mind in a human body is a bit like a passenger in a vehicle. The mind still keeps moving for a time after the body in which it is traveling has stopped. It has a momentum of its own.
Aristotle’s small treatise On Sleep and Sleeplessness is likewise so wide-eyed that it is sometimes blind. And yet it also has moments of genuine understanding. It goes into elaborate detail about humors evaporating from food in the stomach, rising through the body because they are hot and entering the brain, having a narcotic effect. This is the philosopher’s way of saying that everyone falls asleep after a good lunch. The sleeper nods. Their eyelids feel like a dead weight. They can’t stand anymore. Aristotle says this is because the humors entering the head have made the head heavier. People wake when digestion is complete and the heat flows out of the head back down to the body. Thus when they wake, people find their heads are lighter and they can hold them up. He notes that babies sleep a lot because they have large heads in proportion to their bodies. He also says that the bigger a head the more likely someone is to sleep: “Dwarfish or big-headed types are addicted to sleep.” Strange to say, modern medicine will find more than a grain of truth in all this, as we will discover later in the night. It will also find truth in his contention that sleep is something peculiar to creatures with hearts and, therefore, with blood. Aristotle notes that melancholics are hard to accommodate in his scheme because they eat a lot but don’t sleep much.
But it is the opening and close of Aristotle’s treatise that contains its most tantalizing wisdom. Aristotle concludes by saying that we sleep simply because it is in our nature to do so and that no animal can live in defiance of its inherent nature. He leaves up in the air the famous question from which he set out. Sleep could be an activity of the body or the soul or both. For once, he doesn’t have an opinion.
On the night of December 31, 1999, I sat up to watch the end of the world, an event that had been scheduled for midnight that day. For several years, humanity had been on notice about the Y2K bug, a piece of mischief that was going to cause planes to fall out of the sky because the computers that ran our lives had never been told that one day 99 would tick over to 00. I spent the evening with a group of fellow priests who were on holiday; they might otherwise have taken a professional interest in the apocalypse but they weren’t too concerned, except for one who wanted to finish his doctorate before it happened. A venerable father took a laconic view of the situation. He told me that the apocalypse would hardly be the end of the world.
This hadn’t stopped years of scaremongering, which is always good for the economy. A paper manufacturer had banked on the slogan “Y2K. If in doubt, print it out.” Firms appointed Y2K compliance officers and householders stockpiled baked beans and bottled water. In the end, nothing happened. Perhaps we are yet to feel the full impact of the Y2K bug, but so far it’s been quiet.