The whole pointless kerfuffle about the Y2K bug is a reminder that both the calendar and the clock are artificial constructs, human fences imposed over the natural landscape of time. The year 2000 for western Christians was 5760 for Jewish people, 2544 for Buddhists, 1716 for Coptics, and 1420 for Muslims. It’s odd how religions, which are supposed to be a celebration of timelessness, have been so tangled up in measuring time. Let’s not even start on the arguments about the date of Easter.
Sleep, however, does create a rhythm of time. Research has found that when people are deprived of any external prompts such as windows and clocks, they will settle into a pattern of sleep that follows a cycle of twenty-four hours, usually just a little longer. In other words, days and months and years are not inventions. The tools we use to number them are.
The way sleep ebbs and flows over a day is called a circadian rhythm. Jet lag is a problem because it disrupts this rhythm: the traveler’s internal clock gets unhinged from the external clock, and common wisdom says that flying east is worse than flying west because it is more difficult to cope with shortening days than lengthening ones. Shift work can produce the same effects as long-distance travel without the pluses: there aren’t too many people who send cheery postcards from the lunchroom in the wee hours of the morning.
Different people have different rhythms, and the rhythm changes over the course of a lifetime. There are genuinely such things as larks and owls, people who are more alert in the morning and those who can solve crossword puzzles at midnight. Teenagers tend to be owls. They aren’t just refusing to go to bed to annoy their parents. It appears that with all the extra work expected of hormones in adolescence, and all the other secrets that need to be explored, an eighteen-year-old body doesn’t get around to secreting melatonin, the hormone produced in the pineal glad to organize sleep and the circadian rhythm, until about 11:00 PM. So when a teenager or young adult turns in to bed at 3:00 AM and stays there until midday, it is physiological rather than rebellious behavior. In later years, melatonin starts to be released about 9:00 PM, the same time that body temperature begins to fall, another prelude to sleep. There has been some sturdy evidence to suggest that teenagers do better in schools that take their circadian rhythms into account and start classes later in the morning. It is possible that adolescents are less adolescent during the holidays, when they can sleep according to their body clocks. Moodiness and irritability may be signs of poor sleep. Old people produce less melatonin: they tend to become larks, getting up earlier and sleeping less overall, often in broken stretches. The elderly who wake at night worrying about their adult children would most probably wake up anyway. It’s good of their children to oblige them with a reason other than advancing years.
Midnight is no more than a line in the air. It is neither the darkest part of the night nor the coldest, nor the time when anyone is most likely to howl at the moon. Yet it is a powerful image in demonology; midnight is the so-called “witches sabbath” when creatures from the dark side do their thing. But Christians also celebrate Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, a feast whose timing was established to get a free ride on the back of earlier festivals marking the longest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. The image of Christmas is the star; it is a festival not of light but of light in darkness, one whose deepest roots are old. Midnight has political nuances: the independence of India at that moment on August 15, 1947, has occasioned books such as Midnight’s Children and Freedom at Midnight. In the sphere of private experience, midnight has also long been held as a pregnant moment, apt for both godly and ungodly visitings. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a tortured insomniac; his sleep had been land-mined by opium. Yet one of his most tender poems, “Frost at Midnight,” written at the close of the 18th century, celebrates a poised moment when all the world stands still. In practice, for Coleridge, such moments were pure fiction. But they are a beautiful fiction nonetheless. Coleridge writes,
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
’Tis calm indeed! So calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness.
The tales of A Thousand and One Nights start at midnight. They are sometimes called The Arabian Nights and sometimes The Scheherazade, but really they should be called A Thousand Nights and One Night, the extra night on top of the perfect thousand being a gesture toward infinity, a concept enshrined within the Islamic cultures that, in various places over hundreds of years, first told these joyous and wily stories. They include “Sinbad the Sailor” and “Aladdin and his Lamp” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” They are huddled together under an umbrella narrative that goes like this: There once was a king called Shahryar who was cheated on by his wife, so he decided to take his revenge on all womankind, marrying a virgin every night, having sex, and then putting her to the sword at dawn before she could cheat on him. It is understandable that some readers don’t get beyond this point; the text is blasé about these lives. After three years, however, the people are starting to get a bit restless and flee from the city until, in the words of Richard Burton’s 19th-century translation, “there remained not in the city a young person fit for carnal copulation.” A number of readers who have struggled past the three hundred beheadings find this a bit much: the sex drought seems more of a worry than the deaths. The chief Wazir is grief-stricken because he has run out of virgins to offer the king, and he fears for his life. But the Wazir has two daughters: Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Shahrazad has read a thousand books. She has studied science, philosophy, and poetry. She is wise and witty and has a bright idea. She marries the king, arranging for Dunyazad to be present in the bridal chamber when “the king arose and did away with his bride’s maidenhead and the three fell asleep.” At midnight, Dunyazad asks her sister to tell a story. Shahrazad obliges, but at dawn when she is due to lose her head, the story is not finished. The King agrees to allow her to finish it the next night. But by then the story has doors opening off it leading into other stories and the king is entranced, ready to be lead through interlocking rooms and corridors of these beguiling stories.
Many of the stories are both profound and profane at the same time. There’s one little one about Abu Hasan, a nomad who moves to the city and marries. He becomes a rich man and his wife dies. All this takes about four lines: the stories can be biblical in their ability to leave out the stuff you really want to know and leave in the stuff you don’t. Abu Hasan’s friends urge him to marry again, but he resists until finally he agrees to marry a woman whose beauty, we are told, is like that of a midnight star reflected in the ocean. So the biggest wedding feast ever seen in that country takes place, and in due course, the steward arrives to accompany Abu Hasan to the chamber where his bride is “displayed in her seven dresses and one more.” This is the moment of sexual tension in the story. Abu Hasan arises solemnly from the table, but at that very moment, he farts. Not just any fart, but a fart to do justice to the banquet he has just eaten, a fart that Burton describes as “great and terrible,” a fart so loud that every guest “talked aloud and made as though he had heard nothing, fearing for his life.” Farting has had a varied relationship with bedtime rituals: in some cultures it is accepted as an economical means for heating up the bed, in others it is grounds for divorce.
Abu Hasan was so humiliated by his fart that he left his own wedding, went down to the port, and got into a boat for India where he stayed for ten years. At the end of that time, he was homesick and longed to hear his mother tongue once again. So he disguised himself as a dervish and crept home by a secret route “enduring a thousand hardships of hunger, thirst and fatigue; and braving a thousand dangers from the lion, the snake and the Ghul.” The ghul is a demon that robs graves, often disguised as a hyena. Eventually, however, Abu Hasan reaches his own country, his own town. And there he
hears a ten-year-old girl talking to her mother. The girl asks her mother when she was born. The mother replies, “Thou wast born, O my daughter, on the very night when Abu Hasan farted.” Abu Hsan realizes that, far from having been forgotten, his disgrace is now the event from which time is measured. So he gets up and goes back to India where he lives out the rest of his days.
For all its silliness, this little story charms its way into a deeper place. Abu Hasan tries to deal with his disgrace first by running and then by disguise. But the past is patient. It waits for him to come back to it. Time stands still for as long as it takes the proud and restless to listen to what it has to say.
Shahrazad weaves a great quilt of stories. A thousand and one midnights come and go, and the tales become even more captivating. During this time, Shahrazad presents the king with three sons, so she did most of her storytelling while pregnant, another poignant image. After so long, the king is a new man, transformed by the power of all he has heard.
The Thousand Nights and One Night is a model of an entire civilization: we all tell stories to save our lives, and we listen to them to save the lives of others. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a great adventure in which stories are told to pass the time. But Shahrazad tells stories for the opposite reason: to hold time still, to allow one midnight to last forever. The final night ends with a blessing: “Glory be to the living in who dieth not and in whose hands are the keys of the unseen and the seen. Glory be to the one whom the shifts of time waste not away.”
I once worked in an old folks’ home where there was a man, Charlie, who took particular care drying his feet. Every morning, I got him out of the bath and sat him on his bed where he started on his big toe with a towel. I then went and had a cup of tea; when I returned Charlie would be just about finished with the little toe on the other foot. Sixty years earlier, Charlie had been a teenager in the trenches on the Western Front.
“I had two long years with wet feet,” he said. “You know, it’s impossible to sleep with wet feet.”
Charlie spent World War I with the watch his late father had given him stopped at 12:02.
“I never lost it. The spring had broken but it reminded me of him. Besides, it doesn’t matter what time it is when you can’t sleep.”
“I never thought about that.”
“Besides, I liked to think that it had stopped at the start of a brand new day. I became thankful for every brand new day I survived to see.”
He wrote home to his mother and mentioned the feet. It was the least horrific thing he could think to write. She wrote back telling him not to be so silly and to put on dry shoes and socks.
“She had no idea,” he said. “Thank God she had no idea.”
“She must have been glad you survived.”
“She changed the sheets on my bed every fortnight when I was away in case I turned up unannounced. She knew I’d be tired, she could imagine that much. The whole time I was in the army, I used to fantasize about clean sheets and a dry mattress. But when I finally got back to them, I couldn’t sleep properly. I used to toss and turn.”
“Did this improve?”
“Even now I wake in the night and feel the thud of shells. I never hear them. I feel them. I have nightmares.”
Charlie was among the millions of people who feel the impact of trauma on their sleep.
A good number of bedtime stories begin with the words “Once upon a time.” I do like that strange expression “upon a time.” It makes time seem solid, like a table, something that can support weighty objects, which is what happens when we sit upon a cushion, for example. The Charles Perrault story “Hop O’-My-Thumb” begins “Once upon a time, there was a woodcutter and his wife …” Let’s think for the moment about the figure of the woodcutter.
The woodcutter provides the perfect entry point to another world. This is the person who goes into the primeval forest, the figure who steps into the dark. The woodcutter brings that darkness into the light of civilization. He (or she, but mostly it’s he) turns ancient trees into new timber or even firewood. The woodcutter is a bridge between the ruled and the unruly, between nature and nurture, between control and its opposite. He is a liminal figure, someone who stands at the door, the ideal person for stories that help people set out upon the adventure of sleep. There is a known world on this side of sleep with the comfort of beds and fireplaces. There is a forest on the other side.
Sadly, this picture does not always correspond to reality. The world on the other side of sleep bears a close relationship to what we experience on this side of sleep. Those who experience traumatic lives will, more often than not, have traumatic sleep. And many people who manage, often courageously, to live with past traumas in a constructive way during their waking hours will be ambushed by them at night. For many, the aftermath of trauma is worse at night than at any other time. When there’s nothing to distract it and keep it busy, your own mind can be most unpleasant company. The devil makes work for it.
Hansel and Gretel is an example of a story that begins “Once upon a time, near a great forest, there lived a poor woodcutter and his wife and his two children.” Note they are his children. The wife is a stepmother, the most maligned character in fairy tales. It’s a shame that stepmothers all over the world have to bear this injustice. Anyway, the stepmother in this particular story is pretty bad because she wants the kids to die.
Sleep plays no small part in Hansel and Gretel. The children can’t sleep for hunger, which is how they come to hear of the plan to abandon them to the wild animals in the forest. Hansel waits for the adults to fall asleep before going out to get the pebbles that will guide them home. The adults are able to leave the children in the forest because on both occasions, Hansel and Gretel fall conveniently asleep.
The most traumatic character is the old hag who lives in the gingerbread house. She built the house in order to entice children. She puts Hansel in a cage to fatten him up. Luckily, Gretel is able to push her into the oven, and they escape, taking the old hag’s jewels with them. They reach home safely. The wife is dead. The father is overjoyed. They all live happily ever after.
Fairy tales are supposed to insinuate themselves into some of the less readily visited parts of our consciousness. A number, including not just this one but also Little Red Riding Hood, include accounts of children being eaten. I have no clue about the psychology of this. One researcher, Bruno Bettelheim, believed (rather implausibly) that such stories were meant to help bedtime listeners get past their oral fixation—that is, get to sleep without sucking on a bottle or a thumb or the edge of a pillow. The mouth, they imply, is a deadly weapon; it’s best to sleep with it closed.
Hansel and Gretel is an extraordinary catalogue of child abuse. It includes the death of a mother, starvation, abandonment, attempted murder, theft, imprisonment, and violence. There is even a high-sugar diet to add to that list. “They all lived happily ever after” doesn’t seem a credible place to end. Surely it’s more reasonable to expect PTSD ever after. To be fair, the brothers Grimm did end with a short paragraph that was omitted from the Golden Treasury that ushered us to sleep as kids. It reads, “My fairy tale is done. See the mouse run. Whoever catches it gets to make a great big fur hat out of it.”
In other words, the storyteller breaks the spell and says that the story exists only in a bubble of make-believe.
But actually, this description has the whole thing upside down. Hansel and Gretel doesn’t describe traumatic situations for the sake of dealing with them. It deals with trauma that existed before the story, and the roots of this story are very old. The key to an appreciation of this is the figure of the old hag or old witch. The old hag lives on in our world in an expression that is part and parcel of any understanding of sleep, especially post-traumatic sleep. That word is nightmare. “Mare”— the second part of the word—refers to a hag, or witch, possibly even a demon. There was once a belief that a hag would come during the night and sit on your chest, thus constricting breathing and movement.
Those who have experienced sleep paralysis may well consider this to be a better description of what is going on than pages of scientific text. It certainly captures the feeling and even the panic that can come with it. A nightmare was originally a nocturnal visit from a creature like the hag who put Hansel in a cage. Now the word is more commonly used to describe the memory of trauma, not the actual experience of it. But the feeling of a creature sitting on your chest is still an evocative description of what is going on. The neurologist Oliver Sacks said that the supernatural figures of folklore—devils, witches, or hags—can have an important role in helping us at least to describe our experiences: “We make narratives for a nocturnal experience which is common, real, and physiologically based.” Sacks believed that the word nightmare should be represented as night-mare, just so we don’t lose sight of the image of the old hag.
Nightmares are a common part of the landscape of PTSD. As the human family conceives of an ever-growing list of ways to bring stress into the world, there is more and more need to understand PTSD. It can originate in many experiences: grief, loss, bullying, sexual abuse, violence, injury, and so on. It is even possible to traumatize yourself, as when, for example, you damage a relationship that is important to you. Many people who experience PTSD say that a decent night’s sleep is one of the things they most urgently crave and most deeply miss. One expert in the field, professor Kevin Gournay, writes:
Sleeping problems are an extremely common consequence of PTSD. You need to remember that PTSD causes very high levels of physical arousal, and in such a state it is very difficult for the body to relax and for sleep to take over—even if you are feeling very tired. In addition, sleeping problems can be caused by the intrusive dreams and nightmares that are another common manifestation. Although the symptoms of PTSD may subside over time, sleeping problems often become prominent.
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