Snooze

by Michael McGirr

  There are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of stories that bear this out. The stories of soldiers returning from war are a painful part of the phenomenon. When J. R. R. Tolkien returned from the Western Front toward the end of 1916, he would have been counted among the lucky ones to have survived at all. He was sent home with trench foot, hardly a pleasant condition, having witnessed the horrors of the Somme. His wife, Edith, complained that he spent almost two years after his return in bed while she struggled to look after a young family and cope with the effects of a difficult childbirth. It was in bed that Middle Earth was conceived. Whether or not Middle Earth is the stuff of nightmare has been discussed by readers. After his long journey, Frodo is damaged; anniversaries become difficult for him. “I am wounded,” he says at the end of the saga. “It will never really heal.”

  In some circumstances, desperation to do something about sleep provides the very weapon that returned soldiers use to kill themselves. James Prascevic served with the Australian Defense Force in Timor, Iran, and Afghanistan. He eventually broke a leg while parachuting; this was the trigger that led to the onset of depression and, from there, to an investigation of the turmoil faced by those who have experienced war at first hand. He writes of the tragic use of one drug, Seroquel, prescribed as a sleep medication. An overdose can cause death. Some have resorted to that extreme.

  It is good to know the history of the place where you sleep. Sometimes you stumble across it by accident.

  One Christmas a few years ago, when Benedict was eleven and the twins had turned nine, we invited John, an old friend, to join us for lunch. By that point, we were living in a house in a leafy suburb. John was in his eighties and moved slowly with the help of a cane, so I went to pick him up to deliver him to our house.

  In the car, John asked where we heading.

  I mentioned the name of our suburb.

  “Oh, really?” he said. “That’s where I grew up.”

  “What street?” I asked.

  “You wouldn’t know it. It’s just a little street.”

  It turned out that I did know it: it was our street.

  John had grown up a few doors from the house in which we now lived. His family house was still standing. We stopped outside it for a moment in the car. John was silent. Memories seemed to be coming back to him, and he was unsure whether or not to welcome them. John said that his father had been in World War I, starting at Gallipoli in 1915 and remaining in active service until near the end of the war in 1918. He was one of the fortunate few who survived the entire tragedy. He came home and worked hard to qualify for a place in the Taxation Office so that he could support his family. The young John started life on our street in 1929 and went off from there to school where, coincidentally enough, I was now working. He was a member of the class of 1946.

  As we arrived at our front veranda, John stopped for a moment and looked down at his feet. “I remember this place,” he said. He put another foot forward. “I remember these steps. This was the Franklins’ place.”

  It turned out that Mrs. Franklin had been a great friend of John’s mother, so John had spent many days as a boy in the building that was now our house. It stirred memories that had long been dormant.

  “Mr. Franklin had been badly affected by the war,” he said. “In those days, people just said politely that he couldn’t settle to anything after he came back. But everyone knew what it meant. These days, we’d call it post-traumatic stress.”

  “Were there many returned soldiers here?” I asked.

  “Yes,” John said. “The whole street.”

  I learned that all these houses were built by the War Housing Authority and had all been occupied by former soldiers.

  One by one, John pointed out places where the inhabitants had been affected by shell shock, including the one opposite us. It was a street in which fragile people struggled to hold down jobs and share the peace they had fought for. It was a place of nightmares and broken sleep. It was a place whose certainties had been deeply challenged.

  “The women used to get together in your house to support each other,” John told me. “Mrs. Franklin was a kind of focal point, possibly because her husband was one of the worst affected. None of them got much sleep, because they all had husbands who screamed in the night. I can remember my own father screaming. He had terrible nightmares. So the women brought the children here so they could take turns having a nap during the day. That’s how they coped. The sleeplessness was like a fog that spread over the whole street.”

  These stories changed my relationship with my home. It hasn’t always been mine, and it won’t always be mine. Sometimes, I think about the Franklins and remind myself that there was a lot of experience here before ever I was even born. I sleep in a place that had been used to help draw the poison of war from the wounds of broken soldiers.

  There are countless stories of this kind.

  Quiet suburbs often throw a blanket over unquiet experiences. One of Australia’s most revered military commanders retired to a house very close to ours. He was Harold Elliott, better known as Pompey. Elliott was wounded on the first day of the landing at Gallipoli in 1915 and, like so many others, could easily have died. He became a great general, largely because authority never disguised his humanity. Pompey Elliott was in touch with primal instincts. A lawyer by profession, he was a crusty old so-and-so who was famously rude to everybody, especially his superiors. On the other hand, when Pompey threatened to shoot a man who lit up a cigarette at a dangerous moment in the trenches, the offender’s brother, standing nearby, said he’d shoot the general if he did any such thing. Elliott admired the man for speaking up against a general and had him promoted.

  Stories like this abound. Elliott stood up for his men against the dictates of protocol. According to his biographer, Ross McMullin, he was so disheveled in appearance that he was once arrested while on leave in London for impersonating a high-ranking officer. Generals were not supposed to have their shirts hanging out the way Elliott’s always was. The letters he wrote home from the front to his two very young children are beautiful.

  Elliott happened to command two battalions at what has been, with good reason, described as the worst day in Australian history. In July 1916 at Fromelles, his units alone saw more than fifteen hundred men killed in a single period of twenty-four hours. Elliott made it clear to those who had set up this disaster that it was a pathetic idea from the outset. The historian Arthur Bazley wrote that “no one who was present will ever forget the picture of him, the tears streaming down his face, as he shook hands with the returning survivors.” Elliott was a leader of people, not numbers. He was unafraid to express his grief. A Lt. Schroder described Pompey at Fromelles: “A word for a wounded man here, a pat of approbation to a bleary-eyed digger there, he missed nobody. He never spoke a word all the way back to [headquarters] but went straight inside, put his head in his hands, and sobbed his heart out.”

  Elliott fought long and hard after the war for recognition of soldiers who suffered invisible wounds, those whose minds were damaged by the experience. Their needs were usually given short shrift. Elliott was appalled by how returned soldiers, because of either physical or mental injury, found it hard to find adequate work in the 1920s. He was devastated that former soldiers suffered worst in the Great Depression. He never recovered from war himself. He endured years of sleepless anxiety. Ross McMullin writes, “He, too, was plagued by nightmares and ghastly flashbacks, when he not only relived front-line horrors he had repeatedly witnessed. Even more distressing was the memory of all those times he had been obliged to order subordinates to undertake perilous assignments.”

  Elliot entered the Senate in 1919, but his grief was cyclonic. He took his own life in Malvern, not far from where we live, in March 1931. Wars always come home, even if the soldiers don’t. Sleep has a cavernous memory. It holds on to things that, rationally, we may prefer to let go. That is what a nightmare does: It sits on your chest. It pins you to the very bed on which you
are unable to find true rest. It is like the old hag in Hansel and Gretel who keeps you in a cage and keeps fattening you up until she eats you alive.

  One approach to trauma is called stoicism, a set of practices that is much maligned or at least misunderstood. The clichéd version of stoicism is “Grin and bear it” or “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” I don’t want to disparage these adages because there is an entire self-improvement industry built around every one of them, and it’s not my place to deny a living to those who earn their money waging PowerPoint presentations against the world. The problem is that all these sentiments lack compassion and empathy for the people who struggle with life and then, on top of that, are expected to struggle with the fact that they are struggling.

  Besides, such sayings don’t represent Stoicism. Stoicism is not an unfeeling and aggressive attack on the things life throws in our path. It is a contemplative form of life. It is a way of gently changing the way things are by first accepting that they are. It understands that we, ourselves, are also part of the way things are. Meditation is rightly hailed as an aid to sleep; properly understood, Stoicism is a meditative approach to life. It does not isolate an activity called meditation. It suggests that mediation is a bit like breathing, something we’d be silly to stop.

  Stoics get their name from the Greek word stoa, meaning porch, because the original disciples of Zeno, their ancient founder, met on a porch. But porch is a word like woodcutter. It stands between two worlds: inside and outside. Stoicism does precisely that. It negotiates a path between our inner experience and our outer reality. A classic stoic distinction is between pain and suffering. Pain is part of the objective order. If someone hits you, you will experience pain. But suffering is a subjective response to that pain. The memory of a punch long after the physical wound has healed is suffering. A nightmare that relives the punch is suffering. Bad sleep years after a car crash is suffering. How can we honestly acknowledge pain, which is inevitable, while reducing the residual suffering it leaves?

  The stoics were interested in this, and I have a lot of sympathy for the idea of philosophical therapy, the belief that listening to the wisdom of philosophers can shed light on even mundane problems. Philosophical therapy is meditation that is not afraid of an active mind, even a searching mind. The Roman philosophers Cicero and Seneca were Stoics. So, too, was the philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius, a man whose Meditations is still a source of sanity around the world. He was a political leader whose greatest legacy was not political. He was the head of a vast military force whose greatest insights were about surrender. In his collected meditations, he wrote, “Withdraw into yourself. It is the nature of the rational directing mind to be self-content with acting rightly and the calm it thereby enjoys.” In another section, he writes about coping with pain: “Unbearable pain carries us off; chronic pain can be borne. The mind preserves its own serenity and the directing reason is not impaired by pain. It is for the parts injured by the pain to protest if they can.”

  Stoicism puts great faith in our rational abilities, and this is both its strength and weakness. It believes that an active mind is needed to create a still person. The mind is like a surfboard: It is a place to balance in a sea that never sleeps. It creates balance and poise and stillness, but the moment it stops, it topples over.

  Marcus Aurelius also thought about sleep. He believed that it is the rational mind that gets us out of bed. He wrote, “When you are reluctant to get up from your sleep, remind yourself that it is your constitution and man’s nature to perform social acts, whereas sleep is something you share with dumb animals.” He also said that, every time we wake from sleep, the first thing we need to do is actively remind ourselves that we are not going to be buffeted by the opinions of others or the happenings of the day. We will remain at peace because we are one with the whole world, not its victim. He believed that we can shape our own minds such that, no matter what happens, we don’t have to be imprisoned by fear and anxiety. This is even true of post-traumatic sleep and nightmares. The important thing is to be in control: “Sober up, recall yourself, shake off your sleep once more: realize they were mere dreams that troubled you, and now that you are awake again look on these things as you would have looked on a dream.”

  If only it were so easy.

  The idea of creating the habits of your mind does have an honorable history. It is something shared across religions; it unites pagan philosophers such as Marcus Aurelius with Christian theologians such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Nobody reaches peace through passivity; that is achieved through hard labor.

  This kind of thinking is certainly still current. Contemporary researchers have suggested that the brain has a kind of neuroplasticity that allows it to reshape itself—or, rather, the owner to reshape it. It is possible that we think of the mind as a train, tied to a certain groove or track, destined to go in a certain direction. In fact, it is more like a boat that can harness the elements, even if sometimes they seem hostile, to navigate a fresh course. The theories of neuroplasticity could have implications for post-traumatic sleep. Revisiting trauma, which seems to descend uninvited on a sleeping person, could be a habit of mind that is possible, with a lot of time and help, to change.

  The best-selling writer Norman Doidge, author of The Brain That Changes Itself, is a well-known proponent of these beliefs. He says it is possible to work with the plastic nature of the mind to change the way that memories are “re-transcribed” as the physical makeup on the brain is renewed. One of his patients, known as “Mr. L,” suffered the loss of his mother when he was twenty-six months old. He was sent away from his siblings to a childless aunt and subsequently had great problems forming bonds in relationships. He had recurrent dreams whose theme was losing something. He turned his mother into a ghost. Doidge worked with Mr. L to turn a nightmare into a real memory of a real mother who had once loved him. Doidge writes,

  Mr. L did not get better all at once. He had first to experience cycles of separations, dreams, depressions and insights—the repetition or “working through” required for long-term change. New ways of relating had to be learned, wiring new neurons together, and old ways of responding had to be unlearned, weakening neuronal links.

  Mr. L’s ghost needed to be replaced by reality. Doidge continues:

  Why are dreams so important in analysis, and what is their relationship to plastic change? Patients are often haunted by recurring dreams of their traumas and awaken in terror. As long as they remain ill, these dreams don’t change their basic structure. The neural network that represents the trauma—such as Mr. L’s dream that he was missing something—is persistently reactivated, without being re-transcribed. Should these traumatized patients get better, these nightmares gradually become less frightening.

  Sometimes people discover creative ways to find sleep at the end of a dark tunnel.

  Ray Parkin was a prisoner of war on the notorious Thai-Burma railway during World War II. Even before he got there, he’d been through hell and high water. After having enlisted in the navy as a teenager in 1928, he survived the sinking of his ship, the HMAS Perth in March 1942. He was then part of a small group adrift in a dingy. He was finally captured and held by the Japanese on Java. None of this was pleasant. But hard labor on the railway trumped all these horrors.

  Parkin was also an artist and many of the paintings and drawings he completed while in captivity are the most enduring depiction we have of the ordeal endured by him ands his comrades. Some of these images survived because he hid them in the makeshift operating table of his close friend, the legendary doctor “Weary” Dunlop. One of the things that helped Parkin get through this period was that he resolutely kept doing drawings of beautiful things, such as flowers. He made a decision to see more than darkness. He was especially fascinated by the butterflies that abounded in the area, creatures that seemed lighter than air. Wounded men would look at his drawings as a form of therapy. Even the guards seemed uplifted by them.

 
; Needless to say, trauma affected the very sleep the men needed to cope with illnesses that ranged from malaria to dysentery to cholera, not to mention the extraordinary work demands of building the railways and the brutality of the captors. In his diaries, Parkin maked brief observations such as this: “Had a pretty bad night. But it was full of thought.” He was ever-optimistic despite the circumtances.

  Parkin pinned the bodies of butterflies to the roof of the makeshift building in which sick men tried to recuperate. Later he told his biographer, “The Sistine Chapel had nothing on it.” Parkin gave the men something beautiful to contemplate as they tried to find sleep. The wings moved gently in the breeze. The world beneath those butterflies was a more reassuring place.

  When our three children were little, we found that we could get them to sleep in the car, so we spent a lot of time there. On Friday nights, we would line them up in their three car seats and go on a date. We’d drive to the nearest Asian food outlet. By the time we’d done the thirty miles, they had nodded off. We bought noodles and parked outside a café where we could look in through the window and imagine we were part of an adult world. Then we got a takeaway coffee and drove to a spot where we could overlook the Hume Highway and tell each other escape stories. Before long, we checked the little ones in the rearview mirror and got talking about them, wishing they would grow up but still be little.

  Once we got as far as the coast, where we met a family from Western Australia who lived in a rough and ready mobile home. They spent their lives doing laps of the continent, crawling from beach to beach, picking up odd jobs to cover the basics. The twins in that family had just turned ten.