Swift was both fascinated and appalled by bodily functions. He offers a counterweight to our contemporary culture that wants to believe in a physically sanitized version of the bedroom. This means crisp white sheets, perfumed pajamas, fluffy pillows, and even fresh flowers on the table. The entire nightwear industry is a denial about what really happens during sleep. It’s better to think of the old, old joke about the old, old gentleman who goes to the doctor with a list of ailments. The doctor says that he will need a urine sample, a blood sample, a stool sample, and, yes, even a semen sample. The old, old man is hard of hearing.
“What did he say?” he asks his wife.
“Just give him your pajamas,” she says.
We like fictional versions of bedrooms, much as we do with bathrooms. But the reality of sleep is nightly sweat, shedding hair, flaking skin, saliva, dry throat, unconscious scratching, dribble, rumbling stomachs, frequent flatulence, strange utterances, various kinds of nocturnal emissions, and occasional incontinence. It’s no surprise that some marriages need separate bedrooms to survive. Swift made play with all this, never more so than in the final paragraphs of Gulliver’s Travels, after the voyager has returned from living as an animal, a brute Yahoo, among the rational horses, the Houyhnhnms. The Houyhnhmns are disgusted that any creature such as Gulliver should wear clothes to bed. When Gulliver returns to England, he is far from happy at being reunited with his wife and family. Five years later, he is still appalled by the smell of humans and revolted by the thought that he was once guilty of “copulating with one of the Yahoo species,” the evidence of which is the existence of children. Swift did not much like children. Gulliver buys two horses and prefers to sleep with these. He prefers their smell. “They live in great amity with me,” he says; it’s the closest Gulliver gets to love.
The poet Peter Steele writes of Swift’s fascinated revulsion from anything resembling “ordure” that “it may be that the dream of cleanliness is like the dream of reason … he believes in the end that filth is no joke, except in the dark and complicated sense that man himself is a joke.” The phrase “dream of reason” is especially apt, both for Swift’s time and ours. Swift belonged to an age in thrall to the idea of reason; reason was the celebrity of the 18th century. It has its limitations, but it’s surely better than the Kardashians. Swift is one of the few to see reason as a dream. This doesn’t mean it is not real; it just means that you need sleep to get there.
All this brings us to Gulliver’s first arrival in Lilliput. He comes ashore, walks inland and abandons himself to slumber:
I was extremely tired, and with that, and the heat of the weather, and about half a pint of brandy that I drank as I left the ship, I found myself much inclined to sleep. I lay down on the grass, which was very short and soft, where I slept sounder than ever I remembered to have done in my life, and, as I reckoned, about nine hours.
Gulliver doesn’t create a bed; he just lies down. When he wakes up, as most people will remember, he is tied to the ground with hundreds of “slender ligatures” that are wrapped around his whole body “from my arm-pits to my thighs.” It is a wonder that none of this has woken Gulliver, especially having so many ropes, however slender, strapped around his thighs. Gulliver has quite a few resemblances to his creator. Looking at pictures of Swift, with or without his wig, it is clear that he was a jowly individual with a broad neck and a double chin. He was not adverse to wine. He never shared a room with his partner, so much so that people were never entirely sure if the pair were married. I’d wager good money that he was a snorer. Indeed, the evidence all points to a significant case of sleep apnea. If Gulliver is created in Swift’s image (as he is in so many ways including his preposterous views on education), it’s feasible that Gulliver could have slept through his imprisonment by the Lilliputians.
The contrast between Crusoe and Gulliver is not simply between creating a structure for sleep on the one hand and reckless surrender of consciousness on the other. Crusoe’s sleep is part of the order of the world; Gulliver’s is a doorway to another world. When he wakes, he is twelve times the size of everyone else. All sense of normal proportion is gone. Gulliver’s Travels makes endless comedy out of its sense of lost order, lost proportion, and lost perspective. The floating island of Laputa, for example, can move from one time zone to another. It can also move over the cities of its enemies and turn day into night, spoiling the growth of crops. Crusoe could no more play with these ideas than jump over the moon.
Sleep is another country. Swift even gave it a separate name: The Land of Nod. But Swift didn’t actually invent the phrase. It actually comes from the first few pages of the Bible. After Cain kills his brother Abel, Cain is forced to become a “fugitive and a vagabond.” Like his parents, Adam and Eve, he is forced into exile as a result of his own ego. By the end of the first two generations of the human story, the whole saga is already a mess, characterized by intergenerational family dysfunction. Genesis 4:16 reads, “And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the Land of Nod, on the East of Eden.” The Qur’an tells this story in almost the same way but is more humane and compassionate than Genesis. The Qur’an says mildly that Cain “ended up remorseful” and, as a result, God says that anyone who kills a person either out of revenge or even just “to prevent corruption of the earth,” then “it is as if he killed the whole of mankind.” Conversely, when anyone saves a life, it is as if they have “saved the whole of mankind.” These words are central to the whole texture of the Qur’an.
The Bible seems to be harsher, but its bark can be worse than its bite. The former chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregation of the Commonwealth, Jonathan Sacks, has described the Book of Genesis as “the story of human relationship … the necessary prelude to Exodus, the story of nations and political systems.” He points to the endless stories of conflicts between brothers in Genesis and draws the conclusion that its main theme is “the rejection of rejection.” Exile is not death. There is no eye for an eye or tooth for a tooth. Cain killed his brother and he will carry the mark of that forever. But he also gets a fresh start in a place called The Land of Nod. It is to be a new homeland beyond the burdens of waking reality.
Jonathan Swift took the phrase and gave it the meaning with which it is currently associated, namely as a description of sleep. It appears in Swift’s Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, according to the most polite mode and method now used at Court, and in the best Companies of England—a story that is neither genteel nor ingenious nor polite. Nor, thank God, is it even complete. It is a desultory display of banalities exchanged between stuffy stereotypes. This explains why no one other than scholars has heard of it. By the end, even the characters in it are falling asleep. It is, admittedly, after two in the morning, and they have been drinking and playing cards. Before he dozes off, The Colonel announces, “I am for the land of Nod.” Mr. Neverout replies, “Faith, I’m for Bedfordshire.”
This was a significant moment in the history of sleep. It describes sleep as a place of exile, away from family, success, failure, self-image, and the weight of daily life. It is the place to which inadequate humans can escape. It is beyond our borders. It is the daily refugee to which we all turn; we all seek asylum there.
The Qur’an, the Bible, and the Hebrew scriptures all describe God as the one who “shall neither slumber nor sleep.” So if God sometimes appears moody, irascible, unreasonable, and even petulant, lack of sleep may be the explanation. It may just as well explain why God is prepared to put up with so much: an eternity of sleeplessness is enough to lower anyone’s resistance.
God is a creature of the night. On page one of the Bible, we are told that God made the night first and then made the day afterward. That has to say something about priorities. The first biblical creation story relates that God’s ultimate achievement was not the creation of the firmament of heaven, nor of the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, nor of the great whales, nor of everything that creepeth upon t
he earth, and not even the creation of humankind “in the image of God.” The grand finale in God’s big production was what happened on the seventh day: He rested. The Qur’an doesn’t like this idea, cutting off the creation saga after six days and insisting that God was not the least bit wearied by the whole escapade. But the Bible doesn’t say God was tired. On the contrary, it implies that God had a fresh idea and, as a result, simply rested. Indeed, tiredness can be the enemy of rest; we live in a world that is often too tired to sleep.
In the Genesis story, the creation of rest is God’s crowning glory, and the ability—for one day a week—to be godlike in taking it easy became the hallmark of the culture that wrote up the story. The capacity to rest without actually sleeping is the most significant accomplishment of the species at the top of the evolutionary ladder. Mosquitoes can’t do it. Think of that the next time one torments you at night. You may not believe it at the time, but you are a superior being to that buzzing insect. Otherwise you wouldn’t be lying awake at a quarter past two in the morning.
Creation starts with a formless void called chaos and ends with an orderly void called rest. Countless people in every time and culture have found the same thing for themselves: creativity is about creating space, about having the courage to stop, even if it means feeling dizzy, while the world keeps turning. This is the strange essence of the contemplative life, the heart of all great spiritual traditions. The monastery is not a place of escape, quite the opposite. There isn’t much you can do to encounter God. You’ve got a much better chance by not doing. Florence Nightingale never understood this. Her God kept her so busy that the two of them never got to meet.
The irony is that having put rest at the summit of all creation, the Bible story shows God as the great disturber of rest. God gets into people’s sleep but not to snuggle up next to them. On page two, in a second creation story, God makes the man fall into a deep sleep so that he can pinch one of his ribs and make him a mate. Abraham, the first of God’s great travelers, encounters God in his sleep and the experience is one of terror. It was in a dream by night that God bestowed on Solomon, who’d been caught out sleeping with other gods, the gift of “a wise and understanding heart.” One of Job’s friends likewise rubs up against God in his sleep and finds “in thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men, fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake.” An angel appears to Joseph in his sleep and tells him that Mary, the girl to whom he is engaged, is pregnant even though she hasn’t had sex but it’s okay because the father is the Holy Spirit. This is not the kind of news you want to hear in the cold light of day. Once the child is born, an angel tells him to grab the mother and boy and flee for dear life into the desert. Then later another angel tells him it’s safe to go home. It is hardly surprising that legend has it that Joseph died young. He probably stayed up late, dreading that if he went to bed he’d get another visit in his sleep. The Bible is peppered with dry dreams; dry dreams are the ones in which the dreamer discovers their impotence.
There are almost as many theories about dreams as there are people to dream them up. At the risk of being simplistic, the theories tend to fall into two main groups. The first is that the dreamer has the dream; the second is that the dream has the dreamer. In the first, the dream sheds light on the dreamer by providing clues about the workings of their mind or soul or psyche or whatever you care to call your really private parts. In the second, the dreamer is left with a riddle to solve; the dreamer has to shed light on the dream.
Under the first of these umbrellas, some theories, probably most theories, hold that a dream is a reflection of something going on in the life of its host, whether that something is psychological or purely physical, whether that something is meaningful or whether a dream is just the trash icon on our mental screens, the place to which we drag our psychic junk so that we can delete it from memory. Regardless of the dream’s significance or lack of it, a dream is the work of the dreamer; no one else can dream your dreams for you. One of the best-known proponents of this view, at the end of the spectrum that sees dreams as meaningful clues to the waking world, is Sigmund Freud, who wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams that “every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance, and one which may be assigned to a specific place in the psychic activities of the waking state.” In other words, someone’s dreams will take you deep inside the inner workings of that person. Freud builds on the work of Aristotle.
Aristotle did his own thinking in a time and place that had numerous gods to do your thinking on your behalf. In the Greek view of the world, Morpheus, the god responsible for dreams, was the son of Hypnos, who was responsible for sleep and who was, in turn, the son of Nyx, goddess of night. (Incidentally, Nyx had two sons. The other one was Thanatos, death.)
Aristotle believed in putting the ruler over every aspect of human experience and didn’t have much confidence in ideas that were beyond concrete evidence, such as that the gods would be telling us stuff in our pajamas. His writing on dreams is characteristically meticulous, ploughing the field of his inquiry with a fine-tooth comb. He always speaks of “seeing” a dream, not “having” a dream, and he points out that if dreams were vehicles for communication from the gods about the future, then animals wouldn’t dream because why would divine beings be bothered to communicate with lower-order beings. It’s a mystery how Aristotle knew that animals had dreams, but it turns out that he was probably right: more recent studies have shown that most large mammals, and other species as well, have REM sleep, so in all likelihood they dream. They also snore— dogs especially. Aristotle held that the cat curled up in front of the heater is an unworthy receptacle for divine revelation. There are owners who would beg to differ. There’s no point asking dogs about their dreams because sleeping dogs lie.
Aristotle had more to say on the subject of where dreams come from. “If it were God who sent them they would appear by day also,” he said, “and to the wise.” Aristotle was a bit of a snob: for him, the fact that ordinary people happen to have dreams means that, despite appearances, the dreams themselves must be ordinary. “It is absurd to hold that it is God who sends such dreams and yet that he sends them not to the best and the wisest but to any chance persons.” Aristotle thought that dreams were caused by the mind continuing to move after the body has stopped, just as water continues to slop around after the container it is in has come to rest. For him, dreams are like projectiles: they keep going after the thrower has stopped: “It is the mental picture which arises from the movement of sense-impressions when one is asleep, in so far as this condition exists, that is a dream.”
Aristotle believed that dreams are fragile: they are comprised of small stimuli that continue all day but that, like the stars, we are only able to notice at night when competing stimuli have toned down. Dreams are like reflections on the surface of water: the moment the still water is stirred they vanish. The minute we move, dreams go the same way. Even after all this time, Aristotle’s theories have a fair bit going for them. But when it comes to the fact that, after the event, reality sometimes takes the shape of something that appears to be foretold in a dream, he has a single-word explanation: coincidence. Such coincidences may appear frequent, but that’s because there are so many dreams taking place in the world on any night of the week that sooner or later one of them is bound to resemble the future. If dreams are a revelation of the divine, then they are only in so far as the whole of nature is a revelation of the divine because dreams are part of nature, not outside it.
Freud applauded Aristotle for not being bullied by a culture that was infatuated by the idea of prophecy. Freud also believed dreams were not about the future; for him they concerned the past. He used them to take him a long way into knowledge of a person; whereas Aristotle was far more inclined than Freud to believe that dreams were a mirage, an illusion, a random collection of mental bricolage. They were not to be trusted. For Freud, on the other hand, dreams are truthfu
l in a way that the conscious mind has learned over the course of a lifetime not to be. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he writes, “I must insist that the dream actually does possess a meaning, and that a scientific method of dream-interpretation is possible.” The scientific method to which Freud refers was necessary, because in his view, there was a difference between the manifest content of a dream (which is what you experience) and its latent content (which is what it really means). Partly to protect ourselves, we dream in code and the deciphering of those codes is by no means a simple task. Later visitors to Freud’s vast oeuvre have scratched their heads about this. How difficult could it be to point out that a pen in a dream might represent a penis? A sword, on the other hand, could represent a penis. So might a rifle. Then again, a shovel might very well represent a penis. Same for a plough. As you advance to another level, you get to ponder dreams that are actually about penises. In these, a penis is a subtle symbol of a penis. Most things seem to represent either a penis or something a penis can fit into. It would be interesting to know just what Freud thought a simple dream might entail. To be fair to him, his range of interpretation was not really so narrow. Dreams could also be about castration.
Despite the obvious disparities between Aristotle and Freud, the two thinkers share an underlying conviction. This is the belief that dreams are the work of the individual dreamer and reflect something of that individual’s experience. Most people these days would go along with that in some way, shape, or form.
But it could be that dreams are about the future in a way neither man considered. Aristotle believed that infants did not dream. After all, they have little experience and therefore little to dream about. But these days, as we’ve seen, we know that newborn children spend about half of their time asleep in REM, a great deal more than at any other part of their lives, and that fetuses spend even more. The evidence all suggests that unborn children spend a lot of time dreaming. But what on earth could they be dreaming about? It’s not as if they have issues with life that need processing: sexuality that wants to slip its moorings or bosses that remind them of what their parents used to be like. The answer is complicated but probably has a lot to do with the way a fresh brain needs to constantly test its wiring and activate its circuitry. Dreaming in the unborn and in infants may not be visual in the way adult dreams usually are. There are theories, admittedly difficult to test, that relate fetal sleep to the creation of memory and language skills, to the development of cognitive capacity. There is even a hypothesis that adults don’t really need REM sleep and therefore don’t really need to dream; the process is just a leftover habit from the initial stages of our lives when we needed a special start program to boot up our brains. Dreams are toys we have never let go of because, a lot of the time, they are fun, even if the fun is sometimes a bit like a ride on the ghost train: either you have a good dream that you enjoy or a bad one from which you enjoy waking up.
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