If it is the case that dreams are of most practical benefit to little people, dreaming may have less to do with dealing with personal experience after it happens and much more to do with creating the capacity to actually have personal experiences later in life. After all, without language and memory, there isn’t much prospect of that happening. In these theories, the dream does not explain the dreamer. Rather the needs of the dreamer explain the dream, and all significant dreaming is to the same end—namely, setting up those mysterious qualities of mind that are the basis of those equally strange things called personality and, beyond that, character. These are what make us different from one another. The creation of human individuality and uniqueness gets a big helping hand from the fact we all have the same dreams.
Dreams are one of the more baffling aspects of the Bible. Perhaps the storytellers, whoever they may have been, found in them a handy plot device that allows God to step on stage without being seen. But this explanation is too easy. Biblical dreams are eerie and disquieting stories that go a long way toward capturing the elusive nature of the divine. They sit uncomfortably on that line that divides the ego from something much greater. Generally, biblical dreams tend to shape the dreamer rather than the other way round. Biblical sleepers dream as children but are expected to respond as adults, an irony that sets up some of the poignant tensions in the story. Maybe the dreams are just a way of saying that sometimes, in order to see properly, you have to close your eyes.
Jenny and I named all our children after contemplatives, people whose most potent activity was expressed in stillness. Our little Clare got her name from the woman who was both an anchor and a goad for Francis of Assisi. The medievals tell a great story about Clare and Francis having a meal together; they made their table on the bare ground. Their love was so strong that they never touched the food but spent the time in perfect stillness, totally present to each other. There was so much heat in the room that bystanders thought the house was going to catch fire.
Our Clare’s twin, Jacob, got his name from the deepest sleeper in the Bible. There is plenty not to like about the biblical Jacob, a feature he shares with any number of the main characters in the Book. The original Jacob is a figure of gritty determination. His name means “heel” because he was born gripping the heel of his twin brother, Esau, trying to get out before him and so be the firstborn and heir of his father Isaac (whose own name means “laughter,” because his mother laughed when strangers told her, at the age of ninety, that she was to have a son; it was a sour laugh that one). The rivalry between Jacob and Esau is painful reading for any parent of twins. Isaac loved Esau but their mother, Rebekah, preferred Jacob. The story goes that Esau became a skillful hunter, but Jacob was a “plain man” who preferred to stay at home. One day, Jacob happened to have made some soup just as Esau walked in from the fields faint with hunger. Esau was so famished that he exchanged his birthright for a bowl of lentil soup, which remains one of history’s most lopsided deals. Jacob didn’t hesitate to exploit the vulnerability of his brother. Then, to make it all official, Rebekah came up with a scheme to disguise Jacob in animal skins (to mimic the more hirsute Esau) and have him slip into the presence of his father, who was now almost blind. In this way, Jacob steals the blessing from Isaac that is intended for Esau. When Esau realizes what has happened, it looks like he is going to kill Jacob in revenge, so Rebekah packs Jacob off to her brother, Laban, who lives in the north in Haran. There Jacob falls in love with Laban’s daughter, Rachel, and works for his uncle for seven years to secure her hand in marriage. When at long last the time comes for the wedding, Jacob is himself the victim of a trick—and ends up hitched to the elder daughter, Leah. So he knuckles down for another seven years to get Rachel as well. The Bible’s first family makes most other families look functional.
All together, Jacob has twelve sons and one daughter by four different women. Jacob’s favorite son is Joseph, a preference usually attributed to the fact that, after another long wait, Joseph was the first child he had with Rachel. Jacob buys Joseph a special coat, which provokes jealousy among his siblings, and so the next generation of bad behavior gets under way. But there may well be another reason that Jacob feels something special for Joseph. Joseph understands dreams. Like his father, he knows that however complex life can get there is no guarantee that sleep is going to be any more simple. In the Qur’an also, Joseph is presented as a man at home in the landscape of dreams; the prophet Muhammad was, on occasion, guided by dreams and understood them as part of God’s revelation. Indeed, the holy book describes the Night of Destiny, Laylat al-Qadr, which occurred on Mount Hira around 610. On this night, God’s word came to the prophet as a source of peace and light in darkness; the description has a dream-like quality. Yet the prophet was also suspicious of the practice of divining dreams, which was part and parcel of the colorful religious climate in which he lived and which he sought to simplify.
The biblical Jacob’s sleep took him to places he would rather not have gone. For a bloke who only ever wanted to stay at home, he spent a long time away from it. And it was while sleeping by the side of roads that he had two famous dreams. In the first, which takes place on the way to Haran, he sees a ladder reaching from heaven to Earth with angels going up and down it; God appears, identifies himself by name, and declares that Jacob will inherit the land on which he is sleeping. God promises to be with him and keep him safe. Yet when Jacob wakes up, his memory is one of fear and dread. “Surely God is in this place,” he says. He takes the stone that he had used for a pillow, pours oil over it, and makes it a shrine, saying that if God is as good as his word, the pillow will be God’s house. This is a tantalizing image of sharing a resting place with God.
Twenty years later, Jacob, now a wealthy man with many children, is returning home from Haran to encounter Esau for the first time since he fled, when he has another dream, again by the side of the road, again when he is sleeping alone. But this dream, less well-known to the popular imagination than the story of Jacob’s ladder, is radically different from the one he hosted as a younger man. This time, a mysterious figure wrestles with him until first light and, despite Jacob’s pleading, refuses to divulge his name. Rather, the figure changes Jacob’s name to Israel, because he was able to hold his own against God. Jacob is wounded in the hip and leaves the encounter with a limp that will slow him down for the rest of his days. Yet he is grateful to have seen God face-to-face and to have got away at all. The reader can’t even be sure if it was a dream or something else. It never says that Jacob slept; only that he struggled “until the breaking of day.”
There is a lot of growth between these two stories of the night. The younger man dreams of a God who is full of promises and who will help him find rest. The older man wrestles with a God who won’t even reveal his identity. The older man has found a deeper faith, one with fewer answers and that leaves him limping.
Our little boy won the name of Jacob because of this. We named him after the guy who slept by the road and was discovered there by something larger than life, something that became harder to name as he got older. Our Jacob’s name is a prayer that he will never stop grappling with life’s mysteries, that he can be still long enough for the spirit to find him, that he can stop moving long enough to be moved.
I have watched our Jacob searching for sleep in the wee hours. He thrashes about, twists himself, raises an arm and gets himself in a headlock. It goes on and on. He is wrestling. Finally he throws in the towel and his face relaxes into a peaceful surrender, and I tiptoe out of the room, afraid of disturbing his rest.
Every night for the last twelve years, Anne has slept by the phone. She suffers from multiple sclerosis, a cruel illness that restricts her mobility and the symptoms of which, for her, include fatigue. But that is not the reason for the phone. Anne waits for calls. A few minutes after half past two in the morning, perhaps, the phone will ring.
Sometimes the caller is a nuisance, which is why Anne prefers to keep her last name
private. But more often than not, somebody is calling for a few words of reassurance. They ask Anne a straightforward question: Am I still alive?
Anne tells them that, yes, they are alive, and then they hang up, released from their confusion, at least for tonight.
The callers have narcolepsy, a debilitating malady best known for its more public symptoms. People who live with narcolepsy are prone to sudden attacks of sleep, often at inconvenient times, such as when they are under a shower or at a staff meeting. Narcolepsy doesn’t always give warnings of the onset of sleep; there is no dusk before dark. The waking state just goes off like a light.
The other public symptoms of narcolepsy include extraordinary sleepiness during the day and a condition known as cataplexy, the real hallmark of the condition, in which some of a person’s muscles suddenly lose their strength and that person may just fall to the ground, lose grip on something they are holding, or perhaps have their facial muscles fall into an appearance over which they have no control. These situations may last minutes or seconds depending on the individual. They can be triggered by emotional surges, such as laughing at a joke or becoming angry.
In addition to this, there is a private side of narcolepsy that is even more frightening.
One of the features of narcolepsy is the ability to slip straight from wakefulness into REM sleep. This can happen in other situations, such as with tired youngsters or those who have had sleep apnea for years and finally discover effective treatment. But it is an aberration. For most people, before midnight there are four distinct stages of sleep that precede REM sleep, and each of these is characterized by a different pattern of brain waves. These four stages culminate in “deep sleep,” a period in which the brain is least active and in which sleep takes over from the brain as the boss of your life. In this state, sleep regulates a number of tasks that need to be accomplished after the wear and tear of another day. That busy beaver known as the cerebal cortex has a break while growth hormone and melatonin do you favors that you would only mess up if you had any say over the matter. You don’t dream in deep sleep. Your mind gets out of the road so that your body can look after itself. Deep sleep is the healthiest part of your day, the time when you’ve left the room so that your body can talk about you honestly.
About an hour and a half after falling asleep, a profound change comes over the nature of sleep, marking the arrival of REM sleep. In this state of rapid eye movement, it is the frenetic activity of your eyes behind closed eyelids that indicates the brain is tired of being stuck on the sideline and wants to start playing again; more than that, it wants to captain the team. In deep sleep, your brain is still while your body is quiet and stable with slow regular heart rate and low blood pressure. In REM sleep, however, your body is physiologically active, and your brain gets restless. Most dreams, although not all, take place in REM sleep when the body is paralyzed, as a natural defense mechanism to stop us acting out our dreams, one of nature’s really good ideas. REM sleep is so different from the other parts of sleep that even as nonscientists we can think of three states in our human life: wakefulness, sleep, and REM sleep. It may seem strange that REM was not clinically observed until 1953. But there is a simple reason why a species so obsessed with itself seems to have overlooked such an important part of its daily behavior for forty thousand generations: everybody is asleep when it happens.
There is fierce debate over the function of REM sleep, an experience that is by no means unique to humans. Some of these views we have already heard, and there are people who believe REM is the heart of sleep, the culmination of the four stages that came before it, the crucial factor in the consolidation of memory—although the relationship between REM and memory is a particular bone of contention. Francis Crick—one of the discoverers in 1953, along with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, of the double helix of DNA— proposed in the 1980s that “in REM sleep, there is an automatic correction mechanism which works to reduce … possible confusion of memories.” In other words, he saw REM sleep as integral to the working of the mind’s elaborate filing system, also known as memory. Others believe that REM has more affinity with wakefulness than sleep and is, in fact, a preparation for wakefulness.
Narcoplepsy allows the rest of us to understand what can happen when the cycle of sleep gets disrupted and for some reason REM sleep decides to come before the other stages. People with narcolepsy may well be in the REM stage within minutes of falling asleep.
One of the symptoms of narcolepsy is sleep paralysis, a situation in which a person is awake, conscious, and their mind is fully active. But they can’t move. For a few terrifying moments, the body and brain simply don’t seem to connect with each other.
The other private symptom is hallucination. The immediate onset of REM can bring immediate dreams. The problem is that without the slow process that usually leads to REM, a person with narcolepsy can have genuine problems telling if their dreams are real or not. They may wake up in the morning and head off to appointments they have only dreamt about or start looking desperately for the keys of cars they have only dreamt they own. To make matters worse, the dreams are often nasty.
That is why they might ring Anne in the early hours of the morning. They have just dreamt that they are dead. They need an outsider to tell them this is not true.
Anne is a nurse who first encountered narcolepsy when she was training in 1956; one day she found a fellow nurse propped up against a wall, able to hear but not move. She later found herself married to a schoolteacher who has narcolepsy, a condition that isn’t life threatening but that has treatment rather than a cure. It is a long-haul illness. Anne’s husband waited for ages before he found a doctor who was able to respond appropriately. In the meantime, he would come straight home from school and fall asleep. He would then need another nap later in the evening to wake himself up enough in order get himself to bed. Once he was in bed, he also had PLMD (periodic limb movement disorder), which meant that his night’s sleep usually cost Anne a few bruises. Some of the couple’s children also have narcolepsy; a genetic factor has often been observed, but the condition is not inevitable. It is possible for one identical twin to have narcolepsy and the other not.
Part of dealing with all this has meant, for Anne, being available to help others. “A woman rang me at some ungodly hour, just after half past two,” she says. “There was an angel in her room so she needed to know if she was dead yet. I told her she wasn’t and she said that was fine, but she sounded slightly disappointed. She said that it had been very pleasant flying around the room.”
None of this experience has led Anne, a devout Lutheran, to doubt her faith in her own dreams: “Ever since I was nine or ten years old, I have been getting dreams from God in which I have been told to pass on messages,” she tells me. “On five occasions I was told to inform my aunt that she was pregnant. Twice she miscarried but three of those children are still alive. When my mother-in-law died, she hadn’t even been sick but the moment the phone rang I knew what it was. Some people are just given this biblical gift, and I am one of them. I don’t know how it happens, but God uses me. I come out with my voice, but it’s God talking. So when I am counseling, I will be guided in certain ways. I am guided to what God wants me to say.”
Anne does not answer the phone between dawn and noon.
Narcolepsy is rare, although the incidence of it varies from country to country. It is more common than leukemia and affects a similar percentage of people as Parkinson’s disease, at least one in two thousand. It was initially thought to be far more freakish, and like many sleep disorders, narcolepsy has a long history of not being taken seriously. It was first marked in the scientific record in 1881 by a French doctor, John-Baptiste-Edouard Gélineau.
Born in 1828, Gélineau became a naval doctor and had some risqué adventures in the Indian Ocean, before settling down to private practice in a rural community, where he had time and space to indulge his interest in natural history. He made his money when, in 1871, he developed a head
y brew of bromide, antimony, and picrotoxin, which he marketed as a cure for epilepsy and sold in tablet form. The success of the product probably says more about the desperation, at the time, of families living with epilepsy than it does about the efficacy of the pills. The history of sleep medicine is likewise full of wonder cures. People will pay almost anything for a decent night’s sleep.
Gélineau went on to establish a neurological clinic in Paris. One day, a 38-year-old approached him with a bewildering problem. The man was a vital member of the local community; he sold wine barrels. But this active businessman was prone to sudden episodes of sleep in any situation; he also had a proclivity to fall down for no apparent reason, a condition Gélineau called astasia but which we know as cataplexy. Gélineau’s observations were astute. He noted that astasia was different from epilepsy in that an epileptic seizure tended to make muscles tighten and contract. Astasia had the opposite effect; the muscles turned to jelly, and furthermore, the attacks seemed to switch off as suddenly as they switched on. He rightly observed that these attacks seemed to follow occasions of strong emotion which, for a French wine barrel merchant, were not infrequent. Gélineau was also correct in his deduction that the problem was somehow located in the brain. In 1880, he coined the term narcolepsy to describe the whole complex. But the medical mainstream wasn’t especially interested in the findings of a maverick, and it wasn’t until the discovery of REM in 1953 that his work was given credit. Meanwhile, Gélineau had found there were other ways to help people sleep. In 1900, he returned to Bordeaux to make wine.
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