The Sleepyhead's Bedside Companion
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A fact-filled, quirky and maddeningly diverting bedside companion to the pleasures and pains of sleep, covering everything from pyjamas and dreams, pillows and narcolepsy to sex and insomnia. Sleep remains one of the most mysterious areas of our lives. We all sleep, maybe not as much as we would like, but it's a universal human experience, as necessary as breathing and as nourishing as eating. But how much do we really know about sleep? What happens in the third of our lives when we're slumbering? How have sleep, dreams and nightmares been interpreted over the centuries? Why do so many people feel that they are deprived of sleep? How did our ancestors use to sleep?Sleep has its own unexpected and rich story - ranging across science, history, literature and philosophy. It's been a cultural battleground between those who see sleep as a gift from nature and those who have seen it as an idle waste of time. In an overcrowded, exhausting 24-hour culture, sleep has become a valuable, rationed commodity. It's something that people are thinking about more than ever before. This bedside-table companion responds to this interest in sleep, providing a mixture of short, browsable pieces and more extended sections. The style is informed, thoughtful and entertaining, in keeping with the subject matter. It is intelligent but playful, quirky and amusing. Any study of sleep has to savour the delight of the long lie-in, the sexual musk of night time; discuss the history of the bed, the origin of pyjamas and how the Elizabethans saw the pillow as a sign of moral weakness and examine why the Italians called the bed the 'the opera of the poor'.
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''To die, to sleep- To sleep, perchance to dream-ay, there's the rub. For in this sleep of death what dreams may come.''
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
The immortal words of the Bard evoke a belief that goes back to the ancient days and the Greek Mythology. Nyx, the goddess of Night, has two twin sons, their names Hypnos and Thanatos. Hypnos is Morpheus, the Winged god of Sleep and Dreams, and Thanatos is the god of Death. It seems to me, my forefathers got something right, for if we come to think of it, how else can the state of sleep be described, similar to that certain greater rest? And to continue with being morbid, isn't sleepwalking a bit as if the human being -made of flesh and blood- becomes a ghost? Worse than that, an automaton with no perception and consciousness? On the other hand, let us think of hibernation, this miracle of Nature that helps sustain the existence of so many species.
Insomnia, night terrors, recurring and prophetic dreams, the effects of sleep deprivation on beings, the notions of Freud and Jung about sleep and many more topics grace the pages of this extremely interesting and innovative book. Written in simple, clear language and with the right amount of quirkiness- let us admit it, sleep can be quite quirky by itself- Sean Coughlan has created a wonderful account of this sweet and frightening thing we call ‘‘Sleep''. It is a book that will make you think, contemplate on questions that are, seemingly, without answers, on something most of us consider a given thing.
''Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care, the death of each day's life, sore labour's bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, chief nourisher in life's feast.''
Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 2
Well, after reading this book, William, not so much....
