Wednesday, 20 November 2024

On Idler 32: On Sleep

 I have a few books to review but my thoughts on them have not properly formed yet, so I go, as I often do to one of Johnson’s essays. The one I picked was from the 25th of November, close to the date I am writing this but from the year 1758.

It’s about sleep and that appealed to me because I am currently feeling very sleepy. However, Johnson’s thoughts on sleep spin off into some very uncomfortable directions, ones that may keep a reader awake.


He begins neutrally (and Johnsonianly) enough, by talking about how we are so used to sleep that we accept it as a given and ask few questions about it. Yet sleep is a very strange thing. Even in the twenty-first century we have only flimsy ideas of what it is and why we need it. We have theories about the repackaging ideas and strengthening neural paths. We know good sleep knits our bodies back together and reduce stress - we still don’t know exactly why or how.


Sleep is a huge change in us. We go from moving, active souls to ones dead to the world (even those who move around a lot as I do). As Johnson says; “the gay and the gloomy, the witty and the dull, the clamorous and the silent, the busy and the idle, are all overpowered by the gentle tyrant, and all lie down in the equality of sleep.”


Sleep is a great leveller. All people need it and succumb to it eventually. Even Alexander the Great needed sleep, and regarded that as one of the main things that reminded him that he was human. There have been people who tried to do without it, Margaret Thatcher famously said she only had four hours of sleep a night, we don’t know how that affected her or helped cause the dementia she suffered late in life. Ronald Reagan also claimed to sleep four hours a night and succumbed to it, Trump claims to have only three.


Johnson also notes that sleep is the end of waking emotion, that all emotions are turned off by sleep - and that we are glad to do it. This is where he starts walking down a very dark path. 


“There is no height of happiness or honour, from which man does not eagerly descend to a state of unconscious repose.” Even the happiest, most fulfilled person reaches a part of the day when they want nothing more to do than sleep. In some ways it makes us equal, there is not state or position in life which we don’t want to let slide into unconsciousness. Those “distinctions of mankind are more show than value” if even the greatest can’t bear to be conscious of their greatness for more than a few hours. Johnson sees people’s desire to sleep as a sign of their unhappiness at being awake. “All envy would be extinguished, if it were universally known that there are none to be envied, and surely none can be much envied who are not pleased with themselves.”


What’s more, sleep is not enough. We try and escape ourselves in other ways too. As well as sleep, Alexander took away his consciousness by drinking. If it’s not drink, it’s a daydream, being lost in a good book, music. “Almost every man has some art by which he steals his thoughts away from his present state.” To Johnson we need sleep because being awake is such a painful state.


Although Johnson would lay in long, he wasn’t very good at getting to sleep and would have people talking to him till late in the night. He mentions this as well, saying that company is just another way of being outside oneself. “In solitude we have our dreams to ourselves, and in company we agree to dream in concert.” 


In the end, for Johnson all we really want in life is “forgetfulness of ourselves”. That is a gloomy thought but I’m in a gloomy mood. Off to bed. 




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