To Sleep To Dream, Irish Times

Long before they were instructed to aspire to eight hours of uninterrupted shut-eye, people used to engage in “segmented sleep”, slumbering in two distinct shifts. Both Homer and Chaucer referred to a “fyrste sleep” in their narratives, and Ekirch writes of how people filled the hours between sleeping phases with reading, writing, praying, smoking, eating, visiting neighbours, or having sex. (In the 16th century, sex after first sleep was considered the best time to conceive.)
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Yet narcotomy fantasies are just as deep-rooted, where unproductive hours have long been seen as either wasteful or sinful. “There’ll be sleeping enough in the grave,” records Benjamin Franklin in 1741, hardly the only politician to preach a doctrine of wakeful ambition. Margaret Thatcher and Vladimir Putin – neither of them sterling role models – both claimed to subsist on four hours sleep a night. To lesser mortals that qualifies as chronic sleep deprivation.
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Art has never proudly advertised itself as a rest aid, yet it’s not hard to find a proven soporific. Johann Sebastian Bach’s trickling Goldberg Variations – which are being performed this week at Kilkenny Arts Festival – were composed at the behest of an insomniac Russian Count, seeking music that was “smooth and somewhat lively in character”.
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Given the “white nights” described by Beckett in Ohio Impromptu, the “fearful symptoms” of the writer’s own creative and restless struggle, Agate might have been lucky to catch his zs where he found them. You spend your life trying to master the darkness – and all it symbolises – railing against Ballard’s “pseudodeath”, Chandler’s “the big sleep”, while implored by Thomas to “not go gentle into that good night”. A new show at the Edinburgh Fringe, To Sleep To Dream, aware of the anxiety over what people do in the dark, even imagines a world where dreaming has been made illegal. It’s a nightmarish vision, with just a shiver of reality. Still, it’s nothing to lose sleep over.

-Irish Times