Insomnia: A Cultural History

178 Pages·2008·0.95 MB·English

by  Eluned Summers-Bremner

Insomnia
A C U LT U R A L H I STO RY
ElunedSummers-Bremner

Insomnia

Insomnia
A Cultural History
Eluned Summers-Bremner
reaktion books
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
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First published 2008
Copyright © Eluned Summers-Bremner 2008
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
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recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Summers-Bremner, Eluned
Insomnia : a cultural history
1. Insomnia 2. Insomnia - Social aspects 3.Wakefulness in literature
4. Sleep - Folklore
I. Title
306.4´61
isbn: 978 1 86189 317 8
Contents
Introduction 7
1 Sleeplessness in the Ancient World 14
2 Love, Labour, Anxiety 35
3 The Sleep of Reason 62
4 The Night of Empire 83
5 Cities That Never Sleep 110
6 Wired 129
References 150
Bibliography 169
Acknowledgements 174
Photo Acknowledgements 176

Introduction
W
hat is insomnia? Medical practitioners describe it as the
habitual inability to fall asleep or remain asleep when one
wishes or needs to do so. As such, it would seem to be an individual
complaint. And yet, sleep specialists also maintain that the contem-
porary world continually reproduces the conditions for insomnia.
Many of us work longer hours than our parents did, leaving less
time to switch off into leisure mode, and globalization has made
our jobs increasingly re-configurable, giving rise to worry as well as
to the presence of work in the home space. We are accustomed to
communicating all the time, by technological means when others
are unavailable, and have largely abandoned the resource of the free
and available-for-musing moment in which sleep is likely to catch
us. Bright lights make night into daytime, and 24-hour licensing
laws make night a potentially endless, noisy party. It seems that the
contemporary Western world’s tendency to erase all borders from
which it cannot profit – indeed, it has profited from erasing and
redrawing several of those – meets its match on the border between
sleep and waking. We long for the restorative oblivion that sustains
continuous work and enjoyment, and are at a loss when oblivion
does not come.
Our understanding of sleep may be partly to blame for our
world’s generation of an environment unfavourable to it, however.
We tend to assume that night and sleep go together because of what
they lack – light and activity – and that it is their natural task to
subsidize the labours of the day. It was not always thus. In recent
decades, scientists have reached greater understanding of the way
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Insomnia
in which our circadian (biological) clocks evolved gradually to
enable us to adapt to changing physical and social environments.
These clocks are the equivalent of hunger pains that tell us when
to eat. They would have been particularly important in the ancient
world when sleep was by no means an event to which individuals
felt they were entitled, or, like hunting for food, one that was always
easily achieved. To begin to grasp the history of insomnia, we mod-
erns need to think of sleep in terms similar to those in which we
think of going forth in battle and finding or subduing a food source.
For our ancestors, sleep was, like these activities, something to be
striven for, a quiet state that needed to be gained.
While we, like our ancestors, do battle in and with the dark
hours, we also relentlessly calculate and recalculate their value, often
cutting sleep time in favour of other obligations. And we tend to be
surprised when sleep researchers reveal the variety and extent of
the lives we are unknowingly living while we sleep. Our ancestors
would not have been surprised by this. To them, sleep was an active
part of life whose only distinction from waking activity was that it
usually took place in darkness. The gods might visit a sleeper with
prophetic dreams, or an enemy take advantage of a hasty slumber,
but for early humans the rewards of oblivion were in active relation
to everything else worth living for. We are far more likely to see
sleep as the necessary evil required for a productive and happy life.
The chief difference between ourselves and our forebears with
regard to insomnia is the devaluation of sleep that modernity has
brought us. When sleep is described in the language of awakeness
(as in the psychiatrist William Dement’s well-intended catchphrase
‘The brain never sleeps!’, intended to indicate that sleep is highly
1
active ), its darkest qualities – its enigma, dreamscapes and mortal
connotations – become invisible, hidden by the light. Consequently,
for us, although we do not always know it, insomnia means much
more than loss of sleep. But what it means is hard to access,
because, as well as undervaluing absence – and what is insomnia
but the absence of the oblivion one longs for? – we have difficulty
attributing agency to dark states. Nocturnal literacy, a term I have
coined to describe awareness of the complex interactions of differ-
ent kinds of darkness in their own right, is something globalized
modernity does not value, so we lack a lexicon for nocturnal
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