In many households, Christmas Eve represents a particularly strong challenge to parents' control of their children's sleeping behaviour. After all, what could be more exciting than the prospect of a house call from a supernatural nocturnal visitor and his team of airborne reindeer? And what are the chances of this excitement expressing itself as, or translating itself into, prompt, deep and unbroken slumber? Christmas Eve is bad for youngsters' sleep. 

Christmas Eve has, of course, long been thought of as a time of wakefulness and vigil. In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Marcellus reports the legend that prior to Christmas, the "bird of dawning singeth all night long," chasing away the fairies, witches and spirits that usually populate the nocturnal hours. The irrepressible "bird of dawning," in this context, is a figure for the stance of sustained prayerful anticipation that characterises a devoted Christian attitude to Christmas, a stance enacted in the celebration of Midnight Mass and in the All Night Vigils that are central to the Christmas liturgy in many traditions.

Contradictory expectations around sleep and wakefulness thus seem to attach themselves to Christmas Eve. It is a time for well-disciplined sleep, then, but also one for pious and open-eyed vigilance. No one should attempt to clap eyes on Santa, but no one should miss the opportunity to bear witness to the miracle of Christmas. These contradictions are memorably negotiated in one of the most successful Christmas songs of the modern era, John Frederick Coots and Haven Gillespie's "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," in which a demand for wakeful vigilance ("You better watch out") co-exists with a demand for good sleeping behaviour ("He sees you when you're sleeping/He knows when you're awake"). Santa Claus figures, in Coots and Gillespie's lyrics, as a kind of benign Sandman who appraises the sleeping behaviour of children, correlating it with their waking conduct ("He knows if you've been bad or good") and dispensing rewards accordingly. The sleep fantasized by this song is thus a sleep of faith or trust, a paradoxically vigilant sleep that banishes the sceptical gaze but keeps one (unopened) eye on Christmas morning. 

The California-based artist, Sioin Queenie Liao, has produced a series of charming images in which her napping baby son Wengenn is positioned against a variety of vivid backdrops created from clothes, stuffed animals and other household materials. Wengenn appears as a trapeze artist, a riverside angler, a shepherd, a TV reporter (quizzing Barack Obama), and in many other guises in these tableaux vivants -- or should that be tableaux dormants? Whatever we want to call them, these images offer a memorable insight not into the dreams of children but into the dreams we dream for them. 

A recent article by Simon Williams (Warwick) in the Royal Society of Arts magazine provides an informative overview of the emergence of sleep as a matter of political concern in recent years. The article, entitled 'Counting Sleep', includes some startling number-crunching: in North America there are now over 1000 accredited sleep clinics; the market for sleep aids is worth some $30bn in the U.S. alone; more than 1.5 billion cups of coffee are consumed worldwide every day; 12% of Britons get by on fewer than six hours' sleep per night. 'The simplest lesson sleep teaches us', Williams concludes, '[is] that our bodies tick to a different clock from that of contemporary capitalism'.

On 25 October 2013, the University of Kent hosted a one-day interdisciplinary conference on exhaustion, organized by Anna Katharina Schaffner (Comparative Literature, Kent) and funded by the Wellcome Trust, that brought together scholars from the arts, medicine, sociology, psychology, literary studies and medical humanities. Dr Schaffner opened proceedings with a detailed overview of definitions and models of exhaustion from the 1880s to the present, including neurasthenia, melancholia, depression, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and burnout. A keynote by Simon Wessely (King’s College, London) showed how a cluster of puzzling symptoms – fatigue, lassitude, demotivation – that came to be known as neurasthenia in the late 1880s and 1890s would, a hundred years later, be variously described as M.E., Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, or Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome. He also focused on real or perceived causal relations between technology and exhaustion, and discussed the late nineteenth-century perception of neurasthenia as a ‘fashionable disease’, a prestigious complaint associated with the excessive mental stimulations of high-order ‘brain work.’

Wilmar Schaufeli (Social and Behavioural Sciences, Utrecht) made the case for differentiating between exhaustion and ‘burnout’ (the latter a term coined by Harold Bradley in 1969 and popularized by psychologists in the 1970s), arguing that burnout is in some sense a strategy of protective withdrawal for over-extended employees. He also noted that the language of burnout seems to be altogether more prominent in Germany and the U.S. than in the U.K. Addressing similar themes, Greta Wagner (Sociology, Frankfurt) discussed burnout in the context of ‘post-Fordist corporate strategy’, arguing that the pressure to perform, the acceleration of working life and the shortening of intervals between which the individual worker is exposed to competition add up to a perfect recipe for burnout. In Germany, the average number of burnout-related sick days has increased roughly eighteen-fold over the last ten years.

In a discussion of two models of perfectionist behaviour, Julian Childs (Anna Freud Centre, University College London) spoke of the exhausting and/or demoralizing consequences of expectations of perfection in the workplace, especially when unattainably high, all-or-nothing standards of achievement are externally imposed rather than self-imposed. In what might be described as an anti-perfectionist model of creativity, Chris Dooks (University of the West of Scotland) reflected on the methodologies – or ‘M.E.thodologies’ – of fragmented film-making that he has developed as a chronically ill practitioner. Rather than envisioning exhaustion as an obstacle to creativity, Dooks maintains that the ‘predicament itself co-authors the work’.

Examining three recent scholarly works on depression by Alain Ehrenberg, Junko Kitanaka and Anne Cvetkovich, Angela Woods (Medical Humanities, Durham) offered a cross-cultural comparison of understandings of the condition in France, Japan and the U.S. Citing Ehrenberg’s startling claim that depression is ‘the perfect disorder of the democratic human being’, she showed how a case can be made, via Cvetkovich, for thinking of the condition as a political and spiritual resource.

What is the opposite of ‘exhaustion’? One answer to this question might be rest, or restedness. But Felicity Callard (Medical Humanities, Durham) showed how the model of the ‘resting’ or ‘inactive’ – ie non-task-oriented – brain has been demolished by recent work in neuroimaging, leading to a new appreciation of ‘resting’ activities, including mind-wandering and daydreaming, as elements of the productive and generative activity of the brain rather than as pleasant downtime for the grey matter.

How does exhaustion narrate or represent itself? Jenny Laws (Medical Humanities, Durham) raised this question in a talk that probed the rhetorics of energy and desire associated with the ‘active patient’ agenda. Whatever the merits of this agenda, the expectation, or demand, that patients must actively want to get better is a tricky one for those who feel exhausted, and Laws displayed some very striking images in which her interviewees envisaged their own fluctuating energy levels. The aesthetics of exhaustion were also the focus of a talk by Michael Greaney (English and Creative Writing, Lancaster), which explored literary narratives in which the pose of fatigue serves as a refuge from the inexhaustible demands of modernity.

The event closed with a roundtable discussion that re-stated some key questions: Is exhaustion an ever-present in human experience? Or does it have a history? Does it manifest itself in different ways in different eras or in different geographical regions? If gruelling over-work has been the lot of most people for most of human history, then why does exhaustion seem to come into its own as a vogue illness in what is, for many, an age of labour-saving devices and relative affluence? Given the liveliness of these final exchanges, it seems fair to say that these questions are not going to be exhausted anytime soon.

Ian Parker’s fascinating article in the December 9th issue of The New Yorker focuses on Merck’s efforts to secure FDA approval for suvorexant, an innovatory sleeping pill that has yet to reach the market.  Although the FDA has signed off on suvorexant, it has prescribed a dosage level that, while proven in clinical trials to increase sleep time, has failed to convince insomnia sufferers they are being helped: “In the Phase II trial, this dose of suvorexant had helped to turn off the orexin system in the brains of insomniacs, and it had extended sleep, but its impact didn’t register with users.  It worked, but who would notice?” 

As Parker puts it elsewhere in the article, “insomnia is a condition not just of losing sleep but of being disturbed by sleeplessness. … This emphasis on the subjective also makes the amnesiac effect of sleep drugs oddly advantageous to those who manufacture them: the drugs inhibit people from creating memories of waking during the night.”

“To bedward”: The Phenomenology and Ecology of Bedtime Prayer in the Age of Shakespeare

Julia Reinhard Lupton

The University of California, Irvine

                                Macbeth does murder sleep, the innocent sleep,

                                Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care,

                                                        Macbeth, II.ii.34-39

Before he smothers her in their bed, Othello asks Desdemona if she has said her prayers tonight. In Cymbeline, we get to hear Imogen say her bedtime prayers (she also reads some pages from Ovid). In Macbeth, as the hero returns from stabbing the king in his bed, he hears two men wake in the night and exchange a prayer, and finds himself unable to say “Amen.”

      Evening prayers of various sorts – some said upon greeting the coming dusk and lighting the night’s first candles, others pronounced upon undressing for bed, and a final group said just before climbing into the sack -- were a key part of bed time rituals in Shakespeare’s England. In these prayers, the specter of dying in one’s sleep looms large, but so do sexual dreams and the entertainment of forbidden thoughts. As Andrew Bishop notes on this site, night prayers ask God “for rest, guarding, and companionship during the lonely hours” (http://www.sleepcultures.com/2/post/2013/10/sleep-and-christian-theology-a-guest-post-by-andrew-bishop.html). Imagining micro-dramas of sin and betrayal, arousal and accident, bedtime prayers choreograph speech, posture and gesture in an act that acknowledges creaturely vulnerability in order to build trust. In a beautiful prayer by Saint Alphonsus Liguori (1697-1787), the speaker asked Jesus to lodge him “within your sacred side and under the mantle of our Lady” (http://www.catholicity.com/prayer/prayer-before-sleep.html), transforming the wounds of God and the cloak of Mary into a cosy sleeping pod. Bed time prayers often mention the Queen and her counsellors as well as family, friends, neighbors, and the needy, laying out the speaker’s place in a larger social order. (Sometimes the universities are remembered, too!)

      Such prayers contribute to a larger ecology of sleep that weaves home furnishings, circadian shifts, and metabolic deceleration into a general nesting strategy that detaches consciousness from the world by melting the sleeping subject into her soft surrounds. In Shakespeare’s plays, the accoutrements of sleep include candles, pillows, linens, blankets, and curtains. Arrases not only draped beds to create a room within the room, but also warmed the walls, muting sound and adding edifying stories while sometimes inserting a membrane of storage space between wall and chamber (as in Hamlet). “Possets” or bed time drinks invited sleep to come more easily (Macbeth), as could quiet music and ritual undressing (Othello).

      Seeking insight into the murder of sleep in Macbeth, I stumbled on an exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library (http://www.folger.edu/Content/Whats-On/Folger-Exhibitions/Past-Exhibitions/To-Sleep-Perchance-to-Dream/). The digital gallery includes Richard Day’s A Book of Christian Prayer, an unusually lovely volume that offers a total of nine prayers designed to ease the uncertainties of the night. My favorite entry is “A prayer to be said when we unclothe ourselves to bedward.” The word “bedward” describes evening prayer as fundamentally an act of orientation, of affective and bodily settling in response to the time of day and its atmospheric attributes. Like many bedtime prayers of the period, the prose-poem links sleep and death. The speaker asks God to not let him die in his sleep:

      Now therefore, thou O most loving Father, which hast set me together: dissolve me in such wise as I may feel myself to be dissolved, and remember of whom I am overcome, and consider whither I must go.

      Acknowledging that his creaturely estate has been assembled (“set together”) by God, the speaker accepts the coming slumber as a temporary dissolving of consciousness that anticipates the final dissolution effected by death. He asks not to avoid death tout court, but rather to be dissolved in such a way that he feels himself to be dissolved: he wants the courage as well as the opportunity to experience his death as death, so that the loss of consciousness can become the content of a special kind of awareness. Day’s prayer directs mindful attention towards an ambient array of affined dissolutions -- wake and sleep, personhood and creatureliness, investiture and nakedness, life and death – in order to test the timbre of his own subjectivity.

      That Day expresses these thoughts on the occasion of undressing for bed subliminally associates the qualities of fabric with the properties of consciousness, each capable of folding, stretching, wrapping, and tearing.  Clothes afford donning and stripping, protection but also exposure; moreover, in the act of dressing and undressing, the fabric that becomes largely continuous with our skin as we move about our daily tasks separates and becomes tangible as an occasion for proprioception, or feeling oneself feel. More precisely, Day wants to “feel himself dissolve”: he wants to experience a transitional phenomenon that frays his cognitive capacities even as he exercises those capacities.  A kind of immanent and affective Cartesianism draws the melting into air rehearsed each time we fall asleep into a knot of something permanent (thought, mind, soul) that congeals precisely in and as the act of knowingly undergoing the end of knowing.

      I am struck by the semantic and emotional undertow connecting Day’s image of dissolution to Macbeth’s description of sleep as “knitting up the raveled sleeve of care.” One picture that emerges here is of sleep winding a tunnel (sleeve) of comforting darkness around the self-abandoning consciousness of a being undone by a day of exertion. We might even say that the image “yawns,” that it evokes the opening and closing of the throat that models the relinquishment of consciousness at the verge of slumber. Shakespeare’s metaphor both affirms the loss of consciousness and poetically tracks that loss in an enigmatically dream-like image of auto-poetic mending. For both Day and Shakespeare, sleep pivots between doing and undoing, coming apart and making new. In the psychotheology of everyday life, evening prayers are atmosphere-responders, mood-regulators, and soul-stewards that tune the speaker’s bodily processes and cognitive capacities to her immediate setting and to the cosmic rhythms and social orders in which she counts her days. In Shakespeare’s plays, bedtime prayers provide a liturgico-domestic score for the perils of sleep and the violation of its soft safeguards as well as an entry into the poetics of experience at the unravelling edges of consciousness. To “murder sleep” is to cut through the layers of protection and repair promised by the soft affordances of both pillows and pillow talk, but also to submit sleep’s softscape to ecological analysis and proprioceptive appreciation.