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. 

As Sleep Cultures demonstrates sleep is unarguably open to multi-disciplinary approaches: biological, sociological, psychological, and in the field of literature. What then of my discipline, that of Christian theology?

I am Anglican chaplain at the University of Surrey and on a whim I attended the roundtable on ‘Sleep, Embodiment, Cognition: an interdisciplinary conversation’. This was the first time I had given any thought to the phenomenon of sleep.

Since then I have had a voracious appetite for thinking about sleep theologically. The theological and spiritual traditions have much to say about sleep as part of human experience and also about the nature of God, and therefore is legitimately part of the theological pursuit.

Sleep is profoundly theological because it describes characteristics and perceptions of God, albeit in conflicting ways. On the one hand, ‘He [God] who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep’ (Psalm 121.4); on the other ‘Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord?’ (Psalm 44.23).

Jesus himself sleeps on the boat in the storm, thereby embodying the deep peace of his divine-human nature, and yet ‘the Son of Man [Jesus] has nowhere to lay his head’ (Matthew 8.20). When the disciples sleep in the Garden of Gethsemane before Jesus’ betrayal they are chastised: ‘So, [Peter] could you not stay awake with me one hour?’ (Matthew 26.40)

The Bible and Christian spiritual tradition have no systematic treatment of sleep but are full of sleep imagery often with contradictory images. For example it is a metaphor of inattentiveness: ‘if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you must also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour’ (Matthew 24.43, 44). It also focuses the believer on being attentive; hence St Paul’s rousing call, ‘now is the moment to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than we when we became believers’. (Romans 13.11)

Theological anthropology sees sleep as a time of loss of control. So when the individual is ‘taken over by sleep’ it is a time when God may said to be most fully in control. God no longer has to battle with an assertive ego. But that opens the possibility that evil can take the upper hand, so sleep becomes a time of fearfulness. Sleep is also integral to the relationship between mortals and God in God’s communication in dreams and nocturnal revelation.

The way that Christianity has articulated and embodied a theology of sleep is in liturgy and hymnody. Night Prayer asks God for rest, guarding and companionship during the lonely hours. Evening hymns pick up on similar themes and both ask: ‘save us Lord, while we are awake and guard us while we are asleep…’ (Antiphon to the Nunc Dimittis at Compline) And prayers and hymns express the niggling fear that sleep is like death: ‘Teach me to live, that I may dread / the grave as little as my bed’. ‘Abide with me’ was written as an evening hymn, not for funerals. So sleep also mirrors the wakeful life of the day and anticipates the final sleep of death.

Sleep is never neutral in scripture. The great aspiration for the Christian is hallowed sleep that is derived from and centred in God and that can be taken into the waking hours of the new dawn.