[W]hen asleep no man is worth anything, any more than if he were dead : on the contrary, every one of us who cares most greatly for life and thought
keeps awake as long as possible, only reserving so much time for sleep as his health requires.
Plato, Laws (c360 BCE)
[O]nce in four-and-twenty hours, 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.
Samuel Johnson, "On Sleep" (1758)
I wish I could write a chapter upon sleep.
A fitter occasion could never have presented itself, that what this moment offers, when all the curtains of the family are drawn – the candles put out – and no creature’s eyes are open but a single one, for the other has been shut these twenty years, of my mother’s nurse.
It is a fine subject!
And yet, as fine as it is, I would undertake to write a dozen chapters upon buttonholes, both quicker and with more fame, than a single chapter upon this.
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1767)
What is more gentle than a wind in summer?
What is more soothing than the pretty hummer
That stays one moment in an open flower,
And buzzes cheerily from bower to bower?
What is more tranquil than a musk-rose blowing
In a green island, far from all men’s knowing?
More healthful than the leafiness of dales?
More secret than a nest of nightingales?
More serene than Cordelia’s countenance?
More full of visions than a high romance?
What, but thee Sleep? Soft closer of our eyes!
Low murmurer of tender lullabies!
Light hoverer around our happy pillows!
Wreather of poppy buds, and weeping willows!
Silent entangler of a beauty’s tresses!
Most happy listener! when the morning blesses
Thee for enlivening all the cheerful eyes
That glance so brightly at the new sun-rise.
John Keats, 'Sleep and Poetry' (1817)
O soft embalmer of the still midnight!
Shutting with careful fingers and benign
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,
In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes,
Or wait the amen, ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities;
Then save me, or the passèd day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes;
Save me from curious conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oilèd wards,
And seal the hushèd casket of my soul.
John Keats, ‘To Sleep’ (1821)
But, Sleep. I will think about Sleep. I am determined [...] to think about Sleep. I must hold the word Sleep tight and fast, or I shall be off at a tangent in half a second.
Charles Dickens, ‘Lying Awake’ (1852)
‘“Life! […] It keeps disturbing you. Gives you no peace! I wish I could lie down and go to sleep – for ever!”’
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov (1859)
Sleeping is no mean art, it is necessary to remain awake the entire day for it.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885)
The great modification brought about by awakening is not so much our entry into the clear life of consciousness as the loss of all memory of the slightly more subdued light in which our mind had been resting, as in the opaline depths of the sea. The half-veiled thoughts on which we were still drifting a moment ago involved us in quite enough motion for us to refer to them as wakefulness. But then our awakenings themselves involve an interruption of memory. A short time later we describe what preceded them as sleep because we no longer remember it. And when the bright star which, at the moment of waking, lights up behind the sleeper the whole expanse of his sleep, begins to shine, it creates the momentary illusion that he was not sleeping but awake; a shooting star in reality, which dispels along with its fading light both the illusory existence and the contours of the dream and merely enables the waking man to say: ‘I’ve been asleep’.
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (1920-1)
Sleep reveals the worst side of everyone, children perhaps excepted.
James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
‘How strange’, said Jinny, ‘that people should sleep, that people should put out the lights and go upstairs. They have taken off their dresses, they have put on white nightgowns. There are no lights in any of these houses. There is a line of chimney-pots against the sky; and a street lamp or two burning, as lamps burn when nobody needs them. The only people in the streets are poor people hurrying. There is no one coming or going in this street; the day is over.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)
[S]leep brings to all a like immobility. And an innate reverence, even apprehension perhaps, of this so usual miracle almost forbids one watching too closely any fellow creature in armchair or railway carriage thus lost to the world and actuality.
Walter de la Mare, Behold, this Dreamer! (1939)
He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue…
How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!
Those sugary planets whose influence won for him
A life baptized in no-life for a while,
And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.
Sylvia Plath, ‘Insomniac’ (1961)
I fell asleep. But I do not want to sleep. There is no time for sleep in my time-table. I do not want to – no, I have no explanations to give. Coma is for the living. The living.
Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies (1956)
The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. It is, on the whole, a merciful arrangement. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. We are intermittent creatures, always falling to little ends and rising to little new beginnings. Our soon-tired consciousness is meted out in chapters, and that the world will look quite different tomorrow is, both for our comfort and our discomfort, usually true. How marvellously too night matches sleep, sweet image of it, so neatly apportioned to our need. Angels must wonder at these beings who fall so regularly out of awareness into a fantasm-infested dark. How our frail identities survive these chasms no philosopher has ever been able to explain.
Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince (1973)
[T]he famous but misunderstood Dr Rudolf Steiner had much to say on the deeper aspects of sleep. Steiner’s books, which I began to read lying down, made me want to get up. He argued that between the conception of an act and its execution by the will there fell a gap of sleep. It might be brief but it was deep. For one of man’s souls was a sleep-soul. In this, human beings resembled the plants, whose whole existence is sleep. This made a very deep impression on me. The truth about sleep could only be seen from the perspective of an immortal spirit.
Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift (1975)
Most of the jobs advertised these days insist on a non-sleeper. Sleeping is dirty, unhygienic, wasteful and disrespectful to others. All public spaces are designated ‘Non-Sleeping’ and even a quick nap on a park bench carries a £50 fine. You can still sleep in your own home but all new beds are required by law to have a personal alarm clock built into the mattress. If you get caught on a bed-check with a dead alarm, that’s another £50 fine. Three fines and you are disqualified from sleeping for a year.
Jeanette Winterson, ‘Disappearance I’ (1998)
I never fall asleep in public. It's always extraordinary to patrol a planeful or trainful of people, trusting as newborns, sprawling in search of minimum discomfort, slack-jawed, legs apart, hair awry, skirts and trouser legs crumpled and careless, snorting and snoring in full view of a crowd of strangers. I suppose the assumption is that the strangers, too, are asleep, and a condition of mutually-assured unconsciousness obtains. But there is always me, at least, peering at the touching and terrifying vulnerability of the publicly unconscious.
Jenny Diski (2008)
keeps awake as long as possible, only reserving so much time for sleep as his health requires.
Plato, Laws (c360 BCE)
[O]nce in four-and-twenty hours, 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.
Samuel Johnson, "On Sleep" (1758)
I wish I could write a chapter upon sleep.
A fitter occasion could never have presented itself, that what this moment offers, when all the curtains of the family are drawn – the candles put out – and no creature’s eyes are open but a single one, for the other has been shut these twenty years, of my mother’s nurse.
It is a fine subject!
And yet, as fine as it is, I would undertake to write a dozen chapters upon buttonholes, both quicker and with more fame, than a single chapter upon this.
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1767)
What is more gentle than a wind in summer?
What is more soothing than the pretty hummer
That stays one moment in an open flower,
And buzzes cheerily from bower to bower?
What is more tranquil than a musk-rose blowing
In a green island, far from all men’s knowing?
More healthful than the leafiness of dales?
More secret than a nest of nightingales?
More serene than Cordelia’s countenance?
More full of visions than a high romance?
What, but thee Sleep? Soft closer of our eyes!
Low murmurer of tender lullabies!
Light hoverer around our happy pillows!
Wreather of poppy buds, and weeping willows!
Silent entangler of a beauty’s tresses!
Most happy listener! when the morning blesses
Thee for enlivening all the cheerful eyes
That glance so brightly at the new sun-rise.
John Keats, 'Sleep and Poetry' (1817)
O soft embalmer of the still midnight!
Shutting with careful fingers and benign
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,
In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes,
Or wait the amen, ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities;
Then save me, or the passèd day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes;
Save me from curious conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oilèd wards,
And seal the hushèd casket of my soul.
John Keats, ‘To Sleep’ (1821)
But, Sleep. I will think about Sleep. I am determined [...] to think about Sleep. I must hold the word Sleep tight and fast, or I shall be off at a tangent in half a second.
Charles Dickens, ‘Lying Awake’ (1852)
‘“Life! […] It keeps disturbing you. Gives you no peace! I wish I could lie down and go to sleep – for ever!”’
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov (1859)
Sleeping is no mean art, it is necessary to remain awake the entire day for it.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885)
The great modification brought about by awakening is not so much our entry into the clear life of consciousness as the loss of all memory of the slightly more subdued light in which our mind had been resting, as in the opaline depths of the sea. The half-veiled thoughts on which we were still drifting a moment ago involved us in quite enough motion for us to refer to them as wakefulness. But then our awakenings themselves involve an interruption of memory. A short time later we describe what preceded them as sleep because we no longer remember it. And when the bright star which, at the moment of waking, lights up behind the sleeper the whole expanse of his sleep, begins to shine, it creates the momentary illusion that he was not sleeping but awake; a shooting star in reality, which dispels along with its fading light both the illusory existence and the contours of the dream and merely enables the waking man to say: ‘I’ve been asleep’.
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (1920-1)
Sleep reveals the worst side of everyone, children perhaps excepted.
James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
‘How strange’, said Jinny, ‘that people should sleep, that people should put out the lights and go upstairs. They have taken off their dresses, they have put on white nightgowns. There are no lights in any of these houses. There is a line of chimney-pots against the sky; and a street lamp or two burning, as lamps burn when nobody needs them. The only people in the streets are poor people hurrying. There is no one coming or going in this street; the day is over.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)
[S]leep brings to all a like immobility. And an innate reverence, even apprehension perhaps, of this so usual miracle almost forbids one watching too closely any fellow creature in armchair or railway carriage thus lost to the world and actuality.
Walter de la Mare, Behold, this Dreamer! (1939)
He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue…
How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!
Those sugary planets whose influence won for him
A life baptized in no-life for a while,
And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.
Sylvia Plath, ‘Insomniac’ (1961)
I fell asleep. But I do not want to sleep. There is no time for sleep in my time-table. I do not want to – no, I have no explanations to give. Coma is for the living. The living.
Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies (1956)
The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. It is, on the whole, a merciful arrangement. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. We are intermittent creatures, always falling to little ends and rising to little new beginnings. Our soon-tired consciousness is meted out in chapters, and that the world will look quite different tomorrow is, both for our comfort and our discomfort, usually true. How marvellously too night matches sleep, sweet image of it, so neatly apportioned to our need. Angels must wonder at these beings who fall so regularly out of awareness into a fantasm-infested dark. How our frail identities survive these chasms no philosopher has ever been able to explain.
Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince (1973)
[T]he famous but misunderstood Dr Rudolf Steiner had much to say on the deeper aspects of sleep. Steiner’s books, which I began to read lying down, made me want to get up. He argued that between the conception of an act and its execution by the will there fell a gap of sleep. It might be brief but it was deep. For one of man’s souls was a sleep-soul. In this, human beings resembled the plants, whose whole existence is sleep. This made a very deep impression on me. The truth about sleep could only be seen from the perspective of an immortal spirit.
Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift (1975)
Most of the jobs advertised these days insist on a non-sleeper. Sleeping is dirty, unhygienic, wasteful and disrespectful to others. All public spaces are designated ‘Non-Sleeping’ and even a quick nap on a park bench carries a £50 fine. You can still sleep in your own home but all new beds are required by law to have a personal alarm clock built into the mattress. If you get caught on a bed-check with a dead alarm, that’s another £50 fine. Three fines and you are disqualified from sleeping for a year.
Jeanette Winterson, ‘Disappearance I’ (1998)
I never fall asleep in public. It's always extraordinary to patrol a planeful or trainful of people, trusting as newborns, sprawling in search of minimum discomfort, slack-jawed, legs apart, hair awry, skirts and trouser legs crumpled and careless, snorting and snoring in full view of a crowd of strangers. I suppose the assumption is that the strangers, too, are asleep, and a condition of mutually-assured unconsciousness obtains. But there is always me, at least, peering at the touching and terrifying vulnerability of the publicly unconscious.
Jenny Diski (2008)