In Praise of Sleep By Jeet Heer National Post (October 7, 2004) Of all life’s major pleasures by far the least appreciated is sleep. While there are countless books and movies teaching us to savour sex and food, sleep is almost never praised as an enjoyable activity. The passivity of sleep, so closely akin to the vice of sloth, affronts our moral sense. Yet for myself I am willing to confess that many of my happiest moments have been spent in slumber. In fact, I’ve carefully organized my life to maximize dozing opportunities. For example, I often go to public lectures on recondite topics such as the history of the Methodist church or the impact of the 1965 Autopact Agreement on the economy of Southern Ontario. After a few minutes of hearing a lecturer drone on such subjects I conk out, blissfully snoring in a temporary self-induced coma. One of the fringe benefits of being a newspaper columnist is that my flexible schedule allows me to nap every afternoon to my heart’s content. If sleep is undervalued, then the virtues of wakefulness are overrated. The fact is we live under the tyranny of alertness. Frenzied activity is far too highly valued in our society. We praise those who work hard and play hard. “The early bird gets the worm,” our proverbs tell. Or in more modern words: “You snooze, you lose.” Entire Latin American nations are devoted to the production of drugs to keep us industrious and jumped-up: chiefly coffee and cocaine. Our nerves are so jangled that many people now require pills to help them sleep, an activity that humans have performed naturally since the dawn of time. When the North American Free Trade Agreement was first signed, it was my hope that the siesta, that wonderful Hispanic ritual of a daily afternoon nap, would migrate north. Alas, the opposite has happened: Mexicans have now adopted the horrid gringo work ethic, a consequence of long shifts in factories where the workers are required to be as untiring as the machines they operate. The deep cultural prejudice against sleep can be seen in literature, religion and philosophy. In the Bible it is part of God’s perfection that he is always awake. “He will not allow your foot to slip; he who keeps you will not slumber,” the psalmist sings. “Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” In Buddhism sleep is used as a metaphor for lack of enlightenment. Buddha, we are told, was once like all men, going through life asleep even when his eyes were open. But after he achieved wisdom he woke up and saw the world as it really was. Thus he is celebrated as “the awakened one”. In Homer’s Odyssey the hero Ulysses meets many temptations on his journey home, including the Lotus Eaters, who offer a narcotic fruit that destroys the will to continue traveling. One of the most memorable characters in Dante’s Divine Comedy is Belacqua, who seems almost permanently stuck at the gates of Purgatory since he is too lethargic to move on. In Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy sleep is likened to death. Just as sleep comes with dreams, Shakespeare’s hero fears, perhaps “the sleep of death” will have its own hellish nightmares. Because death might be all too similar to sleep, Hamlet forgoes suicide. In a similar spirit, the poet Shelley once warned of “Death and his brother Sleep!” A.E. Housman had some forthright advice in his 1896 poem Reveille: “Morns abed and daylight slumber/Were not meant for man alive.” The entire fable of Snow White is about the dangers of sleep. In fact, one of the seven dwarves (or “dwarfs” to use Disney’s illiterate term) is Sleepy. All the Dwarves are characterized by unsavory traits: Dopey, Grumpy, et cetera. In a just world, there would be a dwarf named Wide-Awakey. Perhaps the greatest anti-sleep manifesto is The Castle of Indolence (1748), penned by the poet James Thomson. In this poem, Thomson condemns his fellow versifiers as lazy sots: “Their only labour is to kill the time; And labour dire it is, and weary woe. They sit—they lounge—turn o’er some idle rhyme; Then rising sudden—to the glass they go, Or saunter forth with loitering step and slow.” In philosophy as with literature, sleep is rarely considered a desirable state. Most often, sleep is linked with the dogmatic slumber of conventional thought, which philosophy seeks to free us from. “Where does our modern world belong – to exhaustion or ascent?” Friedrich Nietzsche asked in The Will to Power (1888). He feared that Europe would succumb to the “compulsion to rest.” His worries were, alas, groundless. Europe would soon be engulfed in a century of frenzied war making Despite the hegemony of wakefulness, there are some countervailing cultural tendencies that give sleep its due. We use the phrase “sleeping like a baby” and recognize this as a desirable state. There are many fine paintings recording the loveliness of beautiful models prone and asleep. Let us praise the great heroes of dormancy, those who have made slumber sublime. I’ve always admired the story of the soldier who dozed his way through the Battle of Waterloo. Ivan Goncharov’s novel Oblomov (1858) is all about a hero who stays in bed all the time. After the Russian revolution Lenin promised to free his country of Oblomov-ism. As a consequence the Soviet Union became an ever-vigilant police state. Let’s us return to the good old days of Oblomov, I say. The lion is the king of the jungle and typically sleeps twenty hours a day – oh, happy beast! The essayist Joseph Epstein has written with quiet self satisfaction about his own prowess as a sleeper. “I nap well on airplanes, trains, buses, and in cars and with a special proficiency at concerts and lectures,” he wrote in an essay found in his 1999 collection Narcissus Leaves the Pool. “I am, when pressed, able to nap while standing up. In certain select company, I wish I could nap while being spoken to.” Yet even Epstein, I feel, is not genuinely loyal to cause of sleep. After all, he’s a prolific and erudite writer (his essay on “the art of the nap” provided some of the quotes for this column). Moreover, in that essay he confesses feeling envy “for people who seem not to require much sleep. Those who can get by, indefinitely, on four of five hours of sleep a night have a small jump on the rest of us.” I completely disagree with this sentiment. As far as I can tell, the great monsters of history, from Napoleon to Stalin, have been light sleepers. If only they knew how to get a little shuteye, how much less damage they would have done.