Sleep and Dreams
A third of our lives is spent in sleep.
It sets our biological clock, punctuates our days and gives a sense of order to the sequence of our lives.
Sleep provides rest and renewal, refreshes our senses… and takes us into a realm where our desires are unbridled and we may not even recognize ourselves.
I
n classical myth, Sleep (Hypnos) was born of Night (Nox) and his twin was Death (Thanatos).
(“When you sleep you remind me of the dead” – Siegfried Sassoon)
Sleep can seem a termination of living…
(“Each day dies with sleep” – Gerard Manley Hopkins)
… or a salve to life’s ongoing woes.
(“Living is an illness to which sleep provides relief” – Nicolas-Sebastien Chamfort)
Is sleep or waking the more enriching existence?
(“We term sleep a death, and yet it is waking that kills us” – Sir Thomas Browne, seventeenth century physician)
Sleep deprivation in insomnia is a debilitating ailment in itself, and a symptom of more serious ills.
(“Sleep disturbance… causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of functioning” – Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV)
Sleeplessness also frequently reflects a deeply nursed guilt.
(“Macbeth has murdered sleep” “Macbeth shall sleep no more” – Shakespeare)
Morpheus, the god of Dreams, was the incestuous spawn of Sleep and his mother Night. He would send to mortals dreams of comfort…
(“So, if I dream I have you, I have you” – John Donne)
… and dreams of despair.
(“All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams” – Elias Canetti)
Oneirology – the art or science of dream interpretation – has a venerable history.The Interpretation of Dreams (Oneirocritica) of Artemidorus predates that of Freud by over seventeen centuries.
(“Theorematic dreams are those which correspond exactly to their own dream vision… [whereas] allegorical dreams are those which signify one thing by means of another, that is, through them, the soul is conveying something obscurely by physical means” – Artemidorus, translated by Robert J White,
“Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious” – popular misquote, nevertheless representative, of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams)
Which of these, dreams or reality, intrudes the most upon the other?
(“Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music – do I wake or sleep?” – John Keats)
In The Secret World of Sleep and Dreams we, each of us, find our most private world.
(“The waking have one and the same world, but sleepers turn aside, each into a world of their own” – Heraclitus)
