Counting Sheep: The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams. Paul Martin

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СКАЧАТЬ the first time Man will be living a full twenty-four hour day, not spending a third of it as an invalid, snoring his way through an eight-hour peepshow of infantile erotica.

      (Ballard’s sleepless volunteers, needless to say, meet a grisly fate.) If the fantasy of doing with less sleep ever became a reality – which, mercifully, it cannot – those extra hours of wakefulness would just be absorbed by more work. If we could all survive working 20 hours a day then the 20-hour day would become the norm. And we would still feel there were not enough hours in the day.

      Fortunately, not everyone aspires to a sleepless world. A few highly successful businessmen have come out of the closet in recent years and openly admitted to sleeping for eight hours or more a night (although some cynics have pointed out that these captains of industry can only afford to have all that sleep because they are amply supported by minions working ridiculously long hours).

      Britain is rapidly following the USA in becoming a fully-fledged 24/7 society where the consumer is king and nothing ever closes. Consumers really do want the freedom and flexibility to shop, bank or be entertained at any hour of the day or night, and governments are having to respond to their demands for public services to be continuously on tap, providing 24/7 facilities to the taxpayers who fund them. In 2001 the British government published a report called ‘Open All Hours’, explaining how public services were raising their game to meet the requirements of the 24-hour society. The report highlighted examples of how public services had responded to demands for extended opening hours. In his foreword, the Prime Minister wrote that ‘people living busy working lives … should be able to access services how and when they want’. The idea of modernising services to suit the needs and convenience of the public is surely laudable and uncontroversial. But there is something crucial missing from the cost-benefit analysis: the impact the 24-hour society is having on the ability of the people who are providing and consuming those services to get enough sleep.

      Whatever happened to the technology-enabled revolution in leisure, which the future-watchers so confidently predicted in the 1960s? The main concern in those days was that we would all have too much free time on our hands, not too little. Sebastian de Grazia, one of the more thoughtful advocates from that era, argued for a return to the inner peace that can only come from a capacity for true idleness, combined with an escape from the constant stimulation that prevents people from ever being alone with themselves:

      Perhaps you can judge the inner health of a land by the capacity of its people to do nothing – to lie abed musing, to amble about aimlessly, to sit having coffee – because whoever can do nothing, letting his thoughts go where they may, must be at peace with himself.

      If the work ethic does not keep us from our beds, then our insatiable lust for entertainment and amusement surely will. As the Irish poet Thomas Moore put it, we are inclined to steal a few hours from the night:

      ’Tis never too late for delight, my dear;

      And the best of all ways

      To lengthen our days

      Is to steal a few hours from the night, my dear!

      In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night the reprobates Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek have been up drinking all night. ‘I know to be up late is to be up late,’ contests Sir Andrew. ‘A false conclusion!’ avers Sir Toby: ‘To be up after midnight and to go to bed then, is early.’

      The range of distractions and temptations to seduce us away from our beds has mushroomed since Shakespeare’s day. There is so much more to do in developed nations, and so much more wealth to do it with. The only quantity that has remained doggedly constant is the amount of time we have. There are still only 1,440 minutes in a day. So, we opt for the immediate fix of pleasure and stay up late. We know deep down that we will suffer the next day in mood, alertness and performance, but the lures are too appealing and their pleasures are instant.

      Psychologists have a technical term – delayed gratification – to describe an individual’s ability to forgo an immediate reward in return for a bigger reward later on. It so happens that a capacity for delayed gratification is correlated with intelligence and attainment in life. Most of us, however, display a lamentable lack of delayed gratification when it comes to sleep. William Dement coined another term, ‘hedomasochism’, to describe the irrational belief that we can do it all, achieving ever more in our work, in our family lives and in our. leisure time, all at the expense of sleep. We cannot.

Ancient and modern

      We rise with the lark and go to bed with the lamb.

      Nicholas Breton, The Court and Country (1618)

      The current predilection for staying awake all hours is very recent in historical terms, let alone when measured against the span of biological evolution. It really took root following the invention of the electric filament light bulb by Thomas Edison in 1879, a negligible fraction of an instant ago in evolutionary terms. Of course, people did stay up after dark in the days before cheap electric lighting – just much less.

      There have only ever been two ways for humans to deal with the night: to sleep and doze through it or to light it artificially. Until the nineteenth century the only practical source of artificial light was fire in one form or another. When humans depended on expensive candles or oil for artificial light they went to bed earlier and stayed there longer, unless they were in the wealthy minority. Few people did much work after dark. And when they did use artificial lighting, the fires and candles (and later, the gas mantles) generated light of insufficient intensity to reset their internal biological clocks in the way that much brighter electric lighting can. One electric light bulb produces as much light as a hundred candles and for only a tiny fraction of the cost. Unlike our ancestors, we no longer have to sleep, doze or stay in bed just because it is dark.

      To appreciate how different life was for the majority of people living in temperate or northern climates, we need only wind the clock back to the eighteenth century. For most working folk, especially in winter, the sun provided the only serious illumination. The Natural History of Selborne, which was written by an English country clergyman called Gilbert White and published in 1788, describes life in a small village in rural England. White’s parochial history is said to be the fourth most published book in the English language. In one of his glimpses into the lives of Selborne’s human inhabitants, White reminds us that in the days before electric lighting, few people could afford the luxury of routinely staying awake for long during the hours of darkness. The villagers burned rushes to produce light, and even rushes cost money:

      Working people burn no candle in the long days, because they rise and go to bed by daylight. Little farmers use rushes much in the short days, both morning and evening in the dairy and kitchen; but the very poor, who are always the worst economists, and therefore must continue very poor, buy an halfpenny candle every evening, which, in their blowing open rooms, does not burn much more than two hours. Thus have they only two hours’ light for their money instead of eleven.

      In rural northern Europe of the Middle Ages it was pointless or impossible to work the fields during the dark days of winter, and too costly to heat and light the home all day. Whole families would therefore take to their beds for days at a time. You might not relish the prospect of spending days in bed with nothing to do. (Or perhaps you would?) Boredom would be the big enemy. Boredom, however, is a modern concept. Being alone with our thoughts and dreams is no longer enough for us.

      Cold weather was another good reason for staying in bed, as Samuel Pepys recorded in this entry from his diary, written in December 1661:

      All the morning СКАЧАТЬ