![]() ![]() Not only is sleep a reminder of our ultimate helplessness, or even of how circumscribed a place thought sometimes plays in our lives, there is also the fear of contagion, as if talking about sleep might induce it – just as this reference to yawning will get at least 50% of you yawning in the next 15 minutes. This continuation of our lives in the absence of our waking self, in which the living daylights are replaced by the half-living nightlights, is a creepy reminder of the unchosen automatisms upon which our chosen lives depend. (I read this unimpressed when I was a junior doctor in the 1970s, and my 104-hour-week included periods of up to 48 hours continuously on call.) Jean-Paul Sartre’s Antoine Roquentin, the anti-hero of Sartre’s Nausea (1938), expresses his contempt for the landlord of the café he frequents by observing that “when this man is alone, he falls asleep.” And a character in one of his other novels observes with horror the person opposite him on the train, fast asleep, passively swaying in time to the movement of the carriage, reduced to a material object. “Blessed are the sleepy ones” Nietzsche said sarcastically, “for they shall soon drop off.” And he sometimes endeavoured to do without sleep, on one occasion trying to live on four hours sleep a night for a fortnight. Hypnophobia was a striking theme in Existentialist thought. ![]() Those who see the aim of philosophy as being to cultivate the most unpeeled mode of wakefulness are likely to treat sleep as an enemy. It is easy to see why philosophers have, on the whole, avoided talking about sleep. William Dement, one of the leading researchers of the last century and co-discoverer of Rapid Eye Movement sleep, concluded from his fifty years in the forefront of the field that “the only reason we need to sleep that is really, really solid, is that we get sleepy.” Philosophers Asleep There are many theories – energy conservation, growth promotion, immobilisation during hours of darkness when it might be dangerous to be out and about, consolidation of memories – but they are all open to serious objections. The trouble is, we don’t know what that purpose is. Since all animals sleep, we assume it has a biological purpose. They have something that truly deserves our sympathy: chronic insomnia. Indeed, the situation of those who do not suffer from Tallis’s Daily Hallucinating Delusional Syndrome is awful. We don’t see how strange sleep is because (nearly) everyone sleeps. The fact that we accept without surprise the need for a prolonged black-out as part of our daily life highlights our tendency to take for granted anything about our condition that is universal. Of course, sleep is not a disease at all, but the condition of daily (nightly) life for the vast majority of us. If I also claimed that the condition was infectious, you would wish me luck in coping with such a terrible disease, and bid me a hasty farewell. If I told you that I had a neurological disease which meant that for eight or more hours a day I lost control of my faculties, bade farewell to the outside world, and was subject to complex hallucinations and delusions – such as being chased by a grizzly bear at Stockport Railway Station – you would think I was in a pretty bad way. Well, a decade on, this is the beginning of a response to Christopher’s wake-up call.įor sleep is rather extraordinary. The volume includes a fascinating essay entitled ‘The Need to Sleep’, where he notes that philosophers have not paid sufficient attention to this extraordinary phenomenon. Meeting Christopher after a long interval reminded me of his excellent book Living Philosophy: Reflections on Life, Meaning and Morality (2001). A few weeks ago, I was sitting on a panel with the philosopher Christopher Hamilton, discussing the question of whether a world without pain is an appropriate goal for mankind or whether pain serves some additional positive purpose other than the obvious biological one of directing us away from things that might harm us (a topic, perhaps, for a future column). ![]() The column you’re reading is at least in part the result of an accident – a happy one, I hasten to add. SUBSCRIBE NOW Tallis in Wonderland Notes Towards a Philosophy of Sleep Raymond Tallis takes us from A to Zzzzz. ![]()
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