Sleep is usually seen as the domain of physicians, psychiatrists and mental health specialists, even writers and folklorists. Historical accounts of sleep are rare. In 2001, American historian Roger Ekirch published a seminal paper revealing a wealth of historical evidence showing that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks at night. His book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, carried a wealth of detail about the human segmented sleeping pattern. Ekirch used a variety of sources, including court records, medical books and literature, Homer’s Odyssey and an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.
Unlike Ekirch, Kat Duff, author of The Secret History of Sleep, is no historian. She is a mental health counsellor. But Duff delves deep into the human experience of sleep through history to arrive at a better understanding of its causes and effect. The book actually started as a blog and Duff’s enthusiasm for her subject echoes what many of us feel—we love to sleep. But at times the language is too flowery. “I invite you to join me at the shore (of sleep) where we can peep into the watery depths, tickle our toes in the waves, and leave the dry land of our days behind,” she writes.
Duff accepts Ekirch’s hypothesis that people in pre-industrial societies did not expect to sleep through the night, but habitually sat around for a couple of hours in the middle. She also speculates that “our pre-industrial ancestors” were better at waking up. They came to “waking awareness slowly, yawning and rolling over, cuddling and cooing with bedmates.”
But unlike Ekirch, Duff does not think we should “divide and polarise the worlds we inhabit by day and by night.” She is against all modern inventions to help us do so: clocks, especially the alarm variety, artificial light, caffeine (which she seems to implicate in the slave trade), chocolate, sleep inducing drugs, the equipment thatÔÇêsleep apnea sufferers need to get through the night, even the teddy bear.
What about parents with babies who allow them no sleep? Duff does not have anything original to offer here. In accordance with the precepts advocated by American thinker Jean Liedloff in The Continuum Concept she argues that babies should be held all night, whether awake, asleep, wetting, or wailing, and this will avoid raised cortisol levels and depression in later life. Here she points that the teddy bear is a problem and the baby should be held by the parents. She returns to Ekrich’s hypothesis while criticising the common wisdom today that eight hours is the minimum required for an alert, productive morning. This line of thinking, argues Duff, has led to widespread dependence on pharmaceutical sleep aids.
Next, she weaves captivating anecdotes with scientific data, detailing how brain activity alters during sleep, relaxing reality-bound inhibitions and often leading to moments of great insight. Duff talks about the creative power of dreams and argues that everyone dreams, whether those experiences are remembered or not, and that these nocturnal mental adventures have a big effect on the decisions we make while awake. She talks of breakthroughs occurring within dreams.
The Secret Life of Sleep is a multidisciplinary approach at its most absorbing. For example, the mythic spirits that visit us in our sleep—the kinds that come to Scrooge at the height of his Christmas cynicism—are described in their literary contexts, before being analysed on their biological bases. The Secret Life of Sleep is full of surprising facts and insights which will help us in understanding the mechanisms that make sleep possible.
Amrita Kulkarni is a clinical psychologist and counsellor