To Sleep
Greg Beckett
A quick search online for famous quotes about sleep will bring up some usual suspects. One of the more famous ones—which you can find on pillows and mugs and just about any object Amazon can ship to you—comes from Shakespeare: “To sleep, perchance to dream.” It is often quoted without further ado, but like so many things in life, context matters. For while the quote mentions both sleep and dreams, and sounds poetic in the way it does so, it is really about death. The line is spoken by Hamlet, in the third act of the play named for him and in which he says to himself:
To die, to sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep—
To sleep—perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub!
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
In Hamlet’s speech, sleep does not refer to our nightly restoration; it is “the big sleep” also known as death, and Hamlet is pondering what might happen to him if he decides to go gently into that good night. When we die, do we still dream, he wonders? The quote is, after all, part of what is surely the most famous of Shakespeare’s soliloquies, in which Hamlet considers ending his own life (“To be, or not to be . . .”). To sleep, to die—anyone who has suffered through a prolonged period of sleeplessness can probably relate.
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Before I became a parent, I never really understood what it was like to go without sleep. There had been sleepless nights of course, but not often and always due to an obvious and temporary cause, like a fever or noisy neighbours. To be sure, I had pulled all-nighters, fuelled by caffeine and the desire to use those dark hours to study or party or talk through the night. Sometimes, when I was younger, I would stay up just to see the stars. The point is, sleep always came easy to me and any time I found myself without it felt fleeting.
Before my daughter was born, I heard all the warnings about lost sleep with an infant. People warned “you won’t sleep for the first year,” or “you’ll never sleep again,” or the ever-helpful “just sleep when the baby does!” I’m told by friends that some babies do, in fact, sleep, but I am not sure I believe them. Sleep was one of the first and longest parenting challenges. There were the night feedings, the diaper changes, and those moments when there was just so much projectile vomit that you need to clean everything, baby and blankets and a bath to boot. (To be fair, our daughter had a knack for saving the worst of this for my wife.) Parenting is full of lessons, but learning to live with sleepless nights was not one I wanted to endure, and the mental fog that came with the lack of sleep was worse than I imagined it would be. I recall thinking at one point—no doubt while up in the dark, rocking my daughter gently while trying to stay awake enough to get her to sleep but not so awake that I wouldn’t be able to return to bed easily—yes, in a night like that, I recall thinking “no wonder sleep deprivation is universally used as a kind of torture.”
There are lots of reasons why babies don’t sleep (again, I am told that some babies do sleep, but it seems doubtful). From gas and acid reflux to noises or light, from hunger to colic or teething—honestly, it’s a long list. And there is no shortage of answers people will give you to deal with it. There are classics like “Have you tried sleep training?” Or there’s “You have to let them cry it out?” I was even told that decorating her room in a certain shade of red would help. (It didn’t.) We tried lots of things, and if something seemed to work it was always short-lived, as a new issue arose, and we searched for new strategies. I wondered how it could be so hard to get another person to go to sleep, especially when I felt that I could fall into a deep slumber in mere moments, if only given the chance. It took losing sleep for me to realize just how strange sleep itself is. After all, there is a reason Hamlet uses sleep to talk about dying—drifting off into the darkness, letting consciousness recede, is, when you think about it, a very strange thing, indeed. In going to sleep, we let our sense of self dissolve. It’s a rather terrifying existential proposition. In a very real sense, sleep is our first and most common experience of what we imagine death to be like. Of course, despite Hamlet’s comparison, sleep is more aligned with, and essential to, life than we acknowledge.
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It is hard to say just what sleep is. We all know it is important. Most recommendations say an adult should get about eight hours of it each night (half of the sixteen hours of sleep a day recommended for infants). Most of the adults I know don’t get anywhere near that much. That’s a problem because sleep doesn’t just help us feel refreshed and recharged, it plays a key role in many physical and cognitive systems, from our immune systems and metabolism to our long-term memories and neural pathways. Sleep is as important to our survival as food and water. But what is it? Most definitions focus on describing what happens during sleep, which is quite a lot. While you are sleeping, you are also repairing the wear and tear of living—and it turns out that living each day causes quite a lot of damage. When we say we feel refreshed after a good night’s rest, it is not just a metaphor—our bodies are literally repairing themselves by removing the free radicals produced during our waking activity and our brains are reorganizing themselves by repairing and creating new neural pathways (a function that is central to learning and long-term memory). Neural reorganization may be even more important than the repair work of sleep, although the latter is, of course, essential to our long-term health, because this reorganization is not just a sorting of sensory data but also a rewiring of our brains. This “plasticity” is one of the most remarkable features of the human brain; it has enabled individuals—and our species—to adapt to novel circumstances.
Much of that neural activity happens not just when we sleep but when we dream. Dreaming has long been a puzzling experience, and different cultures have devised different ways of interpreting dreams. Most agree, though, that dreams mean something, although the contemporary scientific view focuses less on the hidden meaning of the content of our dreams and instead on how dreams enable certain kinds of brain activity to occur when we are not conscious. When we enter the deep sleep marked by rapid eye movement (REM sleep, when most dreams occur), our brains are intensely engaged in neural reorganization. Much of the brain activity that happens during REM sleep takes place in the visual cortex, and area of the brain that would not otherwise be stimulated while we rest because we sleep with our eyes closed. Perhaps this is why dreams are visual above all else? Indeed, some scientists have recently suggested that one of the uses of dreams is to keep the areas of the brain needed for vision active during sleep so that our nightly neural reorganization does not rewire them for other uses.
When we hear Hamlet ask “To die, to sleep” now, and then wonder if he can still dream, we know the answer. But of course, what makes his speech so enduring is that Hamlet knew it, too, even if he didn’t have our scientific explanations. He knew that in death there are no dreams, and so he wasn’t so much asking about sleep or dreams as he was asking about the meaning of life, of his life, and about what he should do. Hamlet talks more than any other of Shakespeare’s characters and is famous for his inability to make decisions or take actions. But it would be a mistake to see him as merely indecisive. His speech tells us something important—that to live is to dream, and to dream, one needs to sleep, for it is “by a sleep” that we “end the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”