Bertrand Russell observed that “men who sleep badly are always proud of the fact.” But in the insomniac’s self-satisfaction there is also, perhaps, a genuine fear of the nullity of sleep.
Contemporary sleep evangelizers worry a good deal about our social attitudes toward sleep. They worry about many things, of course—incandescent light, L.E.D. light, nicotine, caffeine, central heating, alcohol, the addictive folderol of personal technology—but social attitudes seem to exercise them the most. Deep down, they say, we simply do not respect the human need for repose.
Or try offering that advice to an insomniac. Chronic insomnia, a condition that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, currently afflicts some forty million Americans, is not really caused by coffee and Facebook, although it may certainly be aggravated by these things.
There is much here about the misery and indignity of her condition. Benjamin likens her insomnia to a sad, coked-up old swinger who doesn’t want the party to end and insists on keeping her out on the dance floor, swaying along unhappily to his mortifying gyrations.
This slightly preening sense of specialness is not uncommon among insomniacs—particularly, it seems, the writerly sort. Bertrand Russell observed that “men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.” Such pride, he speculated, was a feint on their part—an effort to turn a frailty into an advantage—and perhaps he was right.
Dreams also help us to master new skills; practicing a task or a language in our sleep can be as helpful as doing so when we are awake. And they appear to be crucial in honing our capacity for decoding facial expression: the dream-starved tend to slip into default paranoia, interpreting the friendliest expressions as menacing. Perhaps most alluring, dreams help us to synthesize new pieces of information with preëxisting knowledge, and to make creative lateral connections.
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