Of Sleep

Reason directs that we should always go the same way, but sleep is not subject to reason’s governance; it is the great leveller, taking down the emperor as readily as the beggar, and delivering both to the same darkness. The ancients had good cause to call sleep the brother of death — not because it is terrible, but because it reminds us, nightly, that the self we hold so carefully is easily set aside, and that we do not miss it while it is gone.

It has been remarked of great commanders before great engagements that they have slept deeply. Caesar before Pharsalia was found asleep in his litter; Pompey’s men, by contrast, were wakeful and disordered with anxiety. The capacity for sleep under pressure is not, I think, a sign of insensibility — it is a sign of a settled soul, one that has done its work of preparation and has now committed the issue to its proper place. The sleepless man is still fighting his battle in his head; the man who can sleep has agreed to wait for morning.

“The soul that knows what it is about does not need the whole night to rehearse its fears. It closes its eyes and trusts that what was decided in wakefulness will hold.”

For my own part, I have always slept well and deeply, and I confess I think well of this as a quality. I have never been able to manage the heroic wakefulness that some writers describe with such admiration — the philosopher who lay awake all night in contemplation of the Good. My contemplations take place in daylight. When night comes, I want to sleep; and I do sleep; and I wake restored. I cannot speak very highly of the state of a man who uses his nights to worry through what his days should resolve.

Sleep teaches us that consciousness is not the most important thing about us. In sleep we are not conscious, and yet we do not cease; the heart beats, the blood moves, the body repairs itself, the dreams process what wakefulness could not. There is a great deal of work being done, and none of it by the part of us that considers itself the self. This ought to make us humble about what we think we are in charge of.