'Natural thought of our souls'

There's a great review in the New York Times of an exhibition “To Sleep, Perchance to Dream,” which has opened at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.

It reveals the complexities of the way that sleep was seen in the 17th century, not as something functional and rather trivial, but as an uncertain and thought-provoking state. "Sleep should not be thought of casually: it is mysterious, powerful, central, inextricably linked to the world."

This exhibition shows how seriously the men and women of the 17th century took their sleep - recognising that it needed to be attended to as much as their waking hours.

There is a marvellous quote from the 1630s, saying that the wise man "learnes to know himselfe as well by the night's blacke mantle, as the searching beames of day. In sleepe, wee have the naked and naturall thoughts of our soules".

You could sit back and think about that for a long time. While we attach so much status to what we achieve in our work and in our public lives, to what we show other people, it's under night's black mantle that we might see more of our own souls.

There are also some intriguing sleep remedies. There was the old stand-by of poppy, but also lettuce and dormouse blood. Both lettuce and dormice have been associated with sleep forever, they are remarkably persistent associations.

The exhibition runs until the end of May - and there is some information online at http://www.folger.edu.

Rip van Sleep-Deprivation

It's a sad tale of our times. Rip van Winkle can't get to sleep. This Rip van Winkle is a 37-year-old resident of Corvallis, Oregon, and he is seeking help with his insomnia. The irony couldn't be plainer if it was painted in yard-high letters. The man who shares a name with the symbol of sleep can't get any himself. The owner of the Rip Van Winkle Residential Contract and Repair firm is sleep deprived.

It says something about our sleepless times when this is the case. Such problems never afflicted the Rip van Winkle invented by the writer Washington Irving. He had a drink and fell asleep and didn't wake for 20 years. By then, there had been a revolution, his wife had died and his daughter was grown up. We've all had mornings like that.

Sleeping through a recession

The recession has given newspapers more angles than a suitcase full of protractors. Not just the stuff about money and finance. I mean all the features and news features and lifestyle stories, pegged on the economic downturn. How to eat cheaply, what it's doing to our sex lives, how we're all going to have to go on holiday to a windswept caravan site in North Wales.

The recession is creating its own mini-boom in recession-related news stories.

Sleep is not escaping this recessionary obsession - although oddly enough, sleep is one of nature's greatest free gifts. Millionaires and paupers both have equal claims on its restorative balm. But according to a big survey in the United States, a whopping one third of people are claiming to be losing sleep over the recession.

Now, you can imagine President Obama losing a little shut eye about the recession. And there could be a few troubled nights for those suits who accidentally let the entire banking system slip down the back of the sofa. But it seems very unfair that so many other people are losing out on the joy of sleep because of the financial chaos.

The survey suggests that this is a case of people being too worried about their jobs and their financial security to sleep properly. This might be understandable. But the figures also show that one fifth of the population are only getting six hours sleep. No wonder people are always crying on US reality shows. They must be completely cream crackered.

Six hours every night is systematic sleep deprivation. Lack of sleep means bad judgements, stress, an inability to solve problems, irritability, aggression, it means behaving recklessly...

It's beginning to sound like there might be a connection to the banking crash. Maybe the guys who were running the finance houses that fell apart were only getting six hours a night. No wonder they made bad calls. Now everyone else is losing sleep over it. Perhaps we've stumbled onto something here...

Lessons in sleep

The Australians are teaching teenagers about sleep. It seems a little counter-intuitive, along the lines of taking coals to Newcastle, but the more you think about it, the more sensible it seems.

For something that is so important, it's remarkable how little we really know about sleep. Even on the most basic question - what is sleep for? - the general consensus is that there is no general consensus and no on really knows. On a more day to day level, sleep occupies a great chunk of our lives, but it's something that we don't really learn anything about.

There are all kinds of lessons in schools about sex education and healthy eating and keeping fit... but what about sleep? It might sound vaguely subversive to promote the cause of sleep. But then look around at the yawning ranks of teenagers who have missed out on sleep and what is more important? If you haven't slept properly, there's less chance of learning properly.

A project in schools in South Australia gave teenagers some basic advice about sleeping - how many hours they needed, suggestions for getting into a regular pattern of healthy sleep and avoiding drinks before bedtime such as coffee which might disrupt sleep. According to the research, this helped teenagers to establish a better sleep routine.

It might also help them to avoid that great scourge of teenage life - "weekend jetlag". This is where they stay up so late at the weekend, blurring morning and night, that going back to school on Monday is like crashing back into a different time zone. Sympathy? No chance.

Have you seen a racoon mum?

Here's a label I haven't heard before: "Racoon mum". Or more precisely, "racoon mom", because the example I saw was from Canada. I suppose if we actually were racoons - the variety that sit up and read stuff on computers - then we would already know all about racoon mums/moms and there would be nothing further to add.

But for any non-racoon readers, the phrase "racoon mum" describes a particular pattern of sleep deprivation. It is the way that already sleep-starved mothers of young children become even more exhausted by staying up all night messing round on Facebook, playing Tetris, Googling their old school friends or watching re-runs of Friends at three in the morning on UK Bedsit. In general, staying up half the night doing nothing in particular.

The reference to the racoon is because this behaviour is both nocturnal and rather secretive, hanging around alone in the lamplight of the small hours, black-ringed eyes bulging with tiredness.

The theory is that the racoon mum spends all day either at work or at the beck and call of their children. Any parent will know that children can be tough and unrelenting task masters and after a full day and evening of them-time, the racoon mum still wants some me-time. Going to bed early will mean a day without any adult time.

So the racoon mum gets the white wine and the computer or television and spends some quality time alone.

Except it gets late very quickly and going to bed so late means exhaustion the next morning. Lack of sleep makes the following day even tougher and when you're sleepless, everything is twice as stressful. So the racoon mum is in even greater need of a restorative fix of spare time.

I suspect there are plenty of racoon dads out their too. We manage to make our days so overcrowded that there isn't any room for ourselves in our own lives.

Sleeping with the insects

The male sleeps longer than the female, is more likely to sleep during the day and the female is more likely to have her sleep disrupted. Sounds familiar? This is research into fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) rather than the adult human male (couchus potatus), but it casts a light onto our own propensity to kip.

For a start, sleeping behaviour is hard wired into living creatures. It's written through us like a stick of rock. The humble fruit fly, the hapless butt of so many experiments, has 1,700 genes associated with sleep patterns. These might affect when and for how long an individual fruit fly might snooze. Mess around with these genes and sleep patterns are altered.

What should we make of this? Does the long sleeper have a genetic drive for such inclinations, in the way they might have their own thumbprint or eye colour? Is there some ancestral sleeper who has passed on these habits? Why should the comfortable kipper be turned out of bed when their genes are telling them they need just five more minutes?

Driven crazy by lack of sleep

Sleep must be one of the most powerful mood-altering drugs on the planet. Refreshed and rested the world can seem a manageable place. Exhausted and sleepless, it can seem an impossible and overwhelming challenge. Every task can seem like towing a caravan uphill, against the wind, in a car that's breaking down. Too much of too much.

A really interesting piece of research from Harvard University has been reported this week raising the idea that lack of sleep might be linked to mental health problems. Rather than saying that people with mental health problems might be more likely to suffer from poor sleep, it looks down the other end of the telescope and suggests that people who are wrecked by bad sleep could start to develop mental health problems as a consequence. As the Daily Telegraph describes it: "Having trouble sleeping can literally drive you mad."