26 Mar 2014 23:39:14
And afloat we soon are, still on the internet's infinite, provenance-free sea of reference, where accredited sleep scientists and "dream researchers", scientific studies and personal anecdote, can all bob about together. The going is a little sluggish, for the posts/chapters are loosely arranged and repetitive. Sometimes, too, there is a dramatic anti-science lurch, as when Duff confesses that she "has no way of knowing for sure" whether her uncle, in intensive care some miles away, "actually came to my bedside in some form" during a dream. And the lack of firm history may make you feel queasy when, for example, Duff speculates that "Frère Jacques", a song based on the vigorous clanging of the matins bells, "may have had its origins in a culture that discourages sudden awakenings"; or when she announces that "French writer Michel de Montaigne" lived in the 18th century.
Never mind: out here on the info-ocean, it has always been hard to tell fact from algorithm-swollen factoid. We chug on, choppily. From the depths, an argument emerges, and actually, it's not mellow at all. In fact, it is quite political, as indeed is a lot of recent thinking about sleep. Under the homey styling, Duff proves to be of the new "capitalism ate my sleep" school of thought, with spiritual knobs on. Not only does she accept as a "discovery" historian Roger Ekirch's extremely) contentious hypothesis that "preindustrial folk" didn't expect to sleep through the night, but habitually sat around for a couple of hours in the middle, meditating and raising their prolactin; but she speculates that "our preindustrial ancestors" were better at waking up, too. They came to "waking awareness slowly, yawning and rolling over, cuddling and cooing with bedmates", she imagines, in a scene perilously close to a kitten pic. Curiously, my friend Antigona, who grew up on a thoroughly "preindustrial" smallholding in Kosovo, doesn't recall this, nor any "visiting" or "brewing of beer" in the middle of the night. She does remember, though, working late, overcrowding, long vigils tending the sick and children – how long do you think you can share a bed with a baby in preindustrial nappies? – and, especially as a mother, being constantly, desperately sleep-deprived.
Antigona was certainly superstitious about her dreams, however, and half-awake a lot of the time – both states that Duff seems to prize. Duff does not think we should "divide and polarise the worlds we inhabit by day and by night", and is against all modern inventions to help us do so: clocks, especially the alarm variety; artificial light; alcohol; caffeine (which she seems to implicate in the slave trade); chocolate; all drugs from chloral hydrate to Provigil; the oxygen that sleep apnea sufferers need to get through the night; and even the teddy bear, or transitional object, which here is a byproduct of westerners' chilly insistence on solo sleeping, "a demonstration of (the baby's) innate creative resourcefulness in satisfying needs for physical contact". Lullabies, you may be happy to learn, are culturally universal, and therefore all right.
Inevitably, Duff spends a lot of time at the cot: partly because she is not at all interested in the sexual side of sleep; mostly because this is where sleep theorists and behaviourists and anthropologists and Mumsnetters always end up – peering, like Varka in Chekhov's story "Sleepy", at a baby with colic. The baby's crying. For a long while he has been hoarse and exhausted with crying, but he still goes on screaming, and there is no knowing when he will stop. This is the sharp end of sleep, where the truism of modern therapy – that we are less happy and successful than we ought to be because our parents didn't love us enough in infancy – comes up against the actuality of being parents ourselves, stuck with the task of avoiding that huge, yet nebulous thing: psychic damage to our infants.
It's the business end of feminism, too: how much of your preciously realised self are you willing to lose to your biologically determined role as a mother? Or to new or old ideas of how a mother should be? How much of your own rest are you willing to sacrifice? Especially if, like Varka, you are exhausted yourself. Her eyes are glued together, her head droops, her neck aches. She cannot move her eyelids or her lips, and she feels as though her face is dried and wooden, as though her head has become as small as the head of a pin.
What to do? It's no use looking to science for clear directives, for there are at least as many studies demonstrating that babies may be safely left to self-soothe as there are showing the opposite. Even Duff tiptoes a little around the contentious area of leaving the baby to cry – "some might even say abandon" – she says, saying it. But mostly her answer is of a piece with her other ideas: in accordance with the precepts of Jean Liedloff's The Continuum Concept, the baby should be held all night, whether awake, asleep, wetting, or wailing, and this will avoid raised cortisol levels, depression in later life, and that teddy-bear problem. Varka's solution is more direct and short term: she strangles the baby.
Varka is 13 and a serf, an authentic "preindustrial" figure drawn from Chekhov's experience as a doctor. Perhaps it was such a Cinderella who first told one of our folk tales that feature a feather bed. There are many of them – a comfortable bed is right up with protein meals, gold plates and ever-laying hens as an object of fetish – but perhaps "The Princess and the Pea" is the finest. Twenty mattresses and still not able to sleep – there goes a member of the ruling class! Duff is right to identify that many of us are sleepless princesses, now, prickled by anxiety and text messages, by lights and to-do lists and rubbish on the internet; and right, too, that the intersection of the new science of the brain and our myths about sleep is a fascinating area. But the notion that sleep is an Edenic, universal, good which we have only recently lost through our capitalistic sins – really, what princesses are we, to have thought up such a pea?
