Here is the story we tell ourselves these days about sleep. It is a good and healthy thing to get eight hours without interruption. It is best done in separate bedrooms for adults and children. This all may or may not be true.
Benjamin Reiss is an English professor at Emory University so his creative takes on sleeping are spiked with literary, cultural, and philosophical bonbons. He begins this edifying romp with a lament over our futile attempts to tame and control sleep.
Many of us treat sleep like a dog we are training to do a trick. The harder we try to get our companion to lie down and then roll over, the more this clever animal resists. In similar fashion, all the sleep pills, potions, rituals, and folk remedies leave us more restless and frustrated.
According to Reiss, there are 2,500 sleep clinics in the United States that treat millions of patients. The author sets out to show us how we became a sleep-obsessed society. With great elan and a penchant for the odd habits and peculiar travelers into the dark of the night, Reiss shares the behaviors of sleepwalkers and lunatics, Thoreau's criticism of unnatural rhythms, the propensity of slaves on plantations to sleep too long, and the wearisome battles between parents and their children over what time to go to bed.
Reiss does a splendid job mapping the idiosyncratic hidden history of sleep and even speculates about a future when normal sleep may be drawing to a close and "new technologies for optimizing the human body may be ushering in an age of customized and individually optimized sleep."
