Sleep

Sleep.

This is a tricky one because I'm not conscious when it happens. That's one of the most difficult things about snoring. I do it, I know I do it, but there's almost nothing I can do about it, except of course, surprise, surprise, lose weight. What can you do about snoring, well, apparently playing the didgeridoo helps, but it's done nothing for me.  Apparently the next step is to find out if I've got "sleep apnoea" - stopping breathing when you're asleep.  If you do have this, they give you something called a "Continuous Pressure Machine" which means you get to sleep in a mask. When the machine notices that you've stopped breathing it re-inflates you with a sound a bit like Ivor the Engine (sorry foreigners, look it up on youtube).  Now doesn't that sound sexy?  

I don't normally have problems sleeping, but my wife is a really light sleeper, which means that if I'm having an even-slightly-restless night, every time that I turn over she tuts. That's one of the thing that you don't expect from marriage, to find out that you're a poor sleeper. Not that you don't sleep a lot, but your technique isn't very good.

I realise that Shakespeare must have thought a lot about sleep because two Shakespeare quotes – actually three now have come to mind immediately as I think about the subject of sleep.

“To sleep—perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub! For in that sleep of death what dreams may come” Says Hamlet as he's thinking about topping himself.

And rather awesomely, ruining it for anybody else who wants to try to come up with a better description, as was his way, Shakespeare, through Macbeth says:

Me thought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more!

Macbeth doth Murder sleep”—the innocent sleep,

Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,

The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,

Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,

Chief nourisher in life's feast

And also Prospero at the end of the Tempest “We are such stuff. As dreams are made on; and our little life. Is rounded with a sleep.”

And I think what we can take away from these quotes, is that on the whole, sleep is a good thing, the “Balm of hurt minds” and “Chief nourisher in life's feast.” You get the idea that Shakespeare wasn't an early riser and you wouldn't get an answer at the weekend if you rang before 2 or 3 in the afternoon. Yeah, sleep's a good thing. But it's also a bit weird. Because when you go to sleep what happens? Well sometimes, you dream. I actually don't dream that much. For some reason whenever you say that, somebody in the conversation has, by natural law to say “you do dream, you just don't remember it.” Now, apologies for having paid attention for a few minutes during my philosophy degree, but this one is a lot easier than that one about the tree falling in the wood when there's no one walking their dog or jogging. If I have all manner of crazy dreams but I don't remember them, then as far as I'm concerned, they didn't happen. Quite what point people are trying to make when they claim I had been dreaming frantically I don't know. They might as well claim that I'd spent the entire night singing the canon of Leo Sayer songs. In the absence of any memory of that, any complaints from the neighbours and any ginger afro wig, I'm going to go with it never having happened.

I do remember a few dreams, and they tend to be such obvious anxiety dreams that they'd probably have made Freud laugh out loud (if he'd ever wanted to do anything other than talk about sex to Jewish chicks). But I'm not going to tell you about my dreams because one of the most important things for anybody to understand is that their dreams are utterly tedious to other people. Actually, this is far more important for you to understand than it is for me to understand, because I don't bore myself, I am fucking fascinating at all times, but you, you need to understand this. If you talk about your dreams. That is going to be very tedious. Most of the time when you tell people that their speaking nonsense, you're exaggerating. But when they talk about their dreams, they are, actually, speaking nonsense.

In fact, I can't think of a better “help you get to sleep” DVD/CD/moody MP3 on Pirate Bay than a collection of people talking about their dreams. There surely can't be anything that sends anybody to sleep quicker than listening to other people describe their dreams. Actually, this is forming into a genuine product idea. Can you imagine a recording of a bunch of really spacey undergraduates talking about their dreams? I'm yawning just thinking about it.

I vaguely read in the newspapers this week that there's been some research that shows that we don't need 8 hours sleep. Some people, who only get three or four hours, I've seen them on Twitter rejoicing. The tone has been “see, I was right all along. “Me and Margaret Thatcher (who famously slept less than 5 hours a night) we're the super beings. All you people who need 8 hours a night – YOU'RE the weirdoes.” The article probably had some evolutionary justification for why we sleep like this at the end – if it was the Guardian, something about how when we were on the Savanah, we were always scared of being attacked by Lions, moving with our herds, disturbed by natural history documentary makers and so never slept through the night. Or some such shit. Without having read the study (and don't for one moment think the journalists who wrote the story did either) I can tell you this. It was done by psychologists, who, as a group, I wouldn't trust to deliver pizza, let alone tell me how long I should sleep at night. It's also important to note that almost all psychological experiments that aren't done on a man who has had an iron spike put through a particularly interesting area of his brain are done on supposedly “normal” people. But these “normal” people are undergraduates, normally in psychology. If you saw these people in a group you would not think “a yes, whatever these undernourished, over-neurotic, narcotically over-stuffed twenty-somethings do, I shall take that to be the norm and my guide for life. Even if they're only doing this subject because either they couldn't manage the maths of a proper subject or they aren't allowed to fuck their Daddy.”

Guess what. I like sleep. I really like it a lot. Lots of it. If I don't get it I'm grumpy. Truth be told, everybody who doesn't get a lot of sleep is grumpy. They didn't call her “Margaret Easy-going Iron Tits Thatcher” did they? And actually, even when I'm awake, most of the time, I'm sort of asleep and that's the way I like it. When everything's going swimmingly and I don't have a cold, I'm not upset about anything and I have had a good 8-9 hours of proper sleep, you can get about 1-2 hours of genuinely useful conscious thought out of me before I need a bit of a lay down. Between about 3:30 and 5:30 most afternoons you could hack bits off me with a rusty chisel and I probably wouldn't notice. I go into a caffeine over-dosed lunch digested coma, gently ascending the Glasgow coma scale towards tea time. Even if my eyes are open and I'm surfing websites, it's not a good time to ask me to make crucial decisions. Not that I put that in big type anywhere on my CV, but it is the truth.

So actually, I'm going to finish with another quote, from the daddy of all philosophers and another crazeee Austro-Jewish feller Ludwig Wittgenstein.

‘We are asleep. Our life is like a dream, but in our better hours we wake up just enough to realise that we are dreaming.’

OK Ludwig have it your way, you're the brainy one. Being wide awake is OK, but you tend to notice an awful lot of things that need doing. Personally, I think some of the better hours might be curled up under the duvet blissfully having dreams you won't remember, or not having them, or staring fish-eyed and open-mouthed at the 3^rd DVD of a Columbo box set.

Posted via email from The Ginger Mumbly