Snooze Read online

  For Benedict, Jacob and Clare

  And for Tony Flynn

  “O sleep! it is a gentle thing,

  Beloved from pole to pole!”

  —The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  “I only know that while I sleep I have no fear, nor hope,

  nor trouble, nor glory. God bless the inventor of sleep.”

  —Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes

  “I wish I could write a chapter upon sleep … and yet,

  as fine as it is, I would undertake to write a dozen chapters

  upon button-holes, both quicker and with more fame,

  than a single chapter upon this.

  —The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne

  Spare a thought for Rip Van Winkle, the man who slept through the American Revolution. His story is one of a number of fairy tales in which sleep is a spooky kind of experience. In this world, sleep can start with a curse from an old fairy, end with a kiss from a young prince, and last anywhere up to one hundred years. Such fables have always made curious bedtime reading—the purpose of which is surely to encourage children to surrender to the world on the other side of their closed eyes, not to be frightened of it.

  Like many people, I first met Rip Van Winkle in my pajamas. It was 1969, and our bedtime was 8:00 PM. Mum had read in Women’s Weekly, or somewhere like that, that the astronauts who went to the moon had begun life by always being in bed by 8:00 PM. We were going to follow their example, at least as far as sleep was concerned, so there we were, tucked in bed when Rip Van Winkle arrived. He came after our prayers, traveling in a large volume of children’s stories that had the cover falling off. In this volume of wonders, people did all sorts of strange things that never happened anywhere near our rather staid family. They slept in forests and castles and glades (whatever they were). There was even an old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children that she could sleep anywhere, I suppose.

  In an attempt to avoid his nagging wife, Rip Van Winkle went to sleep just before the American Revolution and then slept for twenty years. He woke up in a United States of America that had successfully untethered itself from the British monarchy and found that he himself had also been freed from his domestic obligations, as his wife had died while he was asleep. Two decades of sleep is a mediocre effort by the standards of Sleeping Beauty and various others. But, still—in an age well before we’d coined that turn of phrase FOMO (fear of missing out)—I remember being somewhat disturbed by old Rip’s story. Sleep had deprived him of a ringside seat in one of the greatest moments in history. Was this supposed to be a fairy tale or a horror story?

  This is a book about sleep. In the history of human civilization, sleep is the unrivaled hero. It is the wellspring of creativity. In sleep, we are most ourselves because we have to surrender our egos. It is the space in which so much happens, mainly because, while we are asleep, we can’t squeeze any extra appointments or make any extra phone calls or look at one more thing on the Internet. Sleep is the daily visit that people who live in crowded diaries make to a wide-open space.

  Sleep has piqued my interest because it has been a point of struggle for me throughout my life. I have lived with a few significant sleep disorders, starting with a diagnosis of sleep apnea twenty years ago when I was working as a Jesuit priest. I had spent most of my life being tired when my wife and I—already parents of a one-year-old—had twins. It was then that I learned what sleep deprivation truly was. But this is not a guidebook. I am not a clinician of any sort. I won’t be telling you when to go to bed, how to prepare for bed, what to eat before bed or when to turn off your TV, phone, iPad, iPod, computer, or any other gadget. (The irony of modern living is the image of someone sitting up in bed looking up sleep techniques in the search engine on their computer. It’s as silly as driving to the gym. Worse. It’s like drinking to achieve sobriety.) If you do want help with sleep, there are plenty of good books available, full of sound advice.

  This is not one of those books. My only clinical advice is pretty basic: If you are struggling with insomnia or nightmares or a sleep disorder, try to read a bit and talk to someone before automatically reaching for pills as a solution. Be wary of giving sleep problems a medical name before they really need them; insomnia is a pathology whereas poor sleep is just an inconvenience. The pair can look similar. It requires wisdom to know the difference; our problems often grow into the names we choose to give them.

  This is a book about more than sleep. It is an exploration of the role of sleep in our history and culture. There is some information about my own experience, but I also reach more broadly to look at some of the most famous wakers and sleepers in history. It is also a book about the opposite of sleep—the phenomenon of not sleeping and what this kind of exhaustion means for society. The whole world is like an overtired baby. It screams at us incessantly when what it most wants is a decent sleep.

  There’s an old saying that says insomnia is nothing to lose sleep over. That is a simplistic statement, but it does contain a grain of truth. So instead, in the wee hours of the morning, when sleep eludes you, you now have this book.

  In the end, it only took one man to change the lightbulb.

  Thomas Edison patented over a thousand bright ideas in his lifetime, although his name is remembered for maybe half a dozen of them. But the ones with which he is commonly associated are household items that changed the way people lived.

  By the age of fifteen, Edison—who had a paltry formal education and a noted inability to sit still, but a habit of reading books compulsively— left his home in Port Huron, Michigan, to become a telegraph operator. The telegraph had at last solved the problem that had cost the runner his life after the battle of Marathon: no longer did messages need to be delivered in person. And Edison loved it. As a teenage telegraph worker, he won standing among his colleagues for the speed of his work and for his willingness to work nights, meaning they didn’t have to. While others drank, Edison studied. He read everything about electricity and warmed to the work of Michael Faraday—a man, like himself, who had started in obscurity. Faraday, author of Experimental Researches in Electricity, had also quit school early; he then used the spare time left over from menial jobs to inch his way through the Encyclopedia Britannica. In 1831, Faraday created the first electric generator. He turned electricity from a mysterious, even spiritual, abstraction into something that could be manufactured and sold, a commodity that only needed the right master to put it to work. Edison would become one of the first of those masters and the most entrepreneurial.

  It was never going to be enough for young Tom (Al to his friends, after his middle name, Alva) to master Morse code and pass on news of other people. He wanted to be the news himself. He studied the technology of the telegraph and saw where it could be improved, coming up with a quadruplex—a means whereby a single wire could be used to send not one but four messages at a time, two in each direction. This had obvious appeal to the telegraph companies, who now only had to roll out a quarter of the lines they did before. One company, Western Union, had contributed money to the development of Edison’s invention and was wrong-footed when, at the last minute, Edison sold the idea to a rival, Atlantic and Pacific, for $30,000—a princely sum in 1875. The boss of Western Union, William Orton, said famously that Edison had a vacuum where his conscience ought to be.

  In 1876, Edison—now married to Mary Stilwell, eight years his junior— bought an estate at Menlo Park, New Jersey, twenty miles from New York. The estate became known as his “invention factory,” and Edison himself was labeled in the media as “the wizard of Menlo Park.” Edison liked that. His pragmatism always came wrapped in mystique. He knew that genius was simply a matter of putting nuts and bolts together in the right order, but
he was only too happy when his nuts and bolts roused a kind of spiritual awe in his admirers.

  The reporters kept coming to Menlo Park, and the wizard kept sending them away with stories of electric pens and megaphones and other wonders put together by his remarkable team of nutters and bolters. In 1876, he came up with the idea that turned Alexander Graham Bell’s awkward fledgling telephone into something even more useful. The new device could not only convey sound, but it could also record it. In 1877—to the dismay of Bell, who was honing in on the same conclusion—Edison patented the phonograph (the word literally means “sound writer”).

  The public was dumbfounded that a machine could speak. The human voice had never been stored before; it had always been a thing of the spirit. Now it had been made physical, engraved on a foil drum. Cartoonists had a field day: one of them showed a wife using the new toy to stir her husband in the middle of the night with cries of “help” and “murder.” Edison’s assault on sleep was already underway. When he demonstrated the new toy at the White House, President Rutherford B. Hayes stayed up all night, playing with it into the wee hours.

  Edison knew that he was tapping into a rich vein of mysticism; the human voice could now be held for all eternity. Future generations could listen to people long after they were dead. Later, when Edison was working on early versions of the movie projector, he said he was trying to do for the eye what the phonograph had done for the ear. He was loosening Father Time’s grip on his sickle.

  Edison’s first wife, Mary, endured a lonely marriage. Given Edison’s work schedule and penchant for late nights in the lab, she dined on her own most nights and nearly always went to bed alone. She died of nervous exhaustion—deemed “congestion of the brain”—in 1884 at the still-tender age of twenty-nine. Although her death took place at two in the morning, Edison had to be fetched home from work to take his place at her bedside. He was, to be fair, distressed by the loss and broke into tears. But his tears may have been salted by guilt. As Mary’s nerves had worsened over the previous five years, Edison had invested himself, day and night, into his dream of taming the dark.

  The year after Mary died, Edison proposed to Mina Miller. Like Mary, Mina was sixteen when Edison suggested the merger. He declared his intentions by tapping “Will you marry me?” in Morse code on Mina’s hand as they rode side by side in a carriage, and Mina understood enough of his world to be able to tap back her reply. At least she knew what she was in for.

  Thomas Edison had little personal use for most of his inventions. He taught Bell’s gurgling telephone to enunciate clearly and thus turned it into a viable economic proposition. But he would never come to the phone himself, least of all when his wife was trying to find out what time he’d be home. He spent years on a futile project to develop a type of rubber that could be grown in North America to make pneumatic tires (Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone were friends), but he never drove a car himself. He loved the phonograph, but he was so deaf that he could only experience the machine by biting into the wooden table on which it sat and feeling its vibrations. He pioneered cinema technology but didn’t go to the movies; he preferred to sit up late and play Parcheesi instead—or, of course, to work.

  Electric light was different. That was something he could use. For Edison, there were never enough hours in the day. So he made more.

  One of the wonders of Edison’s long life is that he died in his bed. He had spent so little of his eighty-five years in it that the odds were that he’d die someplace else. When he did get into bed, he often neglected to take off his boots.

  Edison’s approach to sleep is the stuff of legend. From an early age, he developed the habit of catnapping—snoozing for a few minutes at any odd time during the day. His signature posture was sitting at a desk with his hand balled into his cheek, supporting his head while he dozed. One of the most famous photos of Edison shows him fast asleep, flat out on a laboratory bench with his boots tied and his hand in his watch pocket— ready, it would seem, to check the time the moment he stirred. His hand is under his chin as though, even asleep, he is still working on a problem. At Menlo Park, he had a hidden cupboard under the stairs where he could retreat for a nap. His ability to sleep anywhere, from the side of the road to lying on the cowcatcher on the front of a train, may have been helped by his inability to hear.

  Edison didn’t like other people sleeping either. A contemporary biographer, George Bryan, relates the story of a job applicant telling Edison that he had terrible problems with insomnia. Edison employed him on the spot and set him to work, asking him to keep watch on an experiment “day and night.” After only sixty hours on the job, his new employee dozed off, and Edison was furious that the man had misled him about his need to sleep. In later years, Edison went on camping jaunts with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone. On one such jaunt, they found themselves in Vermont and decided to drop in on President Calvin Coolidge. Mrs. Coolidge told the visitors that the president liked a nap after lunch and was usually tucked up in bed early at night. Once again, Edison was not impressed. He is reported to have told Mrs Coolidge to tell her husband that “lack of sleep never hurt anybody.” In his seventh decade, Edison wrote to a fan that the secret of his success was that he had worked eighteen hours a day for the previous forty-five years. “The body is only a piece of machinery,” he said.

  Edison’s obsession with work was not easy for the colleagues he dragged out of bed at all hours because he was determined to move a project to the next stage of development. At a quarter to ten, his inner circle of men would be far from thinking of going home. After all, it was only two and a quarter hours to lunch—always served at midnight—and usually accompanied by beer, cigars, and male antics. In the 1880s, after Edison had brought electric light to New York and moved his office there, he often had lunch in Delmonico’s restaurant on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street—right on the dot of midnight.

  Despite what he said, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Edison was habitually exhausted. Certainly, he was always on the cusp of sleep. His most famous adage is both a recipe for exhaustion and an expression of it. In 1903, he told a chemist who had just joined his team that he didn’t believe in luck. He said that he never quit anything until he got what he was after. He quoted to the chemist the wisdom of his favorite authority—himself. The adage was “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”

  Edison was undoubtedly a genius, but his celebrated slogan is by no means an accurate representation of the way he divided his own energies. He doesn’t cut any piece of the pie for bravado, self-confidence, bluster, and an ability to give his undivided attention to a dozen things at once— all core elements of the Edison persona. The belief that genius is 99 percent perspiration encapsulates an approach to invention that became the cornerstone of the 20th century’s idea of research and development. Edison always found the one thing that would work by eliminating all the others that wouldn’t. He was never threatened by the prospect of looking for a needle in haystack; it was easier than imagining a needle that didn’t exist yet. Edison didn’t work in the abstract; at Menlo Park, there was a storage room filled with every possible chemical compound, half-finished circuit, and piece of wire that ever came into the place—any of which could come in handy someday. Edison kept notes on all his inconclusive experiments, which he declined to think of as failures, knowing that they could contain the answer to a question that had not even been asked up to that point. Nothing was thrown away. If you worked through the rubble long enough, you would eventually find what you were after. You only had to stumble into it. Even a tired person can do that. It’s possible to work through a haystack, straw by straw, while you are all but asleep on your feet and far beyond any capacity for thought. Edison expounded a way for people to be exhausted and still look as though they were coming up with fresh ideas. In essence, he invented the modern career.

  And the wizard indeed had to sift through a mountain of rubble to change his lightbulb. At the time,
a lot of money had been invested in gas lighting, which released toxins and blackened walls. Electricity had been used to provide what was known as “arc lighting,” a form of illumination that required the combustion of carbon rods and thus let off fumes and heat. It produced a powerful light that couldn’t be dimmed or regulated; it was only suitable for outdoor use or perhaps use in large enclosed spaces, such as factories.

  Domestic light needed to be less obtrusive. Edison wondered if the practice of incandescence, or heating something until it glowed, could be improved upon. The idea had already occurred to Joseph Swan, a chemist from the north of England, who had been fiddling around with incandescent bulbs for almost twenty years. (Edison had no problem taking advantage of minds other than his own. In the mid-1880s, he would promise $50,000 to the newly arrived 29-year-old Croatian electrical genius Nikola Tesla, if Tesla could iron out certain problems in the generation and delivery of electricity. Tesla worked through the night for a year and achieved remarkable results. When he then asked Edison for the money owed to him, Edison told him he had to get used to the American sense of humor. Tesla didn’t laugh. He ended up working for Edison’s archrival, George Westinghouse. Swan was gobsmacked by the speed with which Edison developed not only a bulb but a whole system of fittings, sockets, meters, and lines for electricity distribution. The point was not to have electric light in a laboratory but to have it in every home.

  The year 1879 in Edison’s life bears comparison with the last year of Mozart’s. The chap was busy. In September 1878, Edison began experimenting with a long list of substances that might provide a suitable filament to do the glowing inside a bulb. He and his associates raided the attic in their search and, in order to coax more money out of investors, prematurely announced that they had succeeded. They tried cardboard, cedar, celluloid, coconut hair, coconut shell, cork, cotton soaked in various substances, and more. Then, in January 1879, Edison started fiddling with something new. He tried making a filament glow inside a vacuum, inside a bulb. In March, to keep the press quivering, he announced that he was about to halve the price of gas lighting; he was still miles from his mark. He covered a vast stretch of ground in the next six months. But his resolve never flickered. He knew that invention was only a matter of discovery.