| Favorite Trivia – SLEEP & DREAMS
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| “Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed, The dear repose for limbs with travel tired; But then begins a journey in my head, To work my mind when body’s work’s expired…” Sonnet 21 (William Shakespeare) |
| “I dream for a living.”
Steven Spielberg |
| “A birdie with a yellow bill Hopped upon the window sill, cocked his shining eye and said: ‘Ain’t you ‘shamed, you sleepy-head?'” Robert Louis Stevenson – Time to Rise |
| “Is it not odd? I can command my eyes to be awake when toil and weariness sit on my eyelids, but to draw the curtain of oblivion is beyond my power.”
Sir Walter Scott – English Diaries of the XIX Century |
| “The bed has become a place of luxury to me! I would not exchange it for all the thrones in the world.”
Napoleon |
| “What is insomnia but the gift of more time.”
Michael Perlis |
“I find that when you have a real interest in life and a curious life, that sleep is not the most important thing.” [I wonder if she thought this in prison?  ]
Martha Stewart |
| Question: “Why is it so difficult to remember the majority of dreams we experience?” Answer: “When our brains are asleep, nothing we experience is encoded into memory. (This is one reason sleep-teaching devices don’t work.) To remember fragments of a dream, one must awaken, at least somewhat, while it is occurring, and even then, the memory is likely to be fleeting. People who recall more of their dreams may be slightly more wakeful in general, especially if they’re making an effort to remember or keep a record of them. Recurring dreams are more likely to be remembered because of the increased number of opportunities to awaken during them, and frightening dreams are sometimes recalled only because they wake you up.”
Ask Marilyn, Marilyn vos Savant |
| “‘I was up until five,’ she [78-year-old M.F.K. Fisher] is saying as she lowers herself into a chair by the kitchen table. ‘Then this morning I lay listening to the comedy hour on the radio, dozing and chuckling.’ “‘Are you an insomniac?’ I venture.
“‘Oh, I don’t know about that, dear. Insomniacs mind, don’t they?'” “Compliments of the Nurse” – Dawn Drzal (Eat, Memory: Great Writers At The Table: a collection of essays from the New York Times – ed. by Amanda Hesser) |
| Insomnia – “The triumph of mind over mattress.”
Leonard Louis Levinson – (Anon) Webster’s Unafraid Dictionary: Defiant Definitive Put-Downs |
| “So, if I dreame I have you, I have you.”
John Donne – from Elegy X: The Dream |
| “The body of the sleeper lies as though dead; but his mind lives and flourishes.” [De Divinatione., I, 30.]
Cicero |
| I joked with Johnny: “You are going to sleep and leaving me alone with my thoughts?”
Patty Martino Alspaugh |
| “Work in the hotel taught me the true value of sleep, just as being hungry had taught me the true value of food. Sleep had ceased to be a mere physical necessity; it was something voluptuous, a debauch more than a relief. I had no more trouble with the bugs. Mario had told me of a sure remedy for them, namely pepper, strewed over the bedclothes. It made me sneeze, but the bugs all hated it, and emigrated to other rooms.”
George Orwell – Down and Out in Paris and London |
| “The wild winds weep And the night is a-cold Come hither, Sleep, And my griefs infold!” William Blake – Mad Song |
| “If I can’t sleep, I must just sit up and read instead of trying to fight myself into sleep.” [February 2, 1955]
Norman Mailer |
| “It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”
John Steinbeck – Sweet Thursday |
| “Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.”
Ben Okri |
| “Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, And yet a third of life is pass’d in sleep.” Lord Byron – Don Juan |
| “Sleep means unconsciousness. . . When I go to sleep, I sometimes jealously guard my faculties from being filched away by sleep. I almost fear sleep: it makes me apprehensive—this wonderful and unknowable Thing which is going to happen to me for which I must lay myself out on a bed and wait, with an elaborate preparedness. Unlike Sir Thomas Browne, I am not always so content to take my leave of the sun and sleep, if need be, into the resurrection. And I sometimes lie awake and wonder when the mysterious Visitor will come to me and call me away from this thrilling world, and how He does it, to which end I try to remain conscious of the gradual process and to understand it: an impossibility of course involving a contradiction in terms. So I shall never know, nor will anybody else.” [June 29, 1915]
W.N.P. Barbellion – The Journal of a Disappointed Man |
| “A boxer goes to the doctor’s suffering from terrible insomnia. ‘Have you tried counting sheep?’ suggests the doctor.
‘No, that doesn’t help at all,’ says the boxer. Every time I reach nine, I get up.” |
| “Ut sis nocte levis, sit tibi cena brevis. To rest well at night, eat sparsely.”
Latin proverb |
| “My dreams are more rewarding than my actuality.”
Robert Lowell |
| “If, my dear, you seek to slumber, Count of stars an endless number; If you still continue wakeful, Count the drops that make a lakeful, Then, if vigilance yet above you Hover, count the times I love you; And if slumber still repel you, Count the times I do not tell you.” Franklin Pierce Adams – Lullaby |
| “Later I read The Wisdom of Solomon and then slept very little and poorly, which has been typical recently. Sleep is the principle opposed to the will, which is why I am becoming more alert the more I try to force it. . . One can think of all those things one wants to think of, but on the other hand, we cannot banish thoughts we do not want to think.” [September 30, 1942]
A German Officer In Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945 – Ernst Jünger (trans. by Thomas S. Hansen and Abby J. Hansen) |
| “Floor: Remember you can’t fall out of bed if you sleep on the floor.”
Evan Esar – Esar’s Comic Dictionary |
| “Insomnia, rob me as long as you let me live to the next day.” from Insomnia – Amelia Brett |
| “Dreams are vague because you see them only when your eyes are shut.”
Evan Esar – Esar’s Comic Dictionary |
| “To carry care to bed is to sleep with a pack on your back.”
Haliburton |
| “Am going to read from the Encyclopedia Britannica to steady my nerves, and go to bed early. I will shut my eyes and imagine a terraced abyss, each terrace occupied by a beautiful maiden. . . . Worked my imagination for a supply of maidens. Only saw Mina, Daisy and Mamma. Scheme busted.” [July 12, 1885]
The Diary of Thomas Alva Edison |
| “It is well to put your thoughts to sleep before you go to bed.”
Roy J. Snell – The Thirteenth Ring |
| “Sleep, baby, sleep, Thy father’s watching the sheep, Thy mother’s shaking the dreamland tree, And down drops a little dream for thee.” Elizabeth P. Prentiss – Sleep, Baby, Sleep |
| “. . . people lie down at night and open the dream gates for awhile, in sleep’s bizarre time-out, fret factory and repair shop.”
Diane Ackerman – Cultivating Delight |
| “There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public. There are worse things than these miniature betrayals, committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things than not being able to sleep for thinking about them. It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.”
Fleur Adcock – Things |
| “I do not ever like going to bed. For me each day ends in a little sorrow. I hate the time when it comes to put my books away, to knock out my pipe and say ‘Good-night,’ exchanging the vivid pleasures of the day for the darkness of sleep and oblivion.” [August 9, 1910]
W.N.P. Barbellion – The Journal of a Disappointed Man |
| “For the insomniac, hell is other people’s noise. . . Almost every apartment I rented in my twenties and thirties calls forth memories of a nocturnal soundtrack. In one apartment, it was the slurping, sloshing sound of the landlord’s son mixing something in the basement beneath our living room (What was he up to at 1 a.m.? He was an oddball loner, and the weirdness of his nocturnal activities made it even harder to sleep.). In a French pensione, it was the rhythmic grunts of a man in the next room visited by prostitutes day and night. In Seattle, it was the nighttime shouting matches of the couple downstairs. In every instance I was an involuntary voyeur because darkness affords no protection from sound waves penetrating walls. . . “Trying to negotiate peace and quiet can also make the situation worse. Even the most innocuous request (as in, ‘Hey, guys. Would you mind turning that down a bit?’) can backfire. I got a taste of that the first week in my college dorm, when on a Thursday night I asked my roommate and her friend if they could turn down the volume on the friend’s stereo across the hall. Their response was swift and unambiguous: they set the speaker in the doorway to my room and turned the volume up full blast.”
Lois Maharg – The Savvy Insomniac |
| “He shivered and yawned. It would be lovely in bed after the sheets got a bit hot. First they were so cold to get into. He shivered to think how cold they were at first. But then they got hot and then he could sleep. It was lovely to be tired. He yawned again. Night prayers and then bed: he shivered and wanted to yawn. It would be lovely in a few minutes. He felt a warm glow creeping up from the cold shivering sheets, warmer and warmer till he felt warm all over, ever so warm and yet he shivered a little and still wanted to yawn.”
James Joyce – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man |
| “Wakefulness at night continued to be treated as a health problem during the Middle Ages. The Islamic physician Avicenna, writing in the tenth and eleventh centuries, said quite a lot about it in his Canon of Medicine. ‘Insomnia (or tossing about in bed) is bad for all the bodily states,’ and can result in a ‘weakening and confusion of the reasoning power . . . and acute illnesses.’ “The hygienic measures Avicenna recommended to ensure proper sleep have a familiar ring. One should not try to sleep on an empty stomach; after eating, one should delay going to bed until ‘after the flatulences and eructations. . . have subsided.’ A hot bath with plenty of hot water poured over the head can induce sleep. The wakeful that require ‘a still more efficient method’ of obtaining sleep should take an herbal preparation containing opium, mandrake, and henbane.”
Lois Maharg – The Savvy Insomniac |
| “I suffer a great deal from dreams and one of the worst I had when I was little was the disillusionment I suffered when I died and went to heaven. How horrible heaven was that night! I remember until today the dismal life I led in heaven until I woke up. It was an enormous yard, clean and bare, filled with old women in cloaks, with shawls on their heads, holding their hands up in prayer, not paying any attention to each other. No St. Pedro, no angels, nothing. When they were tired of kneeling they walked around in that enormous yard with their heads bent, still praying. When I woke up and saw I wasn’t in heaven, what a relief!” [October 27, 1894]
Alice Dayrell Caldeira Brant – The Diary of “Helena Morley” |
| “Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast . . .”
Shakespeare – MacBeth |
| “When our attention is in the past, we are in the past. When our attention is in the future, we too are in the realm of an imaginary future. But when our attention is in the present, we are in the presence of life energy. And all problems, particularly insomnia, are a diversion of our attention from present-moment awareness into time-bound awareness.”
Deepak Chopra, M.D. – Restful Sleep: The Complete Mind/Body Program for Overcoming Insomnia |
| “When insomnia, which is the philosopher’s ailment, is increased through irritation caused by city noises; or when, late at night, the hum of automobiles and trucks rumbling through the Place Maubert causes me to curse my city-dweller’s fate, I can recover my calm by living the metaphors of the ocean. . . it has been said countless times that, in the heart of night in Paris, one hears the ceaseless murmur of flood and tide. So I make a sincere image out of these hackneyed ones. . . “If the hum of the cars becomes more painful. . . I dream an abstract concrete daydream. My bed is a small boat lost at sea; that sudden whistling is the wind in the sails. . . I talk to myself to give myself cheer: there now, your skiff is holding its own, you are safe in your stone boat. Sleep in spite of the storm. Sleep in the storm. Sleep in your courage, happy to be a man who is assailed by wind and wave.
“And I fall asleep, lulled by the noise of Paris.” Gaston Bachelard – The Poetics of Space |
| “Trappers, planters and Indians mingled together at these caravanserais: the first time I put up at one, I swore that it would be the last. “Entering one of these hostelries, I stood amazed at the sight of an enormous bed built in a circle round a post: each traveller took his place in this bed with his feet against the post in the middle and his head at the circumference of the circle, so that the sleepers were arranged symmetrically like the spokes of a wheel or the sticks of a fan. After some hesitation, I got into this contraption, because I could see no one else in it. I was beginning to doze off when I felt something sliding against me: it was the leg of my big Dutchman: I have never experienced a more horrible sensation in the whole of my life. I jumped out of the hospitable bed, cordially cursing the customs of our good forefathers. I went and slept in my cloak in the moonlight; this bedfellow at least was all sweetness, freshness and durity.”
François-René de Chateaubriand – The Memoirs of Chateaubriand |
| “Freud’s thinking has been of monumental influence throughout this century. Even those more recent investigators who disagree with his conclusions (as most of them do) find themselves having to deal with the issues that Freud raised, and even use some of his terminology. “For example, studies of sleeping cats by researchers at Harvard University revealed that bursts of brain activity occur at intervals during REM sleep. . . Believing that similar bursts of activity occur in humans, the researchers infer that it’s the task of the sleeping human brain to deal with these sudden floods of random sensory data. In order to do so, the brain does its best to create a story that weaves everything together. The brain naturally draws upon the dreamer’s wishes and fears in order to accomplish this, as in the Freudian theory, but repression has no place in the brainstorm doctrine. Far from trying to hide anything, the brain is looking for whatever it can find to help make sense of the data.
“In a related theory, the sleeping brain is again described as weaving together a large amount of raw data, but instead of originating as sudden neural bursts from inside itself, the random material now derives from the events of the previous day in the waking world, with all its comings and goings, conversations, and so forth. During REM sleep, the brain creates a story line that allows this large volume of events to be stored and remembered in a coherent form, albeit at an unconscious level. According to this theory, the dream is an elaborate mnemonic device for the events of your life. A dream is really a memory aid. “Or perhaps the purpose of dreams is to help us forget. Research by the eminent Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule, concludes that the neural bursts that occur during REM are really a form of cleansing the system. The brain is simply dumping its electrical garbage. This approach has an undeniable logic in its favor. After all, we usually don’t remember our dreams, so it must not have been nature’s intention that we should do so.” Deepak Chopra, M.D. – Restful Sleep: The Complete Mind/Body Program for Overcoming Insomnia |
