Sleeping 'too much' is often deemed a character fault, the result of laziness or apathy, writes Hilary White, an Irish Research Council and Government of Ireland 2023 Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English.

    Sleep is an experience shared by everyone, and yet is so different for each person. This idiosyncrasy of sleeping has stood out to me as a researcher of sleep in literature. As sleep often goes unnoticed until it becomes a problem, many literary accounts describe sleeping difficulties. Take the American poet Bernadette Mayer's On Sleep - a poem about insomnia that somehow has fun with the subject, obsessing about sleep as one might obsess over an elusive love object: ‘I can’t get to first base with sleep’.

    Literature and literary history are full of insomniacs, but I’m interested primarily in figures who sleep a lot. Literature is also full of these, although perhaps less famously (for one example, see Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novel of medicinally induced hibernation, My Year of Rest and Relaxation). Insomnia tends to dominate discussions of sleep in literature—arguably because it’s recognisable to most, a widespread problem affecting health and work. Sleeping ‘too much’, on the other hand, is often deemed a character fault, the result of laziness or apathy.

    Incidentally, Bernadette Mayer also has poems written in sleep, or rather in a state which is close to sleep—the hypnagogic state, which occurs just before we fall asleep and is associated with hallucinations (of sound or image, or both). Mayer trained herself to enter this state and record ‘hypnagogic word clusters’ which became somewhat nonsensical poems, some of which are included in her 2011 book Ethics of Sleep.

    Making poems with this material subtly challenges attitudes which are restrictive to both poetry and sleep—the kinds of attitude which think sleep is a waste of time, and that we should spend as little time doing it as possible. These attitudes run deep, dating back at least to the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato, who is credited as stating: "Asleep, man is useless, he may as well be dead". In our current 24/7 society, sleep is disregarded and devalued to an even greater extent. ‘Our treatment of sleep today is brutish’, as the sleep scientists Steven W. Lockley & Russel G. Foster write in Sleep: A Very Short Introduction.

    While sleep science has undergone huge development over the last century, sleep disorders are still under-diagnosed. The pioneering sleep scientist William C. Dement argued along these lines in The Promise of Sleep in 1999, where he attributed a large portion of public health issues to widespread undiagnosed sleep disorder. Lack of public and medical awareness of some types of sleep disorder combine to make diagnosis more difficult. Delayed sleep phase disorder, for instance, characterised by an inability to fall asleep and wake up at socially appropriate times, could easily be misread as insomnia if the patient reports not being able to get to sleep at night, and struggling with mornings as a result.

    As a literary researcher, I can’t venture too far into the scientific arguments—but I believe that scientific efforts and literary research can collaborate and mutually benefit each other in pushing for better societal sleep. Literature, for one thing, shows us different kinds of sleep experience, expanding what we recognise, and might therefore think of as socially acceptable, in sleep. At the same time, the emergent science of chronobiology tells us there are different chronotypes naturally occurring across the population, forming a spectrum of early to late types (Till Roenneberg’s 2012 book Internal Time provides a readable account).

    The Scottish writer Shola von Reinhold portrays a protagonist with a sleep disorder in Lote, her novel from 2020. This is the first time I’ve seen a circadian rhythm disorder named in literature, which might mean that awareness of circadian rhythm disorders is growing; these disorders are relatively new in the science of sleep, itself a young science in the grand scheme of things.

    Lote’s protagonist has what she calls ‘non-sleep-wake-twenty-four-hour-disorder with possible hypersomnia’. The novel therefore features a lot of sleeping, especially napping: an expansive, occasionally disorienting, occasionally luxurious experience which suits the baroque narrative. When an acquaintance of the protagonist learns she slept all day, the protagonist reports: ‘My sleeping pattern horrified her’. The acquaintance is described as regimented, unwavering, the kind of go-getter and early-riser favoured -- deemed ‘normal’ -- within capitalist societies.

    This horror described in a fictional narrative is recognisable, I’m sure, to those labelled unproductive by society. In a way, it is hostility towards sleep itself. Why are we innately suspicious of people who sleep a lot, or sleep in late, or enjoy sleeping? Sleepers cannot actively participate in capitalist rhythms of production, and so sleep is considered useless. But what would a society that valued sleep look like? What would prioritising rest, inactivity and reverie change? I read these literary works as an argument for slowing down, learning to enjoy sleep, and valuing sleep—in its own right, not for how it can make us more productive in waking and working life.

    This piece originally appeared on RTÉ Brainstorm