Some years ago, I read Roger Ekirch’s At Day’s Close, a book about the history of sleep. Ekirch discovered that before the arrival of artificial light, English people had customarily had two sleep periods each night. People retired soon after dusk, and rose again at dawn. But their nights were divided into two sleeps, with a waking interval between.
I became curious, and found to my amazement that I could trigger the pattern in myself. I went to bed earlier, and suddenly waking at 2 a.m. wasn’t a source of anxiety, but an opportunity. I would stay awake for an hour or two, reading or musing, then sleep again till rising for work. I was stunned by the ease with which my body slipped into this rhythm, my DNA recalling the lives of the weavers and wheelwrights of Ekirch’s study.
So I was interested to read Wild Nights, which Ekirch has praised. In it, Benjamin Reiss sets out to chart the Anglo-American cultural history of sleep.
In his introduction, Reiss talks about privilege. He writes from the perspective of the privileged, educated classes who make up his readers, those who have the luxury of worrying about their sleep practices. Of course, it is axiomatic that the moment a reader is castigated for his privilege, an appeal to diversity can’t be far behind—in this case “a testament to sleep’s amazing diversity.” Reiss is a literature professor, so he guides us through the historical attitudes to sleep via literary examples. The result is that much of the book is only indirectly about sleep. We are treated to lengthy passages on topics as disparate as the life of Henry David Thoreau, the history of coffeehouses, and Victorian anxieties over childhood masturbation.
More than a quarter of Wild Nights is devoted to children, and how their sleep has been arranged and theorized. A child’s sleep, like every other aspect of the infant’s life, is a locus of anxiety among the privileged classes, and Reiss guides us through some of the conflicting advice in today’s growing library of books telling parents they’re doing it wrong.
Much of the counsel is focused on the goal of having children sleep through the night, in their own bed. Herding little Timmy offstage so that Mom and Dad can open a bottle of wine and watch HBO is a standard of middle-class life, although Reiss is keen to point out that historically, Timmy would have been in his parents’ bed—or at least, on the floor nearby. Putting children in their own beds, away from parents, is an artifact of the industrialized West. No doubt this is true, but I came away unconvinced that this makes it undesirable.
Reiss takes the view that co-sleeping—this has a blurry definition, meaning either sharing a bed or just sharing a room—is healthier, at least in training people to sleep despite noises and interruptions around them. He apparently learned this when staying on a kibbutz in the 1980s, where the young people had been raised in a dormitory, sleeping away from their parents. How much this system sprang from ideas of how children sleep best (as opposed to how to best rationalize the group’s child-care situation) is unclear. It also encouraged the peer group to bond, which was part of the kibbutz’s aim. But it was hardly original: Raising children away from their parents as a form of social engineering goes back to the Spartans.
In the American middle classes, it hasn’t been common for children to share beds for over a century, but it was normal until quite recently to share a bedroom with a same-sex sibling. Today, even boarding schools and colleges are less likely to offer shared rooms or dorms in favor of private bedrooms—another contributing factor in spiraling college costs. If Timmy has grown up with a private bed and bath, he’s not inclined to settle for a four-bed dorm and a shower down the hall.
We grow up sleeping in our own space, and as adults, we have to train ourselves to cope with a partner’s snores, flailing legs, or blanket-stealing. Perhaps true “privilege” is not even having to do that: A recent Wall Street Journal story detailed the trend towards houses with two master bedrooms.
Yet our sleep is more disrupted than ever, by round-the-clock job demands and various glowing screens messing up our brains. Reiss demonstrates that sleep advice, and sleep anxiety, also emerged with industrialization. To think of sleep much at all—let alone worry about whether you’re doing it correctly—is a luxury indeed, and one not afforded to many in human history. Sleep is one more human process, like eating, drinking, and sex, that can be dissected and advised upon, creating anxiety about facets of our lives that our ancestors would barely have considered.
Meanwhile, we don’t do enough exercise or manual labor to fall into our beds exhausted, for a well-earned rest. Sleep as a luxury that ought to be earned has long been part of the Protestant worldview, but it’s something Reiss barely hints at in his study. Nonetheless, the Christian moral framework—sloth as deadly sin, early rising as a moral duty—still lingers in the background of our attitudes to sleep. Telling late-slumbering children to get up because they are “wasting the day” conveys the belief that any wakeful activity is a more “worthy” way of spending our time than sleeping. Even as we understand that sleep is a necessary biological process, we think of it, on some level, as a self-indulgence that willpower can resist and admire high achievers who can get by on five hours a night.
According to one study cited here, not everyone has the same built-in sleep chronometer. But that doesn’t stop us judging. And our sleep anxiety itself is a sign of our advanced, privileged neurosis. As Reiss demonstrates, we are not that far from the Victorian view that insomnia was a sign of intellectual activity or emotional delicacy: Only dullards slept like logs.
Nor did all pre-industrial societies sleep in the same way as those early-modern English people of Roger Ekirch’s research. Climate affects our sleep cycles as much as ambient light, and tropical communities slept differently from those in northern Europe. As Reiss himself acknowledges, a single platonic ideal of sleep may be a chimera: How humans slumber has always been culturally and environmentally contingent. But we can exercise our privilege to read books like this, and learn more about what sleep meant at other times. ¨
Katrina Gulliver is the author of Modern Women in China and Japan: Gender, Feminism and Global Modernity Between the Wars.
