Sleep, death and purgatory

Touching on the links between sleep and death (thankfully not that close)

To die, to sleep –
To sleep – perchance to dream.

Today, March 14, is World Sleep Day – not, as it might sound, a day the whole world sleeps through, but an annual event organised by the World Sleep Society, an international band of doctors and medical researchers, to raise awareness of the health benefits of sleep.

According to their website, the day is intended as a celebration of sleep. I’m all for that. But as one of the world’s millions or even billions of insomniacs (estimates range between 5% and 50%, depending on how the condition is defined), I feel it’s also something of a taunt.

Yes, we know sleep is life-enhancing and we’d love to celebrate it. Most of us have spent many years desperately wanting to celebrate it, working out how best to fall and stay asleep, night after night.

image: Sophie Cheng @drawnnnnnnout

I first failed to sleep during finals. It was the night before Middle English. I don’t know if the subject was significant – I think I rather liked ME lit. But I went straight from the exam hall to the medical centre where a doctor, barely looking up from his desk, handed me a prescription for sleeping pills (not sure what they were, don’t remember checking).

Sleeplessness was, I concluded, an occupational hazard if you were trying to graduate, and therefore unremarkable. The next night I took one pill, slept – well, sort of slept – and felt so wretched the following morning I threw the rest away.

Since then, and especially since children and a job that included night shifts, insomnia has insinuated itself as one of the certainties of life. Death, taxes and poor sleep. I’ve learnt, as they say, to live with it. Certain things help, very slightly (hypnotherapy didn’t). But nothing can reliably prevent or cure nocturnal racing mind. Worrying about it might just be worse than the thing itself.

Sleep as a little death or death as a very (infinitely?) long sleep are age-old ideas. Shakespeare wasn’t the first to play with them. But if sleeping is death, then insomnia, or at least the fear of it, is purgatory.

And so back to where we started.

To die, to sleep –
To sleep – perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub!
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause – there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.

Hamlet speculates that, however miserable life is, people choose to continue living for fear of what might come after, the everlasting nightmare. Daring to contradict him, I reckon we go on living because, for most of us, life is on balance worth living. For that we are thankful.

And when life ends, it ends. Point. No dreams, terrible or otherwise, no half-waking, no enforced deep breathing or random counting, no 3 a.m. reading or listening to music, no padding around in the dark trying not to disturb a partner. Nothing. For us insomniacs, that’s very reassuring.

Wendy Sacks Jones is a writer, journalist and former BBC education correspondent.