Sunday, June 17, 2007
And Speaking of Sleeping...
... I don't. Well, not much. Every night, for people like me, is a dragon to be slain. But, in fact, very few people sleep enough. Before the invention of the light bulb in 1879, humans slept 10 hours a night, now they sleep about 7.5 hours. Thanks a lot, Thomas Edison. The entire world is tired and tetchy. This explains phenomena like the National Sleep Foundation, nobody is getting enough and everybody wants more. But I have a solution, inspired by a very funny article in the FT by Lucy Kellaway. I am going to fill my basket at Dream Essentials, whose products, apparently, make one sleep with a big grin on your face. My plan is to get a Mindfold mask, a herbal body wrap, foot cozys, a SleepMate Sound Conditioner, a neck wrap and, best of all, a Snoozer Full Body Pillow. My lonely nights will now be soothed by the project of building, using just these products, a small and very comfortable hovercraft.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
i found that memorising poetry as you lie in bed in a very good way to exhaust the mind. i used this to get to sleep when i was about 20, with the result that i memorised over 1000 lines of poetry, which i would later declaim to the cliffs & islands of Winander, to the silent owls. i think using the internet is a bad idea, as i have a faint feeling that there's something addictive about staring at the screen, regardless of content.
ReplyDeletei'm told you get by on about 3-4 hours' sleep so long as you take injections to replicate the chemical reactions that go on during sleep. My father rarely had more than 3 hours' sleep, and that in patches here & there. He then went mad and had visions.
What poems did you learn, Elberry?
ReplyDeleteby Eliot: The Wasteland; The Hollow Men; Prufrock; Gerontion; Marina. That was just to get to sleep. Later, for fun, i memorised Tennyson's 'Ulysses', Wallace St's 'The Idea of Order at Key West', Yeats' 'A Dialogue of Self & Soul', Hart Crane's lovely 'My Grandmother's Love Letters', Catullus' 'Vivamus mea Lesbia', and am now working my way through Canto 27 of Dante's Inferno (the hell for evil counsellors).
ReplyDeletei also accidentally memorised the first 20 lines of Lucretius' De Rerum Naturae as i kept reading it aloud, fascinated by the sound, e.g. "hominum divumque voluptas, alma venus, caeli subter labentia signa".
i've forgotten most of what i've memorised, but i think it lingers in some way, occasionally asserts itself in the rhythm of my speech or prose. Perhaps what we forget is most potent.
Elberry - that Hart Crane poem is indeed a beauty - I'd never come across it before - thanks. And, like you, I hope that's true about what we forget - there's certainly a heck of a lot of it, and more and more...
ReplyDeleteJust be careful that you don't wind up in a physical relationship with the full body pillow, if you know what I mean.
ReplyDeleteDon't think it much matters what you do if you have worries on your mind. You're not going to sleep.
ReplyDeleteI love to sleep. For me, it rates up there with sex and food.
ReplyDeleteAlas, since I've begun working evening shifts at a daily newspaper, havoc hath been wrought upon my circadian rhythms. I used to fall asleep like a happy baby before 10 p.m., now I'm lucky if I can fall asleep before 2 a.m. And, rarely, if ever, do I see the dawn break.
Someday, perchance, I will sleep again. And dream.
nobody is getting enough and everybody wants more.
ReplyDeleteWhat was the subject again?