Juan Villoro
How many hours should a person sleep? The enigma, of course, is unfathomable. Napoleon would close his eyes in two batches of a couple of hours and awaken with enough stamina to invade Egypt. On the other hand, Einstein proved that work is also a matter of relativity (he performed very well because he rested ten hours a day). In some cases, the brevity of sleep is self-imposed. Salvador Dalí designed a system of naps that allowed him to reduce the loss of lucidity to a minimum. In this regard, Alan Pauls writes: “He would sit in an armchair, leave a metal plate on the floor and abandon himself to sleep with a spoon between his fingers. Asleep, his fingers would relax, the spoon would fall against the plate, and the painter, alerted by the modest clatter, would wake up and resume the softened clock he had left unfinished”.
The growing biopolitical control does not yet impose sleep laws; each one sleeps according to his whim or need, but when evaluating the behavior of others, we praise those who “need little sleep”, not because they are guilty of insomnia, but because of a triumph of metabolism or willpower. The awake person has more prestige than the sleeping one, and there is no lack of medical reports on the fatigue produced by excessive lethargy.
This article cannot change the reputation of people in pajamas, but it aspires to be seen differently. Misleadingly, it is thought that having your eyes open will guarantee performance; however, on many occasions, those suffering from nocturnal disorders spend the day yawning and conceive ideas that should be in a dream.
García Márquez’s characters usually wake up “with the first roosters”; they fulfill their destiny with nature’s clock. In contrast, numerous city dwellers need eye masks, earplugs, thick curtains, valerian tea, and pills ranging from “mood stabilizers” to “sleep inducers”. One would say that sleeping is an unnatural activity that is suspended at the first snore of one’s partner (which might suggest that co-sleeping is also unnatural).
But the essence of the matter is not in the number of hours slept but in their quality. Without going into the Freudian territory and the inexhaustible interpretation of dreams, let’s think about the energy deployed when dreaming. Some do more while asleep than while awake. The demands of dreams can lead us to solve procedures that we will never solve in the offices of reality. Is there anything more exhausting than that kind of rest? Rafael Cordero Aurrecoechea captured the predicament in his text “Bureaucrat”: “He woke up exhausted, with no desire to get up, lying on the right side of his sleep. He dreamed that he had worked eight consecutive hours during his body’s rest. He called in sick.”
In the same dream, we go up and downstairs, open a briefcase full of strange things, swerve before falling into the abyss, take the wrong train, see the loved one leave, argue with Lenin or Carranza, and remember that we left the milk on the stove. Isn’t this too much? Sleep is the place where you are late and the milk spills.
There are pleasant dreams, and I don’t deny it, that equal days of rest. But this article is concerned with the “working nights,” which demand so much work.
“When the dream lasts long enough to disturb us, it is called reality,” Rafael Pérez Gay aptly writes in Perseguir la Noche (Pursuing the Night). I interpret that he is not referring to supernatural nightmares, but to something more profound, the situations that bring into play what we are also by day, the unfinished business, the insecurities and fears of which we are made: the worked dreams.
And then there is the uncertainty of reaching the other shore. The bed is a provisional tomb; we lie there waiting for tomorrow: “arch of blood, bridge of heartbeats, take me to the other side of this night…”, writes Octavio Paz. We trust to open our eyes; sleep is a risky journey. I knew it as a child when I heard my sister pray: “As I lie in this bed, I will lie in my grave…”. Saying “good night” is an enchantment, not a prophecy.
It is worthwhile to reconsider the cultural value of sleep. The history of Europe would be different if Napoleon dared to sleep longer.
This was originally published in Spanish by Reforma on January 21, 2022