The Enduring Mysteries of Sleep and Insomnia

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Sleep scientists spend their entire waking lives engaged in this kind of surveillance. They may stay up all night just to watch someone awaken. They treat bizarre and dangerous disorders—narcolepsy, obstructive sleep apnea, African sleeping sickness, fatal familial insomnia—as well as the common, everyday sleep disturbances like mine. I've studied the work of modern sleep researchers—along with anatomy, mythology, mental disorders, and aging—hoping to find certain answers my body refuses to divulge. While none of what I've learned has fully unraveled the mystery of sleep, least of all in my own life, I have come to see that sleep itself tells a story.

The ancient Greeks envisioned sleep as the minor god Hypnos, born of night, who lived on the island of Lemnos in a dark cave. Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, flowed through this underworld where Hypnos lay on pillows surrounded by his many sons, including Morpheus, the dream bringer. Unlike his twin brother Thanatos, the god of death, Hypnos was considered a friend of mortals, a healer of body and mind. He took different forms as he wandered the earth—a bird or a child, but most often a benevolent warrior carrying a horn, from which he would drip a sleep elixir. The Greeks apparently took his gifts for granted. No cults arose to worship sleep, which seems odd, for surely there were ancient insomniacs.

Aristotle later saw sleep as the opposite of wakefulness, one of the contraries that "are seen always to present themselves in the same subject . . . health and sickness, beauty and ugliness, strength and weakness, sight and blindness, hearing and deafness." In a sense, Aristotle took the Greek myth and recast it: Now, sleep was the evil twin of wakefulness. "Sleep," he noted, "is evidently a privation of waking." Basing his theory on personal observation rather than prevailing beliefs, Aristotle concluded that sleep was the result of digestive vapors moving up toward the brain. The bigger the meal, the greater the vapors, and the sleepier one got.

Aristotle's ideas remained influential for many centuries. Future experts would try to hunt down the anatomical source of sleep, if only in hope of extending wakefulness. One example—nonsensical in hindsight—can be found in David Hartley's Observations on Man: His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations, published in 1749. Inquiring into "the intimate and precise nature of sleep," Hartley, an English doctor, stated that sleep could be explained by the "doctrine of vibrations." As Hartley saw it, the body was like a sack of Jell-O—a jiggling mass of solids and fluids that, on occasion, had to come to rest. He elaborated that "during sleep, blood is accumulated in the veins, and particularly in the venal sinuses which surround the brain and spinal marrow; and also, that it is rarefied, at least for the most part."

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