Sleep is Weird

by E. Marmer
posted Apr 25, 2015

found at cambio.com

Nothing makes you grasp how weird sleep is quite like going to sleep for the night in the clothes you wore that day. You take off your shoes and, still wearing shirt, pants, socks, and even the leather belt you had on, just lie on the bed (blanket optional), and sleep for seven or eight hours. People will give you a bunch of different reasons why we don’t normally do this. Like, it’s not comfortable, or you need separate sleep clothes to absorb the sleep smell we all generate (that’s just weird right there!), or if you don’t perform the ritual of undressing and washing, you’ll accumulate all kinds of grime on your face, etc. But these are just sacraments we’ve adopted to prepare for and regulate a most bizarre phenomenon. To sophisticate and romanticize something primal and animal and out of our control: we simply turn off, shut down to a bare minimum of breathing, beating, and chemical regulation. We hibernate like bears, only for several hours and not months at a time. And our dens are in the modern equivalent of caves. Compartments we’ve sectioned off, in dwellings that also have bigger shared compartments for food stores and communal domestic activities.

When you sleep in your day clothes, there is no formal break between your routines for day and night. You take away that tiny moment we’ve indoctrinated ourselves to notice (or, more accurately, created in the first place for our own reassurance). That moment we think we have deliberately chosen to embark on our journey to the restful, restorative, magical, mystical and even potentially frightening world of dreams. When you sleep in your day clothes, there is no ceremony. There is no moment. You just simply move to a bed and stretch out in a horizontal position.

The bed is the key. A lifetime habit of romanticizing sleep doesn’t disappear in one night of being too lazy to get up from the couch after a late television movie. No, to realize how weird sleep is, you have to deliberately decide, “Hey, you know what? I’m gonna go to sleep in my bed and in my clothes!” And you have to do it for two nights in a row at least, if only to shake the notion that sleeping in your clothes makes you a bum, a dysfunctional loser who might as well be passing out drunk. By the second night of sleeping in your day clothes – not the SAME clothes of course; you have to put on fresh clothes each morning! – you will feel instead like you are conducting a legitimate experiment to investigate the reality of sleep, and be shod of the guilt of abandoning conventions shared by all upright members of society. Yes, folks, I did this. Having the house all to myself now that the kids are in college helped. And I’ll even admit that it didn’t start out as an investigation, but merely as an act of defiance. Why bother going through all the rigmarole? I can do whatever I want. I can go to sleep in my clothes!!

But it turned out to be quite informative. It made me see how sleep is merely the recharging of our organic batteries. Sleep, after eating and expelling waste, is perhaps the strongest proof that we are, albeit very advanced creatures, creatures nonetheless. For even though we are never more vulnerable than when we are while sleeping, we must do it. In the end, it is compulsory. We can’t function without it for very long. There we are, completely defenseless, while our brains and our organs recharge and we generate more bone marrow, more neurons, more enzymes. And because deep down – deep, deep deep down – we know we are defenseless, we protect ourselves as much as we can, both physically and psychologically from this stark truth. We invent words like “slumber” to connote activity, a journey through the netherworld. Indeed, we kiss our loved ones goodnight, as if we are all going somewhere. We perform all sorts of rites such as putting on special, cozy garments, or tucking in our children and giving them a bedtime story. We sleep in the privacy of bedrooms, in homes locked for the night. We graciously offer guests the chance to rest undisturbed in private guest quarters, secure in the unspoken understanding that we are nearby sentinels who promise not to spy on them as they sleep. And we in turn don’t allow just anyone to see us sleep. We don’t sleep in front of the contractors who are doing work in our homes, or even good friends, unless we happen to be bunking with them on holiday. When we seek to economize in our youth, and stay in hostels while traveling, it makes us uncomfortable to sleep communally, but we take a calculated risk and put on a show of bravado, even as we clutch our backpacks or money holders close to our bodies. If we are unfortunate enough to fall asleep during a class or a lecture, we always awaken with a sense of mortification, not because we care about having insulted the teacher or the presenter, but because people have seen us in our vulnerable and undignified state. What if we drooled??

One exception that we all seem perfectly willing to make to our careful protection of ourselves in sleep, is napping on public transportation. It seems that from the earliest invention of public transit, we simply had to accept that the rocking, the jiggling, the boredom and the long passages of time would lull some of us into sleep and it just couldn’t be helped. So there is this shared willingness not to watch the guy leaning against the bus window softly snoring, or the couple, weary after a day of sightseeing, nestled into each other with eyes shut. We know that the same courtesy will be accorded to us, if our exhaustion gets the better of us on the commuter train home, or on the six hour plane ride. Indeed, given length of a typical flight, and the relative lack of movement allowed, we have actually come to feel quite safe and appropriate sleeping on a plane. In the case of flights far across hemispheres, we really have no choice. We come up against that compulsory need for recharging, even if we like to think of it more as an acceptable activity rather than what it actually is: a public shutting down. And so we make allowances, and respect the privacy of the snoozing traveler. Well, in most cases we do. Sadly, the introduction of the smart phone with camera has resulted in the potential for ridicule, as this photo taken of me on the way back from a youth trip to Nicaragua demonstrates. I’m the one with slack jaw.

public snoozing

But rather than dwell on the ignominy of shutting down like a switched off robot, ultimately I choose to celebrate what sleep indicates about our complexity of design and functioning. We are advanced organisms, requiring large amounts of energy for diverse and incredible tasks. We propel ourselves through space. We solve problems (and make some). We find our own fuel and make it even more appetizing. We create, and destroy and communicate. And, of course, we think. We contemplate and ruminate and theorize, and – need I say it? – navel-gaze. We even find ways of dressing up sleep so that we don’t have to face how basic and limited we nevertheless remain. If all that means I must be little more than a large body bag every night, so be it. I can’t choose to keep from shutting down, but I can embrace it and all that it allows me to do when I’m awake. Now, where are those pajamas?