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.

8 comments:

  1. 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.

    i'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.

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  2. What poems did you learn, Elberry?

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  3. by 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).

    i 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.

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  4. 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...

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  5. Just be careful that you don't wind up in a physical relationship with the full body pillow, if you know what I mean.

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  6. Don't think it much matters what you do if you have worries on your mind. You're not going to sleep.

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  7. I love to sleep. For me, it rates up there with sex and food.

    Alas, 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.

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  8. nobody is getting enough and everybody wants more.

    What was the subject again?

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