Nothing (9 page)

We get linoleum, stock tickers, and the player piano. We get heroin, loudspeakers, typewriters, roller coasters, the alarm clock. We get DDT, barbed wire, machine guns, gasoline engines, contact lenses, escalators, zippers, the box spring. Catatonia is discovered. We get tuned wireless communication.

In an echo of Aristotle’s food fumes, Wilhelm Sommer in 1868 theorizes sleep comes from brain asphyxiation. The brain is shown to suck in more air while we are resting, breathing in the room, of a shared air. Other theorists like Thierry Preyer begin to attribute sleep to the body’s accumulations of kinds of harmful cells throughout the days: lactic acid, cholesterol, carbon dioxide, toxic waste. There are all these chemicals inside us, stuck, resounding, with more being pumped and funneled through the air. Leo Errera explains sleep as another strain of these undesirable substances, referred to as “leucomaines,” getting passed up to the brain to be broken down, fed through the body unto depletion, at which point, again cleared, we wake up. Abel Bouchard specifies that these toxins are made into urine in the sleep state, and that the agents in the new urine cause us to wake.

In 1869, the sedative properties of a compound called chloral hydrate are published. Its ease of manufacture and ability to lay a person out make it quickly popular and widely prescribed. Over the next 150 years this chemical will come to be used in date-rape drugs and in a mounting medium used to observe organisms under microscope. It will eventually be found in the blood of the bodies at Jonestown and in John Tyndall, Marilyn Monroe, and Anna Nicole Smith. The bodies, laid beneath the soil, might be seen by some to mix.

In 1880, Thomas Edison—himself a chronic problem-sleeper—patents the light bulb, taking credit for a long string of inherited versions and ideas. This new ability to control the kinds of hours of light indoors and out grants new democracy to our actions, and thus a glaze of uniformity to the phases of the day. Under contained glow, by machines, we can now work longer, late into evenings, in early mornings even, in the smallest, most unwindowed rooms. Bulbs on streets and in rising buildings will obscure the dark all through the hours, blurting the smaller stars out. Rooms inside of rooms will shine encombed. This development will be pointed to, by some, as years rise, as the number one cause of troubled sleep: all hours are the same.

In 1882, Nietzsche declares god dead: “God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?” The same year, U.S. Patent 268693 describes a “Device For Life In Buried Persons,” a periscope-style tube allowing the interred to breathe from underground and signal they are there to those above.

Around the turn into the twentieth century, we return to sleep’s cause being founded in ideological and spiritual ideas. Brown-Sequard and Heubel suggest that sleep is an inhibitory product, a space wherein the body cuts off its sensory stimulation, in the name of performing upkeep on the mechanisms of staying alert. Many minds, like Osborne, Gayet, and Mauthner, try to pinpoint to specific places inside the body responsible for the shift between sleeping and waking—Gayet pinpoints the brain stem; Mauthner notices the rapid movement of the eyes, but many don’t give credence to these findings—instead, we begin to tune in even nearer to our sleep-related behaviors. Mothers are advised of night-lights for fearful children, as well as taking care not to over-coddle every cry. Children are fenced in inside stationary cribs rather than cradles—new isolation.

Meanwhile, great advances are made in the awarenesses of new kinds of anesthesia, various -ologies pinpointing refined informational systems related to the body’s ways. We are more vigilant now than ever over bacteria. We wipe surfaces. We avoid. People start looking for answers to sleep disruption through new medicine, mainly centered around hypnotics: bromide, paraldehyde, sulfonal. We simultaneously acknowledge the vital healing aspects of sleep as a function, and the rising wave of stress. We get radio transmission and the magnetic tape recorder. We get methamphetamine. Around now pictures come in color, our replications that much more like us.

In 1898, we get the remote control, so we can stay in bed for longer and still see into rooms beyond the home. People sometimes press buttons they had not meant to press and see things they had not meant to see. Gelineau names “narcolepsy,” a relatively common condition wherein the body is overcome with sudden, extreme fatigue, often causing blackouts and public collapse. The name is based on two Greek words that mean “a benumbing” and “to overtake.” Another widespread condition, later termed sleep apnea, involves interruption to the sleeper by abnormal breathing interruptions, causing poor rest. The more aware we are of what is in us, the more difficult it might be, in ways, to disregard, and so therefore, to remain calm.

Entering the twentieth century, we get the tank, the bra, the vacuum cleaner, vitamins. We begin taking pictures of the brain. Death during childbirth is at an all-time low. We get machines that cool the air inside our homes and machines that burn our skin so we look healthy. William L. Murphy invents a bed that can fold into the wall so you can walk around where the bed would be usually during the day, a new concealing in the name of more frequent open air. We get sonar, cellophane, the neon lamp, and helicopters. At last the self-starting automobile is perfected. People no longer have to stand still for hours to become pictures: it is more instant. It will become more instant someday still. Harry Houdini, having hardly escaped alive from a magic trick of his own devising, says, “The weight of the earth is killing.”

Increasingly, doctors warn against the overstimulation of the child—the lingering attentions of the parent, the rising rigor of the public school system and extracurricular training, not to mention books and film. “The fundamental requirement,” we are advised, “is to keep the child free from over-fatigue every hour of the day.”
¹¹⁷
In 1910, the Child Health Committee, supported by the Bureau of Education, institutes a standard of “13 hours of sleep for children 5–6, 12 for those 6–8, 11 for those 10–12, 10 1/2 for those 12–14, 10 for those 14–16, and still 9 1/2 up to 18.”
¹¹⁸
Many experts argue about those numbers, some demanding less, some even more, the common denominator being that the child’s life schedule should be rigorous and in tune with the caretaking adult’s. More manuals beget more parental worry beget more attenuation to the child beget the child’s increasing attenuation to the self. Set regular bedtimes. Consult your doctor. Be wary, and prepared.

During World War I, “sleeping epidemics” in the form of encephalitis lethargica spread. In Africa, parasites with trembling membranes enter the flesh and multiply, infecting humans, horses, cows into a deep sleep from which they cannot be aroused. We are encouraged more often to recycle, feeding old shapes back into making new. There is more tangled air in all the speaking, eating, seeing by the hour. Houses grow to hold more artificial glow. Freud starts talking not only about what dreams mean, but how within them our limbs are paralyzed so as not to allow us to act them out. People are regularly X-rayed, photographed inside the body. We get automation and sound film. Each day there are new walls built, old ones torn down. Joseph Jules Dejerine says, “Sleep cannot be localized.”

In 1928, we get sliced bread, antibiotics. Pavlov demonstrates the programmed automation of the animal by making dogs respond as machines, demonstrating how we humans also are. John Watson notes how “
perfect
homes had no outsiders dealing with infants.”
¹¹⁹
Cribs proliferate in design, beginning a league of further trends in parenting that fluctuate and flow like the procession of stylish clothes. Your child might be judged on what he or she is wearing, same as you are. This is a reflection of who you are, both morally, and in mind. Older relatives less often live inside their offspring’s house, keeping their own air, or relegated to group homes, where they spend the last years of their lives. Children get their own rooms in the growing houses, as do each parent their own bed. “It is much better to sleep by yourself,” they say. They’re always talking. “You can rest better and breathe fresher air if you have a bed all your own.”
¹²⁰

Someone invents the radio. Someone invents the TV. There is a new term:
chronic fatigue
. Several major U.S. cities ban elementary school homework, in coalition against our children’s growing night anxiety. The earth, turning, makes no sound as far as we hear. More and more stimuli are considered factors affecting sleep. Opiates, once considered easy sleep aids, are found addictive, frowned upon—in their place, a growing population of new meds. Neurochemists test their ideas burning portions out of the minds of rats.

In 1929, Hans Berger records the electricity of a human brain, leading to the use of the electroencephalograph for tracking the activity of sleep. Aserinsky and Kleitman birth the phrase “rapid eye movement,” and link it to the seeing of the mind inside the dreaming state, which is soon thereafter subdivided into regions, shifting states. Now sleep as a place is polarized. Everybody’s still looking for the specific organ or the cells responsible for nodding out. We are told to consider light and sound, with new emphasis on airflow and uncrowding of sleep space, and so our brain’s air, and so our emotional well-being. Dr. Spock says kids’ bedtimes can be varied, attuned to rhythms, as long as presented in a pleasant way. No matter which choice you make there are those who will say the opposite is true.

In 1932, Ranson shows that placing lesions on the brainstem makes a person sleepy. Three years later Bremer shows that lesions placed specifically on the lateral hypothalamus cause drowsiness by deactivating the “waking center”—the first directly named finding of a neurological insomniac cue, if caused passively, and by prodding. Sleep maintenance is linked to serotonin, the substance that later, as the century begins to close, will be taught to birth out of a pill. Forel studies systems of bees and talks about circadian rhythms’ effect in humans. Bedtime prayers involving latent fear are warned against for causing anxiety before bed, no more
If I should die before I wake . . .

In 1938, we get LSD. We get the ballpoint pen. Scholars perform experiments in isolation underground and in huge caves outside of light and speech and sound to show that there are periods innate to the person—that time is in our blood. Among children, it is cool, frontier-like, to stay up later. “Certainly one would never want to teach a child to be dependent on being held or rocked to sleep,” they say.
¹²¹
Antonin Artaud coins the term
la réalité virtuelle
, which in coming years will be used to sell video games. At least 15 million bodies become murdered based on words emerged from one man’s mouth.

In 1945, we get the microwave oven, the Slinky, nuclear weapons. In 1946, we get mobile phones. Certain people are easier to find without their cooperation. Their bodies radiate the heat. We become targets, followed, complexly haunted. Carcinogens collect in pockets, at our cells. People start finding and naming even more sleep disorders, which beget more clinical diagnoses, which beget more and more and more medications. There are more books, more words within them, more ideas relegated to what a dream might mean. In 1950-something, Samuel Beckett writes: “Name, no, nothing is namable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don’t know, I shouldn’t have begun.”
¹²²

In 1951, Eugene Aserinsky records his eight-year-old son’s eyes through a whole night by EEG and EOG. He notices two phases of the eyes’ movement: twenty-minute periods when the eyes rapidly jerk around behind the lid, as if in seeing, and sixty- to ninety-minute stationary periods occurring regularly between. Based on this information, the basic model for sleep is renovated to include two major modes: when the eyes are still (non-rapid eye movement, NREM) and when our eyes move as they might in seeing while awake (rapid eye movement, REM). A single night’s sleep typically involves four to six periods of strobing between these two. Each lasts, on average, seventy minutes to two hours, with variation.

Later, the NREM period is further subdivided into four stages: Stage 1, in which the shift between waking and sleeping begins—becoming drowsy, the brain’s alpha waves turn slow; stage 2, in which the alpha rhythms slow down further, into theta, punctuated by small bursts of electricity called “sleep spindles.” These first two stages are often brief, but may stretch longer for the busy-brained, and may seem to some not like sleep at all. Stages 3 and 4 are known as delta sleep, the brain slowing down to high-amplitude, low-activity delta waves; muscle tone turns lax; the heartbeat quiets, decreasing metabolism; these stages serve as a door into REM. REM is further found to differ from the NREM in that the brain becomes dramatically activated in electricity and metabolic rate—blood flow to the brain increases 62 to 173 percent; flesh holds a cold-blooded mode; vast jumps occur up and down in breathing and pulse; we experience vivid dreams. Through these facets, sleep now at last has some ground of operational understanding that will hold on as scientific fact, though for the most part we’ll proceed almost nowhere in the way of knowing why any of it happens, or what it means.

In 1949, Egas Moniz wins the Nobel Prize for popularizing the lobotomy. We further customize our homes. Ranch-style homes become popular for their open floor plans and larger windows, allowing in more light. The first U.S. local TV station opens in Pittsburgh.

In 1952, David Tudor performs the premiere of John Cage’s
4’33”
. “There’s no such thing as silence,” Cage says. Sales of teddy bears increase. Bedtime stories are commonly cliff-hangers. People binge eat inside their sleep, not remembering why their refrigerators in the morning look so empty, why they want.
Playboy
unveils a kind of flesh upon the stands. Six years later, the Barbie doll follows with its own malformed body image, its representational sex organs removed.