We spend our days, for whatever reason, in a perpetual state between moderate alertness (you never know when the boss is going to be coming around the corner) & a half-doze. I myself am tired more often than not, & am usually only not tired when I am distracted. Why is that? Are we not engaged enough in our jobs, our lives? Do we simply not get enough sleep? & what is enough sleep? Is there too much sleep? Does that make us sleepy?
Sleepy as a physical condition was first identified by the great Egyptian/Greek scholar Lethargicos after what many archaeologists consider the first sleep study (& what many naughty sociologists consider the first sleep over) during "scroll rebinding night" at the great Library of Alexandria in the second century AD. Or CE. Whatever. While spending a long day dusting & tightly wrapping the library's immense collection of scrolls, Lethargicos noticed that many of the volunteers for the project yawned, nodded off, chewed an extraordinary amount of betel leaves, &, on one interesting occasion, one particular volunteer, who was covering his eyes while closely examining one apparently engaging papyrus scroll, actually fell face-first into the pages, smearing drool everywhere.
Lethargicos decided to try to quantify his observations by keeping the workers around as long as possible, thereby beginning the long-standing social scientist tradition of ordering out for pizza to prolong a study. He asked increasingly surreptitious questions about the mental state of his subjects, from the obvious "Did you get enough sleep last night?" & "Are you simply bored by this?" to such trickery as "Do you think adding more ostrich feathers to my bed will make it softer & comfier?" & stretching his arms out & emitting a long, drawn-out, overwrought yawn.
Though his landmark study, "Oh My Drowsy Colleagues" was lost in the great fire that destroyed the library some centuries later, his work was carried on by the Arabic scholar Hassin Al-Somnol, who was the first scientist to categorize the seventeen stages from wakefulness to sleep. As children, we learned them by heart in elementary school, but it surprises many westerners that they weren't, after all, invented by the British in the 18th century as crucial elements of the new "novel" form, but instead the result of a lifetime of scientific rigor & toil by Al-Somnol & his team at the Moroccan Sleep Number Center. Al-Somnol could be a stern taskmaster, especially when a subject fell asleep too quickly, without properly noting the stages; testees who failed to follow protocol were often engaged in what sociologists now call "pillow fights."
His landmark work, "Sleepiness & The Modern Moor," found its way to Medieval Europe & was Christianized so as not to draw attention to it. Despite references to it in Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Cervantes & the forgotten Scottish poet Fred Hirmsch, it took several centuries (& a bitter dispute between Isaac Newton & Samuel Pepys) to thrust it into the English limelight. British people found themselves utterly exhausted by all the annoying posturing going around, & it became amusing to refer to royals, politicians & military men by the level of tiredness they aroused in the populace. Thus, though he thought it a worthy epithet, "Stupefying" John Locke was actually being made fun of by the people of England.
In our modern world, computers enable us to monitor our state of sleepiness, usually with downloaded porn &/or annoying screen savers. Yet many researchers think that the human being's ability to function in a kind of zombie-like state between actual repose & willful alertness remains a mystery, & studies are planned well into the 21st century, much of it involving television & recordings by Yanni. So the questions asked at the beginning of this essay are certainly as fresh & unanswered as they were to the ancients.
Perhaps this Friday, you can find illumination on Self Help Radio.
& if you're interested, last Friday's show is now available to listen to at the Self Help Radio web site.
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