Becoming Insomniac

How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity

L. Scrivner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137268747
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire sociale

A study of the history of modern insomnia, this book explores how poets, journalists, and doctors of the Victorian period found themselves in near-universal agreement that modernity and sleep were somehow incompatible. It investigates how psychologists, philosophers and literary artists worked to articulate its causes, and its potential cures.

1

A Modern Insomnia

Insomnaissance

Falling asleep is no easy task. It is a fine art and a performance art, and some of us are better at it than others. We start as actors: in the bedroom’s dark, we prepare ourselves for sleep by mimicking it. We get into costume. We get into position. We lie supine and close our eyes. We mentally rehearse our lines with heartfelt sincerity: “And now to sleep!”

If all goes well, within a few minutes we will become musicians and painters. As our muscles relax, our pulse shifts into a slower tempo, from andante moderato to a largo or lento; as our bodies cool, our breathing becomes a brush caressing the air with more regular, broader strokes.

And then, if all continues to go as planned, sleep becomes a science and a poetry. In our brains, beta and alpha waves subside. With them goes our awareness, like a retreating tide; we lose ourselves in a delicious fog of oblivion.

But for some of us, the performance is perhaps unconvincing. We mentally repeat, more emphatically this time, “And now to sleep!” but continue to lie there, on the dark proscenium stage of our beds, alone—or with a more gifted actor who now snores blissfully beside us. We rally our wills and, like some tragedian of old, mentally implore the gods to intervene. But this over-the-top melodramatic begging has only made matters worse. Our brains are now awash in beta waves; we have stirred up a tempest of relentless consciousness.

Here we find the dynamisms through which insomnia usually begins to unfold: paradoxes and vicious circles of attention and will. For—given that sleep is widely considered a general cessation of willing—in willing to sleep we often, in effect, paradoxically negate one of sleep’s primary characteristics and preconditions; in transitioning between thinking “And now to sleep!” and “Why can’t I sleep?” we find an attentive objectification and examination of a self that—if sleep is to be achieved—must be lost to inattentiveness and oblivion. Insomnia, furthermore, is never a static phenomenon or experience, but one that arises, perpetuates itself, and exacerbates itself in vicious circles. Often the more we desire to sleep—and the more we accentuate this desire by a thoroughgoing focus on ourselves and our condition of willing to be will-less—the more we undermine slumber.

This book, like a bout of insomnia, will provide an opportunity to reflect at length upon the condition of chronic sleeplessness —not only as an object of concern, frustration, or torture; but also as an object of inspiration—or even a strange, masochistic delight. This reflecting will largely take the form of a historical examination. But it will also occasionally morph into musings on current technological and social conditions, as well as detailed phenomenological descriptions of what insomnia is like—a three-object juggling act that, it is hoped, might satisfy cultural historians, doctors and psychologists, technophiles and technophobes, raging insomniacs, and curious onlookers alike.

A historical consideration of insomnia is not so strange an undertaking as it might at first seem. In his fascinating history of sleep research, Kenton Kroker suggests that though it is commonly assumed that insomnia is a universal and unchanging human experience—as is, for instance, breathing—and is thus largely “impervious to historical examination,” evidence indicates that attitudes about the chronic inability to sleep have changed significantly in recent centuries.¹ In the pre-modern past, during the Renaissance or further back in the Roman period, the term insomnia and its cognates usually meant little beyond what its Latin etymology would suggest (with in—meaning a negation of—somnus, meaning “sleep”). In other words, it referred simply to the condition of not being asleep. Meanwhile, problematic sleeplessness, usually called “watching” or “wakefulness” in the pre-modern Anglophone world, was only considered secondarily, as symptomatic of far more significant physical ailments—or indeed of emotional or psychological ones. Much of our literary tradition depicts sleeplessness as the result of lovelorn melancholia (Chaucer’s Troilus) or a guilty conscience (Shakespeare’s Macbeth) or the unfortunate penalty for incurring a god’s wrath (Hesiod’s Prometheus).

All of this changed about a century and a half ago on both sides of the North Atlantic. Suddenly, ranks of newly professionalized neurologists, physiologists, and psychologists were putting the term insomnia to wider use in reference to chronic sleeplessness, which they began to consider—for the first time—as a primary disease in its own right and a worthwhile subject for sustained, systematic investigation. Perhaps not uncoincidentally, just as unprecedented professional attention was being turned towards insomnia, a sharp rise in cases of the disorder began afflicting the public, especially in big cities.

One might find it curious that a rise in insomnia happened to coincide with this new scrutiny. Yet this likely occurred, in part, as a consequence of the disorder’s unusually high degree of suggestibility. Unlike ulcers or arthritis or the flu, but more like contagious yawning, the disorder has long been supposed to be instigated or exacerbated by its mere suggestion. Thus, if your doctor is keenly interested in the success of your sleep-seeking, you may not perform well under the new pressure. You might, as a result, worry about something to which you had previously paid little attention, which might, in turn, make finding tranquil repose suddenly problematic. There also might have been a kind of perceptual mechanism at play, wherein for the first time the falling forest trees, so to speak, had an audience of attentive ears. In other words, the unprecedented professional attention that began to be paid to insomnia might have had the same effect that expanded seismograph and communications networks have had in making us feel that there are now more earthquakes than ever before.

In such considerations, of the suggestible nature of the disorder and the likely perceptual mechanism in diagnosis, we evoke some sense of the Hegelian idea of the contingent nature of discovery, in which the mind always essentially creates what it seeks. We will revisit this notion in this book’s concluding chapter. At present, we must consider less theoretical, more concrete malefactors in the sudden rise of the disorder. Apart from these suggestive or perceptual mechanisms, it remains significant that many professionals of the Victorian period blamed the epidemic of insomnia on that which had been unmistakably altered since the sleepier days of yesteryear: the character of the urban environment, the faster pace of modern life—i.e., the general technological milieu of what has come to be called the Second Industrial Revolution.² Insofar as it thus emerged amid the proliferation of wires and rails of industrial technology, as well as amid the increased professionalization and narrow specialization of medical study, insomnia in reference to chronic sleeplessness has always been modern.

Thus the largely Victorian focus of this book comes from no trivial, aesthetic, or arbitrary interest, but from recognition that that period, like our present, was characterized by a “dramatic rise in sleep related complaints,” and that both rises, theirs and ours, have been attributed to the coincident emergence of new technologies, i.e., an “increasingly ‘wired’ culture.” ³ Furthermore, the Victorian period was like our own in that it was marked by the same restless spirit, a full-throttle expansion of fields of activity and access—the endless imperative to “Go Beyond Borders!”

Victorians, after all, had their own Internet: the telegraph.⁴ Like other revolutionary inventions such as the telescope, the telegraph was deemed little more than a child’s toy when it first came onto the scene. But after the successful installation in the 1860s of the transatlantic cable connecting New York and London, the full potential of the new technology was realized. It was humankind’s first means of instantaneous, global communication, at the mere touch of a finger. And in the moment of going global, Victorians also went round-the-clock. The limited word-per-minute carrying capacity of the undersea cable necessitated its continuous operation to satisfy demand, and its unceasing operation prompted a similar adjustment at signaling stations. To remain competitive, news organizations would thereafter adopt an unprecedented vigilance into the night. Alongside the telegraph, railway services were expanded and sped up, and the greater rail distances necessitated the first widespread use of night trains and sleeper cars. More nighttime activity encouraged new urban lighting projects, which further opened up the wasteland of the nocturnal hours.

Meanwhile, other wastelands were being put to use for the first time. The 1864 opening of the Metropolitan Railway in London and New York City’s Beach Pneumatic Transit of 1870 allowed people to move into subterranean space to relieve the activity-exhausted horizontal plane of the urban surface. The first engine-powered submarine, launched in 1863, and Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite in 1866 further facilitated ever deeper and easier penetration into earth and sea. The first engine-powered airships took to the skies in the first few decades after mid-century; the first public-use lifts in London hotels, the “ascending room,” and the “upstairs omnibus” allowed buildings to attain new, unheard-of heights.⁵ Even the printed page claimed new terrain, with the invention of the two-sided printing press and the consequent increase in publications’ word counts. On and on the inventions came throughout the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s: the stock ticker, electric alarm bells, Bell’s telephone and Edison’s incandescent electric light bulb; with each, civilization further invaded under-utilized spaces and moments, and multiplied the circumstances in which human volition might be expected to be deployed.

That many Victorians imagined that all this expanding and doing was causing insomnia is evinced by a profusion of contemporary references. One of these, though from a relatively obscure individual, is particularly telling. After claiming insomnia was rapidly becoming a “chronic terror,” Chicago lawyer Franklin H. Head writes:

It has been of late years much the fashion in the literature of this subject to attribute sleeplessness to the rapid growth of facilities for activities of every kind[:] The practical annihilation of time and space by our telegraphs and railroads, the compressing thereby of the labors of months into hours or even minutes, the terrific competition in all kinds of business thereby made possible and inevitable, the intense mental activity engendered in the mad race for fame and wealth, where the nervous and mental force of man is measured against steam and lightning.⁶

Though impressive sounding, this excerpt might at first be taken with a grain of salt, since it was originally presented in 1887 to a literary society founded by Head, the dubiously named Chicago Liars Club. And indeed the issue of modern insomnia is here employed as a conceit in what turns out to be a light-hearted literary hoax, intended more to entertain than to warn, in earnest, about some emerging “chronic terror.” Still, as is often the case in satires and burlesques, this excerpt offers an overarching summary of a prevailing discourse, spotlighting what we might today call a trending meme. For Head’s claims about the origins of insomnia echo those promoted in the more committed, more sober, and more widely circulated writings of contemporary neurologists, physiologists, and psychologists. The telegraph and the railway, frequently cited malefactors in the new epidemic, will be discussed in great depth in later chapters, as will the commonly referenced onset of new social expectations, heightened commercial and entrepreneurial competitions, and space/time compressions. But we begin by considering one of the last items Head lists. His claim that insomnia emerged from “intense mental activity” was not only shared by many of his contemporaries, but also forms one of the most significant threads connecting each of the ensuing chapters—and indeed accords with my inaugural experience with the condition, recalling the night I stirred up a kind of perpetual motion machine of thought by my eager Internet searches, as described in this book’s prologue.

It may perhaps come as no surprise, considering the prominence of the Internet and related media in our culture, that recent sleep research has developed a “cognitive hyperactivity hypothesis,” in which “intrusive mental activity rather than physiological activity” is seen as the primary culprit in “sleep onset insomnia.”⁷ But the incompatibility of sleep and hyperactive thinking was identified by Head’s contemporaries. “It is well known,” one prominent nineteenth-century professional confidently asserts, “that continued mental activity is the great opposer of sleep;”⁸ another notes the “curious fact that … mental activity often induces a state of morbid insomnia.”⁹ One commentator declares “mental labor … called into use before retiring” to be as great an “enemy of rest” as the “bustle and roar of every great city.”¹⁰ What is usually meant by such references to “mental activity” is what we might today call conscious thinking or cognition, rather than, more generally, the synaptic activity occurring always in any living brain whether asleep or awake. In other words, it was something over which most felt they could exert a modicum of control. Thus, doctors would encourage insomniacs to try to find “some plan by which the tendency to mental activity would be lessened and a favourable condition for sleep secured,”¹¹ and a popular health magazine encouraged readers to seek a cure for sleeplessness in whatever means “takes away thought.”¹²

That varieties of thinking—i.e., reasoning, remembering, worrying, communicating, and even thinking about thinking—are destroyers of sleep is today physiologically explained by the fact that they rely upon and instigate a preponderance of the beta brain waves that are indicative of waking consciousness. In the nineteenth century, however, prior to the invention of the electroencephalogram and the identification of brain waves, physiologists studying sleeplessness focused on, among other things, the fact that the brain was relatively anemic in sleep. They thus proposed that too much blood in the head, brought on by too much active thinking, was a primary material cause of insomnia (as will be discussed in Chapter 5). One of the most prominent American neurologists in the late nineteenth century, George Miller Beard (1839–1883), used this conception of the brain’s physiology as one rationale for his Cassandra-like warning that modern life was deleterious to sleep and responsible for a host of related nervous ailments: “Let us consider the heightened activity of the cerebral circulation [of blood] made necessary for a business man since the introduction of steam-power, the telegraph, the telephone, and the morning newspaper.”¹³ Thus, though he proposes an outmoded physiological etiology, as stemming from too much blood pressure instead of an overabundance of beta brain waves, Beard’s caveat against the new technological gadgetry of his day is the diagnostic ancestor of the Lancet’s current attribution of the recent spike in sleeplessness to the over-stimulations of our “wired culture.”

But modern insomnia can never be fully explained from a purely physical perspective, as being the result of our physiologies and the material things that excite them via sensory stimulation, such as the telegraphs, telephones, and morning newspapers of Beard’s day or the Twitters, Facebooks, or Instagrams of our own; the condition must be about far more than what our environment does to us, unilaterally. For simply receiving a communication, even one that wakes us up, is not the same thing as having insomnia. Sensory stimuli that chase away unconsciousness are just that, and under normal non-insomniac circumstances we face no difficulty in rolling over and drifting back to sleep after an incoming signal has been briefly attended to or ignored. Insomnia, primarily and properly understood, is a function of not just our physiology and our physical environment, but of our desires amid them; it is contingent upon our will—most notably, of course, upon our will to sleep. Insofar as this is the case, and insofar as the condition is often described as, experienced through, and exacerbated by an inward-turning reflective temperament and self-regard, any adequate investigation into the matter must...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Prologomenon
• 1 A Modern Insomnia
• 2 The Freeing of the Will
• 3 The Narrowing of the Attention
• 4 In Vicious Circles: The Physiologies of Exhaustion
• 5 Mental Hyperactivity and the Hematologies of Sleep
• 6 Psychologorrhea
• 7 Slumber and Self Subdivided
• 8 Prostheses and Antitheses
• 9 Insomniac Modernism
• 10 Volitional Regress and Egress
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index