Salon.com > Sleep

What interpreting Abraham Lincoln’s dreams can teach us

Sat, 04 May 2013 19:00:00 +0000

In 1889, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York Evening World held a contest to determine America’s “Champion Dreamer.” The winner was a Maryland junior college instructor named Buckey who dreamed he’d shot a man who wore a thick black mustache. As Buckey walked to work the next morning, the vividly seen face of his victim was suddenly before his eyes a second time. The two men jumped back, equally startled. “For God’s sake, don’t shoot me!” cried the stranger. Buckey and he recognized each other, because they had dreamed the same dream.

In the midst of the Civil War, newspapers North and South featured stories about soldiers whose dreams predicted war’s end. On April 25, 1863, Boston’s Saturday Evening Gazette demonstrated the credence it had given to a local artilleryman’s dream by printing a retraction, regretting that the man’s six-week-old vision of April 23 as “the date of Peace” had not been met. The wife of a Union general, meanwhile, could not banish from her fragmented sleep narratives gruesome premonitions about her sons: “One night I dream that Paul is drowned, another that Benny is dead.”

Is sleep the new sex?

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 21:45:00 +0000

History will ultimately decide if Margaret Thatcher was the woman who ruined Britain or a feminist role model, but one thing’s undeniable -- in a world in which insomnia is a competitive sport, the Iron Lady was a sleep deprivation world champion. A BBC story Wednesday recalls the former prime minister’s "fearsome reputation" for requiring only four hours of sleep a night. Take that, puny humans!

Whether that figure was entirely, consistently accurate is up for debate, but Thatcher is definitely remembered among those who knew her as one who, "when everyone else went off to bed, went off to work.” In that regard, she put herself in the company of Napoleon Bonaparte, who said only "a fool" needed eight hours of sleep, and Winston Churchill, who was frequently a four-hour-a-night man himself. In contrast, Thatcher’s weaksauce successor John Major "found it difficult coming after her because the civil service had got used to a prime minister who never slept, and he used to sleep eight hours a night."

Hotel seeks “professional sleeper”

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 16:04:00 +0000

Breaking news: Every person in the whole entire world is quitting their jobs and moving to Finland.

A Helsinki hotel is currently looking for a "professional sleeper" to bunk down for 35 days and test their rooms for comfort and general snooze-ability.

Hotel manager Tio Tikka told the Associated Press that they are currently looking for a "dynamic person to write a quality blog" about their daily experiences at the Finn Hotel after sleeping in each of its rooms.

So if you are fluent in Finnish, English and Russian (most people are, right?), send your CV to Tikka, posthaste. The job opens May 17 with applications being accepted until the end of April.

Related: It's too bad that Soori the meerkat can't write or speak any languages because he is so sleepy and would be so good as a professional sleeper.

A drug can make sleep optional

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 22:07:00 +0000

The past week has seen a flurry of attention around the latest purported wonder drug, Modafinil, which claims to make sleeping basically optional, with no ill effects. Just pop one, and two hours of sleep is plenty—with no headaches, “sleep debt,” hangover feeling, withdrawal, post-dopamine crash (as with that other common sleep-avoidance drug, speed) and little addiction risk.

Study: Sleep loss could cause weight gain

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 18:15:00 +0000

Getting seven to eight solid hours of sleep each night might seem an almost impossible luxury to many people. But not getting enough sleep is known to impair mental function and increase the risk for heart disease, among other ill effects. Accumulating evidence also suggests that even short-term, partial sleep deprivation could pave the way for weight gain and other negative metabolic consequences.

“Dreamland”: Inside the mystery of sleep

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 22:00:00 +0000

The opening scene of Marcel Proust's "Swann's Way" is one of the most famously difficult to get through in literature. That's not because of its style, which is sublime, but because it describes the experience of falling asleep. Many susceptible readers nod off the first few times they attempt it. All writing about sleep has this problem; of the fundamental human appetites, it's the least exciting. The better you invoke it, the more likely you are to incite it, and because it can't be remembered, sleep can't be described. Nothing could be duller than watching someone else do it. Only people who can't sleep spend much time thinking about it, and if there's anything more tedious than witnessing another person's nap, it's listening to a keyed-up, obsessive insomniac go on and on about how they can't.