by Ben Holden
4
There had been a mysterious ceremony acknowledging the heroic nature of your journey. But the true gift of it was in your spirit, your inner liberation. There was a new eternal light in you.
Fresh, young, and free, you wander the streets of the kingdom. You have the sense of being in a new world, a luminous world. You are living an enchanted life in the kingdom.
You had set out early and had arrived sooner than you thought. You have a whole new life ahead of you. And so here you are, a youth with a spirit of shining gold, rich beyond measure in the lightness of your being. Everything is before you. Your main quest and journey is over, because you had begun early and arrived early. Now you have it all to live, in peerless freedom. What luck! No need to fret, but just to live, now, the life you want.
Like a youth just arrived in a great city, with hope in his heart, looking to make his fortune and find his true love, in the happiest and most innocent days of his life, like such a youth you wander lightly through the streets of the mysterious kingdom. The pastel sky is touched with blue, and there is dawn sunlight.
(2009)
★
To crown our disparate dreams, Shakespeare must have the last word.
As you may have noticed, The Tempest surges through this volume. In his most famous speech, Prospero (and his creator) may ostensibly be shuffling, vexed, back onto the quotidian mortal coil. Yet in this late play, Shakespeare asks consistently of his reader and audience: which, after all, is the true ‘primary world’ and which the ‘secondary’?
Waking or sleeping life?
Life is but a dream – and so perhaps the answer, simply, has to be . . .
. . . both.
From The Tempest (Act 4, Scene 1)
by William Shakespeare
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
(1610–11)
AFTERWORD
by Diana Athill
The Story: words spoken or written by someone else which take you away from yourself. It is something you need: everyone, everywhere, always has responded to it. Bedtime: the time for relaxing on soft pillows. Every child recognizes the connection between these two things, given the chance. I only have to put them together to see the Ugly Duckling swimming about the lake so sadly, so sadly – until that amazing moment when he understands that he is a swan: an imagined event quite unconnected with me but which meant, and still means, so much to me. A precious bedtime story. But did it ever relax me into sleep and dreams? Ben Holden, who has given much thought to the subject, thinks so.
It was bold of him to make this collection of bedtime stories for grown-ups and put them together in such an ambitious way – read, or reread, his introduction to see what I mean. What he calls his ‘lofty aims’ are very interesting and have made me roam back and forth within his book in a way which increased my already lively feelings about it. In no way was I put off it when at times I failed to be persuaded.
I think there are two ways of reading this book: the romantic, and the prosaic. The romantic is in tune with Ben’s own approach to it, the spirit in which he writes sentences such as, ‘The fireworks within our brains, the light fantastic that is aflame throughout sleep, even while the body is glacial, is as wondrous and mysterious as the galaxy of stars that flares the night sky.’ The prosaic, which I have to admit favouring, says, ‘I love the book, but steady on, Ben!’ This, I suppose, is because I am one of those people who don’t dream – or rather, hardly ever remember their dreams (I accept that I must have them, and hope that they are less boring than the few of them which have occasionally surfaced). To me, when I slip away from consciousness, whether via a story or simply weariness, it just seems that I’m having a good night’s sleep.
But that does not mean that I have not been charmed by this collection, so unlike any other, swooping as it does from little jewels of poetry to quite long stories and from voices as unlike each other as those of Sylvia Plath and P. G. Wodehouse. It is truly enjoyable. Not only has it crept at once onto my bedside table, but it is also going to solve my Christmas-present problem – and to those readers whose nights are more thrilling than my own, it will be even more precious.
Diana Athill was a founding director of the British publishing firm of André Deutsch, where for fifty years she worked with writers including Jean Rhys, Stevie Smith, Margaret Atwood, Molly Keane, Jack Kerouac, John Updike, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth. She has published a novel, collections of stories and letters, and seven volumes of memoirs, including a study of old age, Somewhere Towards the End, which won the 2008 Costa Award, and Alive, Alive Oh! (2015).
NOTES AND ILLUMINATIONS
Introduction: Seize the Night
The introductory lines by Wallace Stevens are extracted from the poem ‘The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm’.
Pagelink: It could be said that whole nations, as well as individuals, effectively have their own ‘slumber numbers’ and ‘chronotypes’. In May 2016, a study published in Science Advances revealed global sleeping patterns. Conducted by a team at the University of Michigan, aided by an app called Entrain, the survey claimed its findings could inform measures to tackle the ‘global sleep crisis’. The research showed that the Dutch sleep almost an entire hour more than people in Singapore or Japan (8 hours 12 minutes as opposed to 7 hours 24 minutes). Britons average just under 8 hours. The study also showed that women spend about 30 minutes more in bed each night than men.
The ‘widely acknowledged’ rule that adults need ‘7–8 hours’ is, for one source, borne out in advice issued during 2016 by the Royal Society of Public Health, which recommended 7.7 hours per night (on average) for an adult, or a mean ‘slumber number’ spread of 7–9 hours; this followed a sleep pattern survey of 2,000 adults in the UK.
Finnish scientists, meanwhile, concluded in October 2014 that women need marginally less sleep on average than men, 7.6 as opposed to 7.8 hours, following a health study of 3,760 people.
Pagelink: For a broader analysis of sleep patterns in animals, see Chapter 4 of Sleep: A Very Short Introduction by Steven W. Lockley & Russell G. Foster (eds) (Oxford, 2012).
Pagelink: That we produce 2.5 trillion bytes of data was detailed in 2016’s ‘Big Bang Data’ exhibition at Somerset House, London.
Pagelink: Professor Russell Foster’s quote was referenced as part of the BBC’s ‘Day of the Body Clock’, 12 May 2014.
Pagelink: For a succinct and accessible guide to the neurology of sleep, see neuroscientist Jeff Iliff’s 2014 TED Talk, One More Reason to Get a Good Night’s Sleep.
In line with the statement about gene expression and the 24-hour pattern of activity here, the BBC’s ‘Day of the Body Clock’ made the claim that ‘about 10% of your DNA has a 24-hour pattern of activity that is behind all behavioural and physiological changes’.
The pituary gland is pea-sized but regulates a monumental range of human activity, including: growth, blood pressure, certain functions of the sex organs, and metabolism, as well as some aspects of pregnancy, childbirth, temperature regulation and pain relief.
Pagelink: The recent US survey referenced showing average adult sleep has reduced over the past fifty years is corroborated by the findings of Charles Czeiser, the chief of the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, whose work asserts that ‘over the past five decades our average sleep duration on work nights has decreased by an hour and a half, down from eight and a half to just
under seven.’ (‘Why Can’t We Fall Asleep?’ by Maria Konnikova, The New Yorker, 7 July 2015).
A recent Gallup poll also showed that 40% of all American adults are sleep-deprived and get less than 7 hours per night. This is referenced in Arianna Huffington’s The Sleep Revolution (Penguin Random House, 2016).
Pagelink: Prime Ministers who were famously derided the importance of sleep include Margaret Thatcher, who developed Alzheimer’s after leaving Downing Street, and Winston Churchill, who suffered from the ‘black dog’ of depression and also alcoholism while in office. More recently, 2016 US Presidential candidate Donald Trump proclaimed that sleeping more than four hours a night is a waste of time.
For political summits of global import that ended in disarray and proved ineffective in large part due to the participants’ sheer exhaustion through a lack of sleep, look no further than climate-change conferences such as in The Hague in 2000 and the Copenhagen Summit, or the United Nations Climate Change Conference of 2009. The inability to reach conclusive and meaningful resolutions at the conferences was, in part, on both occasions, publically attributed to the participants’ lack of sleep after protracted negotiations.
Pagelink: The research that proposes fairy-tale archetypes date further back than previously imagined, some ‘harking as far back as the Bronze Age’ – and referenced again in Chapter Two, ‘Once Upon A Time’ – was published by the Royal Society of Science in January 2016; it was written by Sara Graça da Silva and Jamshid J. Tehrani and is entitled ‘Comparative phylogenetic analyses uncover the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales’.
Pagelink: As regards the academically beneficial effects of parents reading to children – a June 2015 Ipsos/Mori poll commissioned by the Book Trust showed that UK fathers, particularly, are not reading enough to their children. Book Trust’s Chief Executive, Diana Gerald, elaborated thus: ‘Reading together increases children’s literacy skills, but research also proves that children who love reading do better at school in all subjects . . . If a parent reads to their children every day, they will be almost 12 months ahead of their age group when they start school. Even reading to them three to five times a week gives them a six-month head start over those who are read to less often.’
Another recent survey, by YouGov for the children’s publisher Scholastic, in 2015, found that 83% of children enjoyed being read aloud to, with 68% describing it as a special time with their parents, and yet a separate survey by Settle Stories, of more than 2,000 parents with young children (aged 4–10), found that only 4% read a bedtime story to their child each night, with 69% saying that they do not have the time. Another study, in February of 2015 by TomTom, of 1,000 parents of children aged 1–10, found that 34% never read their kids a bedtime story.
Pagelink: One-minute bedtime stories are explored in Chapter One, ‘The Age of Rage’ of In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed by Carl Honoré (Orion, 2004).
Pagelink: Storybook Dads (and Storybook Mums) operates in 100 UK prisons. It was set up by prison visitor Sharon Berry, at Dartmoor Prison in 2002. Over 200,000 children annually experience the trauma of an imprisoned loved one. Research has also shown that offenders who manage to maintain regular family contact during their prison sentence are up to six times less likely to reoffend. Over 5,200 audio CDs and 431 DVDs of storytelling were produced by prisoners for their children in 2013 alone. For more, visit www.storybookdads.org.uk
Pagelink: The anthology demonstrates how various works of art or celebrated writing careers were launched by the bedtime-story routine or sleep (notably, entries on Tolkien and Dahl, but also Maxwell and Gaiman) – but the idea, as stated in the Introduction, that the bedtime-story routine is a formative influence for great writers is also indirectly corroborated by Steven Pinker in The Sense of Style (Penguin, 2014). In the first page of his first chapter, Pinker writes about ‘the elusive “ear” of a skilled writer’, observing: ‘Biographers of great authors always try to track down the books their subjects read when they were young, because they know these sources hold the key to their development as writers.’
Pagelink: Sleep cycles, as touched upon here, were also traditionally grouped into two distinct sleeps per night for humans, as still is the case with almost all other mammals. A period of wakefulness split the two sequences of sleep. ‘Segmented sleep’ seems to have dwindled in Europe from around the seventeenth century, coinciding with the illumination of cities – yet can still be traced in the sleep patterns we experience at the beginning and end of our lives.
Pagelink: Kafka’s quote stems from a letter written to Oskar Pollak on 27 January, 1904.
1. Eventide
Pagelink: That ‘moon’ was one of the first words uttered by Frieda Hughes was revealed by Ted Hughes on Thames Television in The English Programme, in 1989, as noted in The Poetry of Ted Hughes: Language, Illusion & Beyond by Paul Bentley (Longman, 1988).
Pagelink: For more on Charles Dickens’ early years in the blacking factory, turn to Claire Tomalin’s masterful Charles Dickens: A Life (2011), Chapter 2, ‘A London Education’.
There is also a definitive treatise of Dickens’ night-walking in Matthew Beaumont’s Night Walking: A Nocturnal History of London (Verso, 2015). The quote about ‘wandering back to that time of my life’ appears in Beaumont’s Chapter 12, ‘The Dead Night’, and is in turn attributed to John Foster’s The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. 1, 5th edition (Chapman & Hall, 1872).
Pagelink: The quote from J. Allan Hobson, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, about dreaming resembling delirium comes from the second chapter of his book Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction (2002, Oxford University Press).
2. Once Upon a Time
Pagelink: For more on the harmful blue light in today’s modern electronic devices, please see the online research article ‘Bigger, Brighter, Bluer – Better? Current light-emitting devices – adverse sleep properties and preventative strategies’ by Paul Gringras, Benita Middleton, Debra J. Skene and Victoria L. Revell, and published in October 2015 by Frontiers in Public Health.
In 2016, bowing to the scientific evidence and pressure to make amends, Apple introduced in operating systems a new (and somewhat unfortunately named) ‘Night Shift’ mode, affording their customers a softer, redder light. Similarly, during December of 2015, Amazon rolled out ‘Blue Shade’ night mode for their Kindle Fire tablets.
Pagelink: Dame Marina Warner’s description of the fairy-tale tradition features in Chapter 3, ‘Voices on the Page’, of Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale (2014, Oxford University Press).
Pagelink: Tolkien’s lecture ‘On Fairytales’ was initially written (and entitled simply ‘Fairy Stories’) for presentation as the Andrew Lang lecture at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, in 1939. It first appeared in print, with some enhancement, in 1947, in a festschrift volume, Essays Presented to Charles Williams, compiled by Tolkien’s friend, C. S. Lewis.
Pagelink: For Angela Carter’s notes on the provenance of the Russian fairy tale (as extracted herein) and traditions thereto, see her notes to ‘The Wise Little Girl’ in Part Two of her Book of Fairy Tales (Virago).
Pagelink: ‘The Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Duban’ has been edited for this anthology by Marina Warner. The full version can be found in Husain Haddawy’s translation of The Arabian Nights (Norton).
Pagelink: The tale of ‘Ole Lukøje’ by Hans Christian Andersen first appeared in Fairy Tales Told for Children (New Collection, Third Booklet; 1842).
Pagelink: Susan Holton’s short poem ‘I’m Looking for the Sandman’ (1928) first appeared in the Methodist Book Concern and runs as follows:
I’m looking for the Sandman.
He’s somewhere ’round ’tis said;
But as I’m rather sleepy,
I think I’ll go to bed.
Pagelink: For more on how Roy Orbison came up with the song ‘In Dreams’, see Chapter 5, ‘Distant Drums’ of Alan Clayson’s biography Only the
Lonely (1989, Sidgwick & Jackson).
Pagelink: A recording of Les Murray explaining the provenance of ‘The Sleepout’ (as extracted here) and then reciting the poem himself can be found on www.lesmurray.org
Pagelink: ‘The Idea of Age’ was initially called ‘Mrs Vivaldi’, and then ‘I Dropped Off’ – before its author settled on its ultimate title. This is detailed in Nicola Beauman’s biography, The Other Elizabeth Taylor (2009, Persephone Books). Beauman also rightly observes (in Chapter 9, ‘Penn Cottage 1950–53’) that the story is ‘a forerunner in miniature’ of Taylor’s celebrated, subsequent novel Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont.
3. Hook, Line and Sinker
Pagelink: The Italian word for ‘sleep-waking’ is dormiveglia.
Pagelink: Edgar Allan Poe’s metaphysical aesthetic and awareness of sleep’s powers can be seen in this passage from Eureka. Monos here equates mortality to sleep. The sense of time that is conjured is cosmic and, I’d argue, downright circadian:
‘The day waned; and, as its light faded away, I became possessed by a vague uneasiness, an anxiety such as the sleeper feels when sad real sounds fall continuously within his ear – low distant bell-tones, solemn, at long but equal intervals, and commingling with melancholy dreams. Night arrived; and with its shadows a heavy discomfort. It oppressed my limbs with the oppression of some dull weight, and was palpable. There was also a moaning sound, not unlike the distant reverberation of surf, but more continuous, which, beginning with the first twilight, had grown in strength with the darkness. Suddenly lights were brought into the room, and this reverberation became forthwith interrupted into frequent unequal bursts of the same sound, but less dreary and less distinct. The ponderous oppression was in a great measure relieved; and, issuing from the flame of each lamp, for there were many, there flowed unbrokenly into my ears a strain of melodious monotone . . .
