Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

by Ben Holden

  And now, from the wreck and chaos of the usual senses, there appeared to have arisen within me a sixth, all perfect. In its exercise I found a wild delight: yet a delight still physical, inasmuch as the understanding had in it no part. Motion in the animal frame had fully ceased. No muscle quivered; no nerve trilled; no artery throbbed. But there seemed to have sprung up, in the brain, that of which no words could convey to the merely human intelligence even an indistinct conception. Let me term it a mental pendulous pulsation. It was the moral embodiment of man’s abstract idea of Time.’

  Pagelink: Coleridge’s best-known poems – ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ – in bearing the imprint of his opiate addiction also inhabit dream-states and often tip into the nightmarish. The Mariner pleads, ‘O let me be awake, my God’, while the poem ‘Kubla Khan’ presented itself to the poet during a particularly vivid dream, as he recounted in the introductory fragment, ‘Kubla Khan: Or, A Vision in a Dream’ (1816). This accompanied the poem when it was published in 1816 in an octavo pamphlet entitled ‘Christabel: Kubla Khan, A Vision; The Pains of Sleep’.

  Coleridge, in ill health, had been prescribed ‘an anodyne’. He fell asleep in his chair, reading in Purchas, His Pilgrimage of Khan Kubla. The fragment recalls: ‘The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he had the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation of consciousness of effort.’

  Pagelink: William Wordsworth’s poem, ‘To Sleep’ makes it clear that he understood the importance of sleep and was well acquainted with insomnia (the subject of many other books and an area that I have chosen not to explore here, as this collection is for everyone, including but absolutely not limited to those poor souls who struggle with sleep). Wordsworth’s poem ends with a rather desperate beckoning:

  Without Thee what is all the morning’s wealth?

  Come, blessed barrier between day and day,

  Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health!

  4. The Dead Spot

  Pagelink: Sleep paralysis, as referenced in the introduction to this section, has been experienced by approximately one in three young adults.

  Pagelink: Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Aubade’ was written in 1977; ‘Unfinished Poem’ in 1951.

  Pagelink: Such bedboard talismans to ward off evil spirits are, for example, traditional and still deployed by the Shona people of Eastern Zimbabwe.

  Pagelink: For more on the dead spot and its happy corollary, plus much more on our body clocks and inherent timetable, seek out the BBC Horizon documentary, The Secret Life of Your Body Clock (2009).

  Pagelink: Theories on ‘sleep-dependent memory processing’ vary and the links between sleep and memory is a topic of much debate in the sleep scientific community.

  On 13 May 2016, a study conducted by academics from the University of Bern and McGill University, Canada, was published in Science journal that dramatically moved forward our understanding of REM sleep. Using optogenetics – a technique that allows scientists to control neurons with coloured light shone directly into the brain, via a tiny optical fibre-implant – the research team inhibited theta oscillations in mice hippocampus during REM sleep. They found that inhibiting such brain activity during REM sleep prevented the animals from remembering things learned during the day (such as a brand-new object in its cage). ‘Disrupting the activity only during REM sleep, and not other sleep, basically obliterates consolidation and memory formation,’ said Dr Sylvain Williams. The study is titled ‘Causal evidence for the role of REM sleep theta rhythm in contextual memory consolidation’.

  Pagelink: The recent US studies showing links between sleep and amyloid plaques include the study published by researchers at Stanford University in 2001, ‘Association between apolipoprotein E epsilon4 and sleep-disordered breathing in adults’.

  Pagelink: Isaac Bashevis Singer made this statement in an ‘Art of Fiction’ interview with Harold Flender for the Paris Review, Issue 44, in 1968.

  Pagelink: E. B. White’s observation about New York was also made in an interview for the Paris Review, with George Plimpton, Issue 48, 1969.

  Pagelink: Roald Dahl recounting how he came to write James and the Giant Peach appeared in the unpublished manuscript of Ophelia Dahl’s Memories of My Father.

  In his biography, Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl (2010), Donald Sturrock elaborates on the Dahl household’s bedtime-story routine. Sturrock relates that for ‘much of his adult life he had enjoyed telling stories to children . . . [his wife, Patricia Neal] recalled that they followed him as if he were the Pied Piper, mesmerising the children with his rich voice, his glittering eyes, his sense of fun and his wild subversive imagination. Now [in 1959] Roald was spending a lot of time with his own children – particularly when Pat was away on movie shoots . . . A story was never far away. Roald read them traditional fairy tales from Norway or from the Brothers Grimm, Beatrix Potter stories, and absurdist fables such as Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales. He also began concocting narratives of his own.’ (Chapter 13, ‘The Master of the Macabre’).

  Pagelink: Roald Dahl’s ‘night owl’ motto features in the Puffin Passport at the back of the 50th-anniversary ‘golden ticket’, 2014 edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964).

  Pagelink: Roald Dahl’s selling his short story ‘Bedtime’ is recounted in Sturrock (Chapter 9, ‘A Sort of Fairy Story’).

  Pagelink: Roald Dahl’s description of his relationship with his mother appears in Memories with Food at Gipsy House (1991), co-written with his wife, Felicity.

  5. Be Not Afeard

  Pagelink: For more on the pineal gland seek out Jeff Iliff’s 2014 TED Talk, One More Reason to Get a Good Night’s Sleep.

  René Descartes posited that the pineal gland performed the role of internal clock in the seventeenth century, referring to it in his first and last works, Treatise of Man (written before 1637) and The Passions of the Soul (1649), and calling it ‘the principal seat of the soul and the place in which all our thoughts are formed.’

  Pagelink: Those innovative Dutch retirement homes feature in the BBC Horizon documentary, The Secret Life of Your Body Clock (2009), which includes an interview with Eus Van Someren, the pioneering Sleep Professor who masterminded this raising of light levels during daytime, and who also set up a national Sleep Registry in Holland.

  Pagelink: ‘Friendly dream-diarists’ include, notably, Graham Greene. His final published work, posthumously, was a memoir told via his dreams, called A World of My Own (1992, Reinhard Books/Viking). Greene fashioned the book from over 800 pages of dream diaries, kept from 1965 through to 1989, describing it in his introduction as ‘in a sense . . . an autobiography’. Its epigraph is taken from the writing of Heraclitus of Ephesus, 500 BC: ‘The waking have one world in common, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.’

  Pagelink: For more on Katie Paterson’s Future Library Project, including filmed interviews with Paterson and Margaret Atwood, visit www.futurelibrary.no

  6. Tread Softly

  Pagelink: As regards babies and sleep – melatonin is passed to the foetus through the placenta, and so even when cocooned within a womb, a biochemical light-dark cycle is being established within each of us. Once born, babies receive melatonin through breast milk. At two weeks, half of a baby’s sleep episode consists of REM sleep (as opposed to a quarter for a grown-up) and, by two months, a 24-hour cycle is becoming established.

  Pagelink: William Maxwell’s description of his ‘improvisations’ is taken from his own Preface to his collected short stories, All the Days and Nights (1997, Harvill Panther).

  7. Ashore

  Pagelink: The history of alarm clocks is charted more extensively – alongside superstitions reg
arding headrests and bedstead rituals in animals – by Paul Martin in Chapter 16 (‘And So to Bed’) of his indispensable Counting Sheep: The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams (2003, Flamingo).

  Pagelink: The full text of Seamus Heaney’s ‘Crediting Poetry’ address can be found in Nobel Lectures: 20 Years of the Nobel Prize for Literature Lectures (2007, Icon).

  Pagelink: Richard Ford’s observation about ‘bad events’ is made in his novel Canada (2012, Bloomsbury).

  AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

  NB: The biographies of those authors – such as Billy Collins and Robert Macfarlane – whose work appears in this volume, but who have themselves also contributed a choice of bedtime story, can be found alongside their choices.

  A. Alvarez (1929– ) is a British poet, novelist, literary critic, anthologist and author of non-fiction books on diverse topics ranging from suicide, divorce and dreams – The Savage God (1972), Life After Marriage (1982), Night (1995, from which this anthology’s extract is taken) – to poker and mountaineering – The Biggest Game in Town (1983) and Feeding the Rat (1989). His most recent book is Pondlife: A Swimmer’s Journal (2013).

  Margaret Atwood (1939– ) is a Canadian novelist, poet and activist. Her novels include The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Cat’s Eye (1988), Alias Grace (1996), The Blind Assassin, which won the 2000 Booker Prize, and Oryx and Crake (2003). Her short-story collections include Good Bones, which features ‘Adventure Story’, and she has also published seven books for children.

  Nicholson Baker (1957– ) is the American author of The Mezzanine (1988), Vox (1992), The Fermata (1994) and two books narrated by a poet, The Anthologist (2009) and Traveling Sprinkler (2013). Among his non-fiction works are U and I (1991), Double Fold (2001) and Human Smoke (2008).

  J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) was born in Shanghai, interned in a Japanese prison camp from 1943 to 1945 and arrived in England in 1946. He published his first novel, The Drowned World, in 1962, and his last, Kingdom Come, in 2006. Alongside his short story collections – such as The Disaster Area (1967), which features this anthology’s story, ‘Now Wakes the Sea’ – his many novels include Crash (1973), High Rise (1975), Empire of the Sun (1984) and Cocaine Nights (1996). His autobiography, Miracles of Life, was published in 2008.

  Nicola Barker (1966– ) was born in Ely, Cambridgeshire. Her eight novels include Wide Open (1998), Darkmans (2007) and The Yips (2012). Her award-winning short-story collections include Love Your Enemies (1993), in which ‘Dual Balls’ appears, and Heading Inland (1996).

  J. M. Barrie (1860–1937), born in Kirriemuir, Scotland, was inspired to write the story of Peter Pan by his relationship with the sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, friends of his while living beside Kensington Gardens in London. The idea of Pan first emerged in the novel The Little White Bird (1902), the Peter Pan episode which was reprinted as Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), later adapted for the stage in 1904 to great success, and expanded into the novel Peter and Wendy in 1911. His other notable works include the plays Quality Street (1901), The Admirable Crichton (1902) and Dear Brutus (1917).

  Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) was a British writer and poet, born in St Cloud, near Paris. He is today best known for his nonsensical verse for children, The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts (1896) and the Cautionary Tales for Children (1907), but also wrote numerous travel books, historical studies and religious books, as well as serving as an MP for the Liberal Party between 1906 and 1910.

  Wendell Berry (1934– ) was born in Kentucky, where he still lives and tends a hillside farm in his native Henry County. He is the author of over 40 books, including the novel Hannah Coulter (2004), the essay collections Citizenship Papers (2003) and The Way of Ignorance (2005), and Given: Poems (2005).

  William Blake (1757–1827) was an English poet, painter and engraver. Blake did not go to school in London, where he grew up, but was apprenticed to an engraver. He went on to study at the Royal Academy and published his first collection of poems in 1783, Political Sketches. His ‘illuminated books’ interwove text with his own imaginative engravings: such works include Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794). Other writings include The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) and Jerusalem (1804–1820). His notable other designs include the 537 coloured illustrations to Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1797).

  Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) considered Dreamtigers, the collection eponymous with the poem included herein, to be his most personal work. Published in 1960, it is also known as The Maker. The Argentine’s seminal works are Fictions and The Aleph, both published in the 1940s and then in English translation during the 1960s, compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, notably dreams. Borges’ first publication was aged nine: a Spanish translation of Oscar Wilde’s story ‘The Happy Prince’, for a Buenos Aires newspaper.

  Humphrey Carpenter (1946–2005) was a writer and journalist. He wrote many books, including Secret Gardens (1991) about the golden age of children’s literature, and biographies of Tolkien (1977, as extracted in this collection), The Inklings, W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound, Benjamin Britten, and Spike Milligan. His Mr Majeika series of books for young children still enjoys considerable popularity. He wrote, with his wife Mari Prichard, the first edition of The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (1984), later comprehensively revised and updated by Daniel Hahn.

  Angela Carter (1940–1992) was a British writer whose novels included The Magic Toyshop (1967), Several Perceptions (1968), Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991). Her collection of short stories The Bloody Chamber (1979) is a series of retellings of classic fairy tales in her own words, designed to ‘extract the latent content from the traditional stories’. She also published a translation of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales in 1974. The collection Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales was originally published as The Virago Book of Fairy Tales and today bills itself as ‘Angela Carter’s pick of Mother Goose’s feathers’.

  Jimmy Carter (1924– ) is the 39th President of the United States. After serving in the US Navy, he took over the family business of peanut farming in Georgia. He became Governor of Georgia (1970–74) and was elected President in 1977, serving until 1981. A prolific human-rights campaigner, Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. His books include the memoirs, Keeping Faith (1982) and A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety (2015). The statement included in this anthology, and carried aboard the Voyager spacecraft, was delivered in electronic impulses that could subsequently be transcribed into words.

  Charles Causley (1917–2003) was a Cornish poet whose work was not only rooted in Cornwall’s landscape and tradition but also informed by his long experience as a primary-school teacher (he taught until 1976), a pursuit that led to much of his writing being for or about children. He is famed for his ballads and much of his work concerns innocence, as a theme. Causley’s collections include Farewell, Aggie Weston (1951), Survivor’s Leave (1953), Johnny Alleluia (1961) and A Field of Vision (1988).

  Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) studied medicine at Moscow University and qualified as a doctor in 1884, but wrote stories and sketches throughout his studies. His first book, Motley Stories, was published in 1886. His first full-length play, Ivanov, was written in 1887, while still a practising doctor. It failed, however, as did The Seagull (1896). Chekhov concentrated on short stories instead thereafter but was persuaded to return to drama, with success, by Stanislavsky. He went on to write Uncle Vanya (1897), Three Sisters (1901), and The Cherry Orchard (1904) for the Moscow Art Theatre. The bulk of his many short stories were first translated into English in thirteen volumes, The Tales of Tchehov, between 1916 and 1922.

  Leonard Cohen (1934– ) is a novelist, poet, painter and musician. He was born in Montreal. His artistic career began in 1956 with the publication of his first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies. Since then he has published fifteen books, including two novels, The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966), and volumes of poetry, such as Stranger Music
: Selected Poems and Songs (1993) and The Book of Longing (2006). He has made thirteen studio albums, ranging from 1967’s Songs of Leonard Cohen to Popular Problems in 2014. He lived on the Greek island of Hydra during much of the 1960s, providing the inspiration for ‘Dusko’s Taverna, 1967’.

  Wendy Cope (1945– ) is a British poet who has published four collections of adult poetry – Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986), Serious Concerns (1992), If I Don’t Know (2001) and Family Values (2011) – as well as two books of poetry for children and several anthologies. Her prose publications include Life, Love and The Archers (2014), in which the piece ‘By Chance’, first published in the Daily Telegraph, appears.

  Michael Cunningham (1952– ) is the author of seven novels, including A Home at the End of the World (1990), Flesh and Blood (1995), The Hours (1998, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award), Specimen Days (2005), By Nightfall (2010) and The Snow Queen (2014). His story ‘Jacked’ is taken from the collection A Wild Swan and Other Tales (2015), a series of ‘fairy tales for our times’. He has also published Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown and is a senior lecturer at Yale University.

  Roald Dahl (1916–1994) was born in Cardiff to Norwegian parents. His stories are currently available in 59 languages. UK sales alone of his works are over 50 million and rising, with global sales estimated to be more than 200 million copies sold. As well as his classic children’s books – such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), Fantastic Mr Fox (1970), The BFG (1982), The Witches (1983) and Matilda (1988) – Dahl wrote many short stories for adult readers, in collections such as Someone Like You (1953), Kiss Kiss (1960), Switch Bitch (1974) and Tales of the Unexpected (1979). His story ‘Only This’, which features here, appeared in his first collection of stories, Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying (1946).

  Lydia Davis (1947– ) is the author of, among other titles, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, a translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and a chapbook entitled The Cows. In 2013, she was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for Fiction. Her most recent collection of stories is Can’t and Won’t. ‘Happiest Moment’ first appeared in her collection, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2001).