As she does every morning, my wife asks, “How did you sleep?” Her next question is, “Did you have dreams?” I dreamed she was driving a vintage Bentley convertible, top down, and I was reaching from the passenger seat to help her to steer into a left turn in an upscale residential neighborhood. A beautiful day in a dreamy ride with top down and happy riders: What could be better?
Later, after dropping one of my ballerinas off to her class, I was reading at the library and it hit me. The true way to wealth and a signature of having arrived at real luxury is the ability to sleep through the night, and to nap-at-will. If Norman Rockwell could re-title his suite of iconic paintings, he’d call them the Five Freedoms. In addition to freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear, there would be the freedom to sleep.
But wait a second. As I researched these paintings, I noticed something tremendously important. The third, freedom from fear, depicts parents tucking their children into bed, memorializing the centrality of sleep in our pantheon of freedoms.
In America, we celebrate those that have the backbone to toil long hours and to limit their shut-eye. Indeed, this all-work-no-sleep ethic permeates our self-help literature. Stories are told about Thomas Edison, who purportedly never slept at length. It was his ongoing, relentless focus that led to an extraordinary number of patents. To this day I pay a company called Southern California Edison for my electric bill.
You might gather from how the sleepless-Edison tale is told that his lack of sleep caused or at least facilitated his inventiveness. I am here to say this folklore is wrong. Edison was a magnificent sleeper! He slept many times a day, in what we call naps. He was able to refresh himself this way because, according to some scientists, it isn’t how long we sleep that matters, but how deeply we sleep when we shove off into that nether world. If Edison was able to reach the deepest level of sleep consciousness multiple times a day, he was a far more accomplished sleeper than those sleeping longer but more superficially.
The idea that “Edison never slept!” is an utter fiction. I’m very fond of Edison-prevarications. In one of my most-viewed online articles, Exactly, How Many Times Did Edison Fail? I share my research into the inventor and especially this myth about his failures.
Estimates vary wildly, yet unlike numerous inventors, Edison died rich, leaving an estate of $12 million in 1931. This is worth more than $187 million today.
Literally, Edison slept and grew rich.
You could say he slept his way to a great fortune. I realize this is punctuating his work style in an unusual manner, but it is more plausible an explanation than asserting he never slept. Sleeping, or napping if you like, was central to his capacity to invent numerous devices that changed the world. Yet we imagine him and other moguls as insomniacs.
My argument is that the poorest people on the planet are the most sleep deprived. They are also among the nuttiest, the least stable, and the least healthy.
If you want to be happy, productive and rich, or at least feel like it most of the time, get a good night’s sleep. And if that doesn’t do it, sleep some more! If someone brings you a wonderful sounding business proposition, or a magnificent offer of any kind, what is the best advice you can hear? Sleep on it. We are told this is sage advice because letting a sizzling offer cool off for 24 hours is a good way of not getting hustled. We show down the transaction, and if we’re being conned, the miscreant might slip into the night. And we might realize things that sound too good to be true are often just that. People have saved, which is to say they have made, billions of dollars, by following this advice.
Sleeping on something engages our unconscious, and this is why it is so valuable to permit a cooling off period. If we have nightmares or just a fitful reaction to the offer that prevents us from sleeping, this could be an authentic “danger” message from our inner self. We could be tapping a source inside ourselves that is alert to tiny nuances that our conscious being wasn’t aware of when we were awake.
I took my happy-go-lucky Doberman pinscher to a real estate transaction I was doing. Meeting me at the property was my buyer and his building contractor. The buyer made a verbal offer that was less than half what I was asking. Blue, my dog, growled when he heard it.
“Is he growling at me?” the suddenly flustered buyer asked.
Blue never growled. He didn’t bite, either. He was a wonderful dog bereft of gifts other than affection. But on that occasion he picked up on something I had missed entirely. The buyer was a sleaze, someone to avoid doing business with. We have our own inner Blues. These are the signals sent from our sleeping state to our conscious beings. They warn us, and they can also make us rich.
Einstein had a dream he was riding on a beam of light and this ignited his interest in relativity theory, which has certainly enriched humanity. His dream and subsequent mining of its meaning made him rich. He died with a fortune of $10 million in today’s dollars, was the country’s top paid professor at Princeton, and his heirs continue to earn a reported $12 million from his name, image, and publications.
Another inventive fellow who slept and grew rich!
These bright luminaries, Edison and Einstein, had to recharge their batteries to accomplish what they did when the sun came up. They’re given credit for the results, but not for the precursory and necessary antecedent, sleeping.