… hate to see the evenin’ sun go down,
Makes me think I’m on my last go-round.
W.C. Handy,
“St. Louis Blues”
Why do old people sleep less at night and slip into little naps in broad daylight, dozing off in the midst of company? Why this reversal of conventional sleeping habits? Unlike the young, who can zone out and lie comatose right up until lunch, we lie awake in the dark and doze off in daylight. With the years, normal sleep gradually dwindles from the prescribed eight hours to six, even five. Night more and more becomes our time. Against our will, the ancient goddess Nyx (Night) is forcing us to become her devotees.
So much goes on at night; not only dreams and reminiscences and prayers; not only fears, those visiting demons who sit at the edge of your bed and recount your blunders and worries, and then fly off (as vampires do) once morning finally comes. Even more insistent are pressing toilet calls.
In early years the involuntary urge to urinate does not disturb sleep. Small children can wet their beds without waking, so strong is the child’s need to stay asleep and to protect this sleep from waking in the night, with its often fearful intruders. In late years, however, the urge to urinate interferes with sleep, as if the wisdom of the older body calls you to wake up.
Bladder calls at night affect daytime living, too. You must watch your evening fluid intake, avoid diuretics, plan ahead for stops when traveling. More and more nighttime creeps into the day. In stark physical terms, we feel trapped in a body over which we are losing control and whose nightly message is decay.
Suppose, however, that getting up from sleep awakens you not only in the night, but to the night. Once, in monasteries and nunneries, night watch was called vigil, and sleep was shortened on purpose so that when the Lord of Temptations came calling and his minions tried to enter your thoughts at night you could ward them off The early Christian monks who lived in desert caves tried to banish sleep altogether, since pagan powers were thought to approach pious souls through dreams. Moreover, since the visionary book of Revelation says “there shall be no night there” in the kingdom to come, some religious orders have sought to approach that eternal day by literally banning sleep. So the devout person intent upon building a strong character was less eager to sleep than to keep watch at night. Character depended on fending off the fantasies and voices that threatened to lead one away from the Christian path. To fend them off, the devout had to open their eyes to the night so as to discriminate among the spirits.
Awakening to the night opens a dark eye into the invisible world. It opens an acute ear to cautions, insights, and promptings that seem to visit only at night, disturbing sleep in order to be heard. We hardly suffer from the same crowd of anxieties and reconstructed nostalgic longings in daylight.
This crowd of spirits that we call worry, self-castigation, anxiety, remorse, death terror, and erotic longing had similar names in the old world of the Mediterranean. For us they are psychological abstractions; for the ancients they were personified figures, children of Nyx. We can see these “invisible” persons, Night’s offspring, painted on vases and carved in relief: fatalistic foreboding (moros), fault-finding (momos), punishers (keres) and avengers (nemesis), angry persecutors (erinyes), miserable distress (oizys) and lustful longings (kupris). The Bible calls Nyx by another name, Lilith, the night-monster “roaming with her retinue in the darkest hours of the night.”
Of course, Nyx had another side, a happier function. She brought ease to the weary, and her wide dark wings spread protectively over the sleeping world. In later years however, the shelter she affords interests us less than that crowding in of her plaguing offspring who demand we wake up in the dead of night.
Waking up to these figures of the night world deepens and broadens character. You come to know what cannot enter during the day, what Freud called the repressed. Dreams (also children of Nyx, according to the old myths) are not enough to return the repressed to awareness, for, as Freud said, their function is to protect sleep. And dreams do mostly let us sleep peacefully, by masking our worries and terrors and presenting them in the guise of images we do not understand, letting us dream on without waking.
But to dream on without waking seems not to be what aging physiology wants. Not only do the bladder, the sphincter, and the enlarged prostate play their roles in getting men out of bed at night, but so does a strange, newly studied change in circadian rhythm. Research on men in Denmark and Japan shows that something happens to the younger, habitual patterns of urine production. “Healthy young adults produce urine three times faster during the day than at night.” Although the older men in these studies produced the same total amounts of urine as younger men in any twenty-four-hour period, older men were no longer retaining salt and water during the night; they were instead excreting more sodium at night, and thus voiding more frequently. The report concludes by saying that “some people with nocturia have disordered circadian rhythms,” and “there’s not much you can do to regulate your body’s clock.”1
There is, however, something you can do about understanding your body’s clock. Men are being forced to learn another rhythm. (Women were not included in these studies, initiated as inquiries into prostate disorders and repairs.) The biological clock “intends” to rouse us elders from sleep and awaken us to the darkness around us. Plato called for this awakening from darkness, in his famous allegory of the cave. The concluding two stanzas of one of William Stafford’s finest poems about the erosion of character due to careless inattention puts it like this:
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.2
Evidently we sleep less in later years because our tasks change. If once we were to be sheltered by Night herself, now we must learn from her offspring. Phantoms of Fate, Death, Despair, Blame, Revenge, and Desire won’t let you rest. You have to discriminate among the invisible figures who share your home, even your bed. Letting them awaken you, receiving their biting attacks, and studying the legitimacy of their claims—this is hard work. An hour or two with the children of Nyx, wide-eyed in a dark room, can be exhausting. Little wonder that some eighty different sleep disorders have been catalogued and that there are 337 sleep disorder clinics in the United States. Ten percent of the population report a nightmare at least once a month. Little wonder, then, that so many of us take sleeping pills and wear incontinence pads so that we can rise in the morning without having had to tangle with (and learn from) the persecutory brood of Nyx.
I do believe she wants us to know her better. Perhaps she takes offense at our methods of avoiding knowledge of the night. Our culture’s light pollution and its after-dark noise levels may be offensive to her; who knows? What place outdoors and nearby is free of artificial light and the sounds of civilization? How far do we have to travel to look up to a full sky of stars? What do you or I know about differentiating Night, beyond divisions into prime time, late night, and bedtime. Do we know Night’s sounds and smells, where the constellations are, the moon’s condition, the soughing of the wind at dawn, how the house rattles and settles?
Besides the animal creatures that thrive on the night’s black air; besides thieves, third-shift workers, jazz players, streetwalkers, and other nightcrawlers, all invisible in the daytime—besides these, inanimate things come alive in the dark, as so many fairy tales and ghost stories tell children. The restless mind is besieged by insights; lying sleepless, we develop a strange intelligence. Is this how the images of the dead communicate, how the ancestors instruct us? Many indigenous peoples wait until nightfall to sacrifice to ancestor spirits and to feast and dance to propitiate their fearful powers. Keeping vigil to know the night was one way of gaining strength from the invisible world. Specific rituals belong to different phases of the night, as if the night had a variety of faces. In medieval Japan there were clocks that told time by releasing smells: every two hours a different odor wafted through the air, so that on waking in the dark you could literally sense what time it was. For us, Night is mostly all the same: In our blinds-drawn room, we little know or care whether what we awaken to is the darkness of midnight, three A.M., or just before daybreak. No patrolling watchman calls the hours, no bells peal from the towers and steeples. Yet the body has its timekeeper, and nurses on night-duty know to expect certain crises in different patients at particular hours.
We do not distinguish the parts of the night because we have yoked Nyx to day-world duties. We go to bed for oblivion, not for worry. Nighttime is for catching up on sleep, for being recharged for tomorrow, which will take off, manic: we’ll needle our scalps with a quick hot shower, followed by a jolt of juice, some cheery pops and snaps, a mug of sugared caffeine—rituals to ban the last traces of Nyx and her brood and the sleeping drugs we have taken to keep her at bay.
If character is fate, and if the Fates as avengers and pursuers are daughters of Night, then character building may need the physiological changes that awaken the old into night. What else could so urgently get us up? It seems character has underpinnings that sink into a dark intelligence, an intelligence that settles into us in darkness and deepens our imagination of human life, its obscure obsessions, its irrational panics. Late in the night, we realize that the acts of our lives have not been shadow-free, that we are shadowed by curses and sins—not because we are cursed and sinful by nature, but because with the very origin of the world, one half of which belongs to Night, come fearful figures who demand we know them. All you know of the day world is only half-knowledge. Character asks for a larger truth, a richer understanding, and the beginning of this wisdom is imparted by these dreadful visitations.
How does this wisdom bear on character? First, you learn that your emotions are not quite yours; they are not so much to be controlled as to be reckoned with. Fatalistic anxieties, recriminations, and vengeful afterthoughts that come in the night come from the night. They derive neither from your brain and its processes nor from your personality and its behaviors. They belong instead to the dark, impersonal underside of the world, which becomes personally available to you through the ordeal of nighttime awakenings.
Second, because your heart turns so cold and beats so wildly, you have to take to heart old lessons that once seemed only Sunday sermons and philosophical theories, such as Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s primacy of dread, such as the biblical God’s insistence that fear is the beginning of wisdom, such as that God’s terrifying wrath against peoples, cities, and nations and his persecutory manipulation of even his good servant Job.
Third, you grasp something of the hellish reality of the realm of shades, an underworld essential to so many mythologies, religions, and rituals of initiation, and to the making of art. The dreadful masks of ancestors and tribal spirits exhibited in exotic anthropological collections become actual dark angels inhabiting your own room. Enduring their attacks takes character.