It was Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels, who first referred to sleep as “the Land of Nod.” Our children loved Gulliver’s Travels, which had also been a bedtime favorite of mine.
On the whole, it is an invigorating experience when you first encounter a story as a child and then discover it all over again as an adult, possibly even at different stages of adulthood, each time stretching your imagination to reach new places. It’s like learning to play in the safety of shallow water before you gain enough understanding and respect of the forces around you to move into the deep. We all pay an enormous price when people first encounter their sacred texts, such as the Bible or the Qur’an, as children but then never learn to read them as adults. Sacred texts need deep water; in the hands of fundamentalists, they are like whales stranded on a beach, thrashing about dangerously, gasping for air.
In my own childhood bedtime reading, Gulliver’s Travels is paired in my memory with Robinson Crusoe, the original version of which was written by Daniel Defoe. Defoe was a prototype of what came to be known as a journalist. He also had sidelines as a spy and an insurance salesman; his eye was as sharp as Swift’s, but Defoe was not so much appalled by the human condition as Swift was, as ready to make a buck out of it. He did humanity the disservice of taking it far too seriously.
Robinson Crusoe, written in 1719, and Gulliver’s Travels, written in 1728, have a few things in common. They were written within the space of a few years of each other and are both fantasies of exploration and discovery. They both use the kind of narratives that reached their apotheosis in the reality TV series Survivor. In addition, they both also have extraordinarily long titles, enough to put any librarian off their lunch. Swift’s book is called Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts by Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, then a Captain of Several Ships. Not to be outdone, Defoe’s is called The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates. It sounds more like the title of a bill before Congress than an adventure story. But despite their similarities, Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe are born from radically different understandings of the world. And different views of humanity can be seen in different attitudes to sleep.
When the eponymous Robinson Crusoe finally comes ashore on his castaway island, he immediately starts putting his new world in order. He realizes that he is defenseless, and with undaunted logic, he establishes a safe place for his bed in “a thick bushy tree.” Defoe writes,
And having drank, and put a little tobacco into my mouth to prevent hunger, I went to the tree, and getting up into it, endeavoured to place myself so that if I should sleep I might not fall. And having cut me a short stick, like a truncheon, for my defense, I took up my lodging; and having been excessively fatigued, I fell fast asleep, and slept as comfortably as, I believe, few could have done in my condition, and found myself more refreshed with it than, I think, I ever was on such an occasion.
Crusoe is the embodiment of what used to be called Protestant work ethic, a sturdy and, in many ways, admirable approach to life. It is evident, for example, in the practice of putting clocks on church towers. Religion is supposed to be about timelessness, but when there’s a clock on the steeple, there is a caveat: yes, we believe in eternity, which is why the steeple points so high, but here below you still have to keep an eye on the time and use it prudently. Crusoe often talks about God and the way the Almighty has looked after him and so on, but the reader becomes increasingly skeptical about this. In point of fact, he is a self-made man. His first bed typifies his whole mind-set. He uses reason to rig up safe bedding in a hostile world and is rewarded with sound sleep. As the book goes on, we find that Crusoe can do anything by the combined power of reason and hard work, even overcome mental illness. He comments, “my reason began now to master my despondency.” Thousands of people might wish it were so easy. He is never really alone on his island because he is a one-man civilization. The whole point of the novel is that a rational creature “not bred to any trade” has the capacity to re-create the entire apparatus of European civilization. Crusoe does this without a flicker of self-doubt.
Crusoe is obsessed with time and its correct measurement. For him, sleep is not just a personal experience, designed for the well-being of the individual. It is also how we measure the passage of days, and these build into weeks, months, and years—and ultimately into what we call history. Every child knows how many nights it is till Christmas or their birthday. This aspect of sleep is far more important to Crusoe than any of its restorative qualities; indolence is a sin and sleep can be a Trojan horse bringing sloth and laziness into the world. The measurement of time is instrumental in bringing order to existence. Robinson Crusoe (if I may use the abbreviated title) is replete with the counting of days, the numbering of history. Crusoe keeps the Sabbath religiously (I am not sure how else it could be kept) and is distraught when he thinks it is possible he has been observing it on the wrong day; he is also punctilious about his diary. More than anything, when he eventually finds a companion, he calls the man Friday because that is the day on which he found him. Friday is named after a measurement of time. If he’d been found one sleep earlier, he would have been called Thursday.
In Gulliver’s Travels, when Lemuel Gulliver comes ashore in Lilliput, he, too, is ready for sleep. But here it is a completely different story.
The children’s version of Gulliver’s Travels tends to include Lilliput (where people were small) and Brobdingnag (where they were big) but leaves out the parts that are complex and dark, meaning most of Jonathan Swift’s original work. Gulliver’s Travels is not exactly lighthearted. It is funny, sometimes hilarious, but the humor tears strips off the follies of the human animal. In the bedtime version, the little Lilliputians were cute, and when he reaches Brobdingnag, to the giants it is Gulliver who becomes like the Lillputians and also seems cute. This was far from Swift’s intention. The idea of cuteness had no place in his view of the world, nor did ideas such as “sweet” or “delightful.” Swift was one of the most savage satirists ever to have put poison in their ink. Just consider his short piece A Modest Proposal, which suggests ending famine in Ireland by eating children. Its logic and structure are so impeccable that they end up calling into doubt the functions of logic and structure themselves; this is precisely what Swift intended. He creates an unarguable case that is patently absurd. His use of reason leads to crazy results. Lucky for the pretentious of the world that he did not live past 1745, having endured several years of dementia, a fate he always dreaded. He is buried in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, an establishment of which he had been the dean. He wrote his own epitaph, which reads angry indignation can no longer lacerate his heart. Swift is one of those who only find rest in death.
Swift was born in 1667, a year after the Great Fire of London, a calamity that may well have been the result of poor sleep. It is said to have begun in a bakery in Pudding Lane just after midnight on September 2 that year, caused by sparks that escaped the fire. (The phrase “just after midnight” is the clue. It suggests that some poor soul had been left to keep an eye on the oven but had nodded off.) However, there were plenty of folk who wanted to blame the fire on terrorists. England was engaged in a war at the time and spies were thought to have crept up the Thames and set fires. The likely real cause was more mundane and less newsworthy— just a simple accident in the bakery.
The Great Fire destroyed thousands and thousands of houses and almost ninety churches, including a great and labyrinthine cathedral. It may have been one of the factors that contributed to Swift’s sense of the fragility of civilization. For him, civilization was brittle; the human ego, in contrast, was virtually unbreakable.
There is a great fire in Gulliver’s Travels, one that threatens the palace of Lilliput. Gulliver stirs from sleep and pisses on it to put it out. This is no ordinary piss. Swift likes us to know that it is the first piss of morning, that pungent and powerful concoction that your body brews while you’re asleep. In Gulliver’s case, it is all the more offensive because he has been drinking the night before. The palace is saved, but the king is offended because pissing within the royal precinct is illegal.
Swift was both fascinated and appalled by bodily functions. He offers a counterweight to our contemporary culture that wants to believe in a physically sanitized version of the bedroom. This means crisp white sheets, perfumed pajamas, fluffy pillows, and even fresh flowers on the table. The entire nightwear industry is a denial about what really happens during sleep. It’s better to think of the old, old joke about the old, old gentleman who goes to the doctor with a list of ailments. The doctor says that he will need a urine sample, a blood sample, a stool sample, and, yes, even a semen sample. The old, old man is hard of hearing.
“What did he say?” he asks his wife.
“Just give him your pajamas,” she says.
We like fictional versions of bedrooms, much as we do with bathrooms. But the reality of sleep is nightly sweat, shedding hair, flaking skin, saliva, dry throat, unconscious scratching, dribble, rumbling stomachs, frequent flatulence, strange utterances, various kinds of nocturnal emissions, and occasional incontinence. It’s no surprise that some marriages need separate bedrooms to survive. Swift made play with all this, never more so than in the final paragraphs of Gulliver’s Travels, after the voyager has returned from living as an animal, a brute Yahoo, among the rational horses, the Houyhnhnms. The Houyhnhmns are disgusted that any creature such as Gulliver should wear clothes to bed. When Gulliver returns to England, he is far from happy at being reunited with his wife and family. Five years later, he is still appalled by the smell of humans and revolted by the thought that he was once guilty of “copulating with one of the Yahoo species,” the evidence of which is the existence of children. Swift did not much like children. Gulliver buys two horses and prefers to sleep with these. He prefers their smell. “They live in great amity with me,” he says; it’s the closest Gulliver gets to love.
The poet Peter Steele writes of Swift’s fascinated revulsion from anything resembling “ordure” that “it may be that the dream of cleanliness is like the dream of reason … he believes in the end that filth is no joke, except in the dark and complicated sense that man himself is a joke.” The phrase “dream of reason” is especially apt, both for Swift’s time and ours. Swift belonged to an age in thrall to the idea of reason; reason was the celebrity of the 18th century. It has its limitations, but it’s surely better than the Kardashians. Swift is one of the few to see reason as a dream. This doesn’t mean it is not real; it just means that you need sleep to get there.
All this brings us to Gulliver’s first arrival in Lilliput. He comes ashore, walks inland and abandons himself to slumber:
I was extremely tired, and with that, and the heat of the weather, and about half a pint of brandy that I drank as I left the ship, I found myself much inclined to sleep. I lay down on the grass, which was very short and soft, where I slept sounder than ever I remembered to have done in my life, and, as I reckoned, about nine hours.
Gulliver doesn’t create a bed; he just lies down. When he wakes up, as most people will remember, he is tied to the ground with hundreds of “slender ligatures” that are wrapped around his whole body “from my arm-pits to my thighs.” It is a wonder that none of this has woken Gulliver, especially having so many ropes, however slender, strapped around his thighs. Gulliver has quite a few resemblances to his creator. Looking at pictures of Swift, with or without his wig, it is clear that he was a jowly individual with a broad neck and a double chin. He was not adverse to wine. He never shared a room with his partner, so much so that people were never entirely sure if the pair were married. I’d wager good money that he was a snorer. Indeed, the evidence all points to a significant case of sleep apnea. If Gulliver is created in Swift’s image (as he is in so many ways including his preposterous views on education), it’s feasible that Gulliver could have slept through his imprisonment by the Lilliputians.
The contrast between Crusoe and Gulliver is not simply between creating a structure for sleep on the one hand and reckless surrender of consciousness on the other. Crusoe’s sleep is part of the order of the world; Gulliver’s is a doorway to another world. When he wakes, he is twelve times the size of everyone else. All sense of normal proportion is gone. Gulliver’s Travels makes endless comedy out of its sense of lost order, lost proportion, and lost perspective. The floating island of Laputa, for example, can move from one time zone to another. It can also move over the cities of its enemies and turn day into night, spoiling the growth of crops. Crusoe could no more play with these ideas than jump over the moon.
Sleep is another country. Swift even gave it a separate name: The Land of Nod. But Swift didn’t actually invent the phrase. It actually comes from the first few pages of the Bible. After Cain kills his brother Abel, Cain is forced to become a “fugitive and a vagabond.” Like his parents, Adam and Eve, he is forced into exile as a result of his own ego. By the end of the first two generations of the human story, the whole saga is already a mess, characterized by intergenerational family dysfunction. Genesis 4:16 reads, “And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the Land of Nod, on the East of Eden.” The Qur’an tells this story in almost the same way but is more humane and compassionate than Genesis. The Qur’an says mildly that Cain “ended up remorseful” and, as a result, God says that anyone who kills a person either out of revenge or even just “to prevent corruption of the earth,” then “it is as if he killed the whole of mankind.” Conversely, when anyone saves a life, it is as if they have “saved the whole of mankind.” These words are central to the whole texture of the Qur’an.
The Bible seems to be harsher, but its bark can be worse than its bite. The former chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregation of the Commonwealth, Jonathan Sacks, has described the Book of Genesis as “the story of human relationship … the necessary prelude to Exodus, the story of nations and political systems.” He points to the endless stories of conflicts between brothers in Genesis and draws the conclusion that its main theme is “the rejection of rejection.” Exile is not death. There is no eye for an eye or tooth for a tooth. Cain killed his brother and he will carry the mark of that forever. But he also gets a fresh start in a place called The Land of Nod. It is to be a new homeland beyond the burdens of waking reality.
Jonathan Swift took the phrase and gave it the meaning with which it is currently associated, namely as a description of sleep. It appears in Swift’s Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, according to the most polite mode and method now used at Court, and in the best Companies of England—a story that is neither genteel nor ingenious nor polite. Nor, thank God, is it even complete. It is a desultory display of banalities exchanged between stuffy stereotypes. This explains why no one other than scholars has heard of it. By the end, even the characters in it are falling asleep. It is, admittedly, after two in the morning, and they have been drinking and playing cards. Before he dozes off, The Colonel announces, “I am for the land of Nod.” Mr. Neverout replies, “Faith, I’m for Bedfordshire.”
This was a significant moment in the history of sleep. It describes sleep as a place of exile, away from family, success, failure, self-image, and the weight of daily life. It is the place to which inadequate humans can escape. It is beyond our borders. It is the daily refugee to which we all turn; we all seek asylum there.