The Qur’an, the Bible, and the Hebrew scriptures all describe God as the one who “shall neither slumber nor sleep.” So if God sometimes appears moody, irascible, unreasonable, and even petulant, lack of sleep may be the explanation. It may just as well explain why God is prepared to put up with so much: an eternity of sleeplessness is enough to lower anyone’s resistance.
God is a creature of the night. On page one of the Bible, we are told that God made the night first and then made the day afterward. That has to say something about priorities. The first biblical creation story relates that God’s ultimate achievement was not the creation of the firmament of heaven, nor of the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, nor of the great whales, nor of everything that creepeth upon the earth, and not even the creation of humankind “in the image of God.” The grand finale in God’s big production was what happened on the seventh day: He rested. The Qur’an doesn’t like this idea, cutting off the creation saga after six days and insisting that God was not the least bit wearied by the whole escapade. But the Bible doesn’t say God was tired. On the contrary, it implies that God had a fresh idea and, as a result, simply rested. Indeed, tiredness can be the enemy of rest; we live in a world that is often too tired to sleep.
In the Genesis story, the creation of rest is God’s crowning glory, and the ability—for one day a week—to be godlike in taking it easy became the hallmark of the culture that wrote up the story. The capacity to rest without actually sleeping is the most significant accomplishment of the species at the top of the evolutionary ladder. Mosquitoes can’t do it. Think of that the next time one torments you at night. You may not believe it at the time, but you are a superior being to that buzzing insect. Otherwise you wouldn’t be lying awake at a quarter past two in the morning.
Creation starts with a formless void called chaos and ends with an orderly void called rest. Countless people in every time and culture have found the same thing for themselves: creativity is about creating space, about having the courage to stop, even if it means feeling dizzy, while the world keeps turning. This is the strange essence of the contemplative life, the heart of all great spiritual traditions. The monastery is not a place of escape, quite the opposite. There isn’t much you can do to encounter God. You’ve got a much better chance by not doing. Florence Nightingale never understood this. Her God kept her so busy that the two of them never got to meet.
The irony is that having put rest at the summit of all creation, the Bible story shows God as the great disturber of rest. God gets into people’s sleep but not to snuggle up next to them. On page two, in a second creation story, God makes the man fall into a deep sleep so that he can pinch one of his ribs and make him a mate. Abraham, the first of God’s great travelers, encounters God in his sleep and the experience is one of terror. It was in a dream by night that God bestowed on Solomon, who’d been caught out sleeping with other gods, the gift of “a wise and understanding heart.” One of Job’s friends likewise rubs up against God in his sleep and finds “in thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men, fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake.” An angel appears to Joseph in his sleep and tells him that Mary, the girl to whom he is engaged, is pregnant even though she hasn’t had sex but it’s okay because the father is the Holy Spirit. This is not the kind of news you want to hear in the cold light of day. Once the child is born, an angel tells him to grab the mother and boy and flee for dear life into the desert. Then later another angel tells him it’s safe to go home. It is hardly surprising that legend has it that Joseph died young. He probably stayed up late, dreading that if he went to bed he’d get another visit in his sleep. The Bible is peppered with dry dreams; dry dreams are the ones in which the dreamer discovers their impotence.
There are almost as many theories about dreams as there are people to dream them up. At the risk of being simplistic, the theories tend to fall into two main groups. The first is that the dreamer has the dream; the second is that the dream has the dreamer. In the first, the dream sheds light on the dreamer by providing clues about the workings of their mind or soul or psyche or whatever you care to call your really private parts. In the second, the dreamer is left with a riddle to solve; the dreamer has to shed light on the dream.
Under the first of these umbrellas, some theories, probably most theories, hold that a dream is a reflection of something going on in the life of its host, whether that something is psychological or purely physical, whether that something is meaningful or whether a dream is just the trash icon on our mental screens, the place to which we drag our psychic junk so that we can delete it from memory. Regardless of the dream’s significance or lack of it, a dream is the work of the dreamer; no one else can dream your dreams for you. One of the best-known proponents of this view, at the end of the spectrum that sees dreams as meaningful clues to the waking world, is Sigmund Freud, who wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams that “every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance, and one which may be assigned to a specific place in the psychic activities of the waking state.” In other words, someone’s dreams will take you deep inside the inner workings of that person. Freud builds on the work of Aristotle.
Aristotle did his own thinking in a time and place that had numerous gods to do your thinking on your behalf. In the Greek view of the world, Morpheus, the god responsible for dreams, was the son of Hypnos, who was responsible for sleep and who was, in turn, the son of Nyx, goddess of night. (Incidentally, Nyx had two sons. The other one was Thanatos, death.)
Aristotle believed in putting the ruler over every aspect of human experience and didn’t have much confidence in ideas that were beyond concrete evidence, such as that the gods would be telling us stuff in our pajamas. His writing on dreams is characteristically meticulous, ploughing the field of his inquiry with a fine-tooth comb. He always speaks of “seeing” a dream, not “having” a dream, and he points out that if dreams were vehicles for communication from the gods about the future, then animals wouldn’t dream because why would divine beings be bothered to communicate with lower-order beings. It’s a mystery how Aristotle knew that animals had dreams, but it turns out that he was probably right: more recent studies have shown that most large mammals, and other species as well, have REM sleep, so in all likelihood they dream. They also snore— dogs especially. Aristotle held that the cat curled up in front of the heater is an unworthy receptacle for divine revelation. There are owners who would beg to differ. There’s no point asking dogs about their dreams because sleeping dogs lie.
Aristotle had more to say on the subject of where dreams come from. “If it were God who sent them they would appear by day also,” he said, “and to the wise.” Aristotle was a bit of a snob: for him, the fact that ordinary people happen to have dreams means that, despite appearances, the dreams themselves must be ordinary. “It is absurd to hold that it is God who sends such dreams and yet that he sends them not to the best and the wisest but to any chance persons.” Aristotle thought that dreams were caused by the mind continuing to move after the body has stopped, just as water continues to slop around after the container it is in has come to rest. For him, dreams are like projectiles: they keep going after the thrower has stopped: “It is the mental picture which arises from the movement of sense-impressions when one is asleep, in so far as this condition exists, that is a dream.”
Aristotle believed that dreams are fragile: they are comprised of small stimuli that continue all day but that, like the stars, we are only able to notice at night when competing stimuli have toned down. Dreams are like reflections on the surface of water: the moment the still water is stirred they vanish. The minute we move, dreams go the same way. Even after all this time, Aristotle’s theories have a fair bit going for them. But when it comes to the fact that, after the event, reality sometimes takes the shape of something that appears to be foretold in a dream, he has a single-word explanation: coincidence. Such coincidences may appear frequent, but that’s because there are so many dreams taking place in the world on any night of the week that sooner or later one of them is bound to resemble the future. If dreams are a revelation of the divine, then they are only in so far as the whole of nature is a revelation of the divine because dreams are part of nature, not outside it.
Freud applauded Aristotle for not being bullied by a culture that was infatuated by the idea of prophecy. Freud also believed dreams were not about the future; for him they concerned the past. He used them to take him a long way into knowledge of a person; whereas Aristotle was far more inclined than Freud to believe that dreams were a mirage, an illusion, a random collection of mental bricolage. They were not to be trusted. For Freud, on the other hand, dreams are truthful in a way that the conscious mind has learned over the course of a lifetime not to be. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he writes, “I must insist that the dream actually does possess a meaning, and that a scientific method of dream-interpretation is possible.” The scientific method to which Freud refers was necessary, because in his view, there was a difference between the manifest content of a dream (which is what you experience) and its latent content (which is what it really means). Partly to protect ourselves, we dream in code and the deciphering of those codes is by no means a simple task. Later visitors to Freud’s vast oeuvre have scratched their heads about this. How difficult could it be to point out that a pen in a dream might represent a penis? A sword, on the other hand, could represent a penis. So might a rifle. Then again, a shovel might very well represent a penis. Same for a plough. As you advance to another level, you get to ponder dreams that are actually about penises. In these, a penis is a subtle symbol of a penis. Most things seem to represent either a penis or something a penis can fit into. It would be interesting to know just what Freud thought a simple dream might entail. To be fair to him, his range of interpretation was not really so narrow. Dreams could also be about castration.
Despite the obvious disparities between Aristotle and Freud, the two thinkers share an underlying conviction. This is the belief that dreams are the work of the individual dreamer and reflect something of that individual’s experience. Most people these days would go along with that in some way, shape, or form.
But it could be that dreams are about the future in a way neither man considered. Aristotle believed that infants did not dream. After all, they have little experience and therefore little to dream about. But these days, as we’ve seen, we know that newborn children spend about half of their time asleep in REM, a great deal more than at any other part of their lives, and that fetuses spend even more. The evidence all suggests that unborn children spend a lot of time dreaming. But what on earth could they be dreaming about? It’s not as if they have issues with life that need processing: sexuality that wants to slip its moorings or bosses that remind them of what their parents used to be like. The answer is complicated but probably has a lot to do with the way a fresh brain needs to constantly test its wiring and activate its circuitry. Dreaming in the unborn and in infants may not be visual in the way adult dreams usually are. There are theories, admittedly difficult to test, that relate fetal sleep to the creation of memory and language skills, to the development of cognitive capacity. There is even a hypothesis that adults don’t really need REM sleep and therefore don’t really need to dream; the process is just a leftover habit from the initial stages of our lives when we needed a special start program to boot up our brains. Dreams are toys we have never let go of because, a lot of the time, they are fun, even if the fun is sometimes a bit like a ride on the ghost train: either you have a good dream that you enjoy or a bad one from which you enjoy waking up.
If it is the case that dreams are of most practical benefit to little people, dreaming may have less to do with dealing with personal experience after it happens and much more to do with creating the capacity to actually have personal experiences later in life. After all, without language and memory, there isn’t much prospect of that happening. In these theories, the dream does not explain the dreamer. Rather the needs of the dreamer explain the dream, and all significant dreaming is to the same end—namely, setting up those mysterious qualities of mind that are the basis of those equally strange things called personality and, beyond that, character. These are what make us different from one another. The creation of human individuality and uniqueness gets a big helping hand from the fact we all have the same dreams.
Dreams are one of the more baffling aspects of the Bible. Perhaps the storytellers, whoever they may have been, found in them a handy plot device that allows God to step on stage without being seen. But this explanation is too easy. Biblical dreams are eerie and disquieting stories that go a long way toward capturing the elusive nature of the divine. They sit uncomfortably on that line that divides the ego from something much greater. Generally, biblical dreams tend to shape the dreamer rather than the other way round. Biblical sleepers dream as children but are expected to respond as adults, an irony that sets up some of the poignant tensions in the story. Maybe the dreams are just a way of saying that sometimes, in order to see properly, you have to close your eyes.
Jenny and I named all our children after contemplatives, people whose most potent activity was expressed in stillness. Our little Clare got her name from the woman who was both an anchor and a goad for Francis of Assisi. The medievals tell a great story about Clare and Francis having a meal together; they made their table on the bare ground. Their love was so strong that they never touched the food but spent the time in perfect stillness, totally present to each other. There was so much heat in the room that bystanders thought the house was going to catch fire.
Our Clare’s twin, Jacob, got his name from the deepest sleeper in the Bible. There is plenty not to like about the biblical Jacob, a feature he shares with any number of the main characters in the Book. The original Jacob is a figure of gritty determination. His name means “heel” because he was born gripping the heel of his twin brother, Esau, trying to get out before him and so be the firstborn and heir of his father Isaac (whose own name means “laughter,” because his mother laughed when strangers told her, at the age of ninety, that she was to have a son; it was a sour laugh that one). The rivalry between Jacob and Esau is painful reading for any parent of twins. Isaac loved Esau but their mother, Rebekah, preferred Jacob. The story goes that Esau became a skillful hunter, but Jacob was a “plain man” who preferred to stay at home. One day, Jacob happened to have made some soup just as Esau walked in from the fields faint with hunger. Esau was so famished that he exchanged his birthright for a bowl of lentil soup, which remains one of history’s most lopsided deals. Jacob didn’t hesitate to exploit the vulnerability of his brother. Then, to make it all official, Rebekah came up with a scheme to disguise Jacob in animal skins (to mimic the more hirsute Esau) and have him slip into the presence of his father, who was now almost blind. In this way, Jacob steals the blessing from Isaac that is intended for Esau. When Esau realizes what has happened, it looks like he is going to kill Jacob in revenge, so Rebekah packs Jacob off to her brother, Laban, who lives in the north in Haran. There Jacob falls in love with Laban’s daughter, Rachel, and works for his uncle for seven years to secure her hand in marriage. When at long last the time comes for the wedding, Jacob is himself the victim of a trick—and ends up hitched to the elder daughter, Leah. So he knuckles down for another seven years to get Rachel as well. The Bible’s first family makes most other families look functional.
All together, Jacob has twelve sons and one daughter by four different women. Jacob’s favorite son is Joseph, a preference usually attributed to the fact that, after another long wait, Joseph was the first child he had with Rachel. Jacob buys Joseph a special coat, which provokes jealousy among his siblings, and so the next generation of bad behavior gets under way. But there may well be another reason that Jacob feels something special for Joseph. Joseph understands dreams. Like his father, he knows that however complex life can get there is no guarantee that sleep is going to be any more simple. In the Qur’an also, Joseph is presented as a man at home in the landscape of dreams; the prophet Muhammad was, on occasion, guided by dreams and understood them as part of God’s revelation. Indeed, the holy book describes the Night of Destiny, Laylat al-Qadr, which occurred on Mount Hira around 610. On this night, God’s word came to the prophet as a source of peace and light in darkness; the description has a dream-like quality. Yet the prophet was also suspicious of the practice of divining dreams, which was part and parcel of the colorful religious climate in which he lived and which he sought to simplify.
The biblical Jacob’s sleep took him to places he would rather not have gone. For a bloke who only ever wanted to stay at home, he spent a long time away from it. And it was while sleeping by the side of roads that he had two famous dreams. In the first, which takes place on the way to Haran, he sees a ladder reaching from heaven to Earth with angels going up and down it; God appears, identifies himself by name, and declares that Jacob will inherit the land on which he is sleeping. God promises to be with him and keep him safe. Yet when Jacob wakes up, his memory is one of fear and dread. “Surely God is in this place,” he says. He takes the stone that he had used for a pillow, pours oil over it, and makes it a shrine, saying that if God is as good as his word, the pillow will be God’s house. This is a tantalizing image of sharing a resting place with God.
Twenty years later, Jacob, now a wealthy man with many children, is returning home from Haran to encounter Esau for the first time since he fled, when he has another dream, again by the side of the road, again when he is sleeping alone. But this dream, less well-known to the popular imagination than the story of Jacob’s ladder, is radically different from the one he hosted as a younger man. This time, a mysterious figure wrestles with him until first light and, despite Jacob’s pleading, refuses to divulge his name. Rather, the figure changes Jacob’s name to Israel, because he was able to hold his own against God. Jacob is wounded in the hip and leaves the encounter with a limp that will slow him down for the rest of his days. Yet he is grateful to have seen God face-to-face and to have got away at all. The reader can’t even be sure if it was a dream or something else. It never says that Jacob slept; only that he struggled “until the breaking of day.”
There is a lot of growth between these two stories of the night. The younger man dreams of a God who is full of promises and who will help him find rest. The older man wrestles with a God who won’t even reveal his identity. The older man has found a deeper faith, one with fewer answers and that leaves him limping.
Our little boy won the name of Jacob because of this. We named him after the guy who slept by the road and was discovered there by something larger than life, something that became harder to name as he got older. Our Jacob’s name is a prayer that he will never stop grappling with life’s mysteries, that he can be still long enough for the spirit to find him, that he can stop moving long enough to be moved.
I have watched our Jacob searching for sleep in the wee hours. He thrashes about, twists himself, raises an arm and gets himself in a headlock. It goes on and on. He is wrestling. Finally he throws in the towel and his face relaxes into a peaceful surrender, and I tiptoe out of the room, afraid of disturbing his rest.