Everyone sleeps, even those who claim not to. Sometimes people don’t know they are asleep because, well, they sleep through it. For many years, the record for sleeplessness was held by a Californian teenager, Randy Gardner, who, in 1965, managed to stay awake for eleven days—a grand total of 264 hours. Gardner achieved this feat with the help of friends and a lot of physical activity including walking, using a baseball machine in a pinball arcade, and playing basketball. He got a bit cranky at different times, lashing out at the people who were keeping him awake because he had forgotten why they were tormenting him like this, and he probably had a lot of micro-sleeps, of which people were not yet aware. But the ordeal didn’t seem to leave Gardner with any permanent scars. Once he’d reached the milestone, he slept for nearly fifteen hours. The next night he slept for over ten. After that, he seems to have returned to a normal sleep pattern. Randy was most at risk during the marathon itself.
History is full of famous insomniacs. Some have tried to make a virtue of their affliction. Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of Britain from 1979 to 1990, wrote in her memoirs that she only slept for a few hours a night. She wrote, “There was an intensity about the job of being Prime Minister which made sleep seem a luxury. In any case, over the years I had trained myself to do with about four hours a night.” Thatcher presented herself as keeping vigil over the fortunes of the nation, perhaps not an insomniac so much as someone, like Thomas Edison, who had more important things to do than sleep. As a matter of fact, she didn’t; the belief is a delusion. Voters may have been less impressed if she said she drank heavily but the effects are basically the same as sleeplessness. According to researcher Paul Martin, somebody who has been awake for twenty-one hours will have the same reaction time and cognitive impairment as somebody with a blood alcohol level of 0.08 percent. They shouldn’t be driving a car, let alone a country.
Charles Dickens was a genuine insomniac, and his anxiety concerning bedtime reflected in a curious obsession. He would only sleep in a bed with the head pointing north and the feet pointing south. People have come up with many such rituals, some easier to explain than others. Elizabeth I, for example, always slept with a sword in her bed, perhaps to defend her virginity or perhaps to ward off the armada if it got that far. The purpose of Dickens’s obsession may have been the obsession itself: he was equally fussy about dress and food, although beds had a special hold on him. He always had trouble getting a bed to do what it was supposed to do; at least the direction it pointed was one aspect of its behavior he could control. Dickens’s problems with sleep are evident in his capacity, on occasion, to blur the line between dreams and reality. Ideas for plots sometimes came to him in dreams, and he called the month’s installment, for whatever serialized novel he was working on at the time, “my month’s dream.”
Like Shakespeare, Dickens wrote a lot about sleep. The reason was that, like Shakespeare, he wrote a lot about everything. They both had voracious imaginations; the whole world was not enough to feed it, so they needed to create extra worlds. They made these new worlds by observing the one they already had. They both described sleep apnea, for example, long before the condition had medical credentials. Shakespeare saw it in Falstaff. Dickens saw it in Joe, a character in the book that made his name—1836’s The Pickwick Papers. Joe is introduced as “a fat and red faced boy in a state of somnolency who divided his time into small allotments of sleeping and eating.” Joe is obese; the only thing that rouses him is having his leg pinched and his appearance greeted by the refrain, “Damn that boy, he’s fallen asleep again.” Indeed, in those early days sleep apnea was known as Pickwickian Syndrome. Yet an even better description, one which seems to understand the underlying seriousness of the condition, is found in the character of John Willet, proprietor of the Maypole Inn in 1841’s Barnaby Rudge. Willet’s breathing, when asleep, is likened to the problem of a carpenter trying to get through a knot in a piece of timber. On one occasion, Willet “came to another knot—one of surpassing obduracy—which bade fair to throw him into convulsions, but which he got over at last without waking, by an effort quite superhuman.” Mr. Pickwick experiences insomnia (“that disagreeable state of mind in which a sensation of bodily weariness … contends against an inability to sleep”), while in Bleak House, Volumnia Dedlock is among those legions of people who claim not to sleep when in fact they do. There are descriptions of sleep spasms in the character of Twemlow in Our Mutual Friend and of sleep paralysis in Oliver Twist: “There is a kind of sleep which steals upon us sometimes, which, while it holds the body prisoner does not free the mind from a sense of things around it.” A minor character in Hard Times takes to their bed for fourteen years, something of a Victorian pastime.
Dickens included sleep in all its guises in his literary works—most likely because he so often and so continually battled with it himself. In many respects, his spirit could find rest only in his fiction, a world of his own wonderful making; reality, on the other hand, was for him a place of profound restlessness, as it had been ever since his childhood. He said, “My own comfort is in Motion”—with a capital M. He was always on the move, an escape artist, a mirror to the world, a gifted mimic, and a generous-hearted man, but one with little capacity for self-reflection. He painted hundreds of vivid characters, his prose using primary colors to subtle effect, but he never portrayed himself, at least not with conviction. The narrative voice in some of his personal writing is among his least sure characterization. Perhaps he knew that if he ever stopped, reality would catch up with him, not least the traumas of his own childhood and its emotional privations. Something was disturbed in his early years that never settled. All his life he was a magnificent observer; he never missed a thing. His imagination was both his blanket and his bed. His books celebrated human entanglement; in private, Dickens was controlling.
Dickens knew one city, London, like few others have known any city. The source for this intimacy was that Dickens knew London at night, in the hours after it took off its makeup. Great Expectations, to take a single example, turns on the moment when the convict Magwitch reenters the life of Pip; that scene rests on its depiction of a wild London night. London was Dickens’s bed partner as well as his quarry; he loved her and needed her chaos to pillow his own. The pair of them spent many restless nights together, tossing and turning. He called London his “magic lantern.”
Because of all of this, it is hardly surprising that Dickens’s remedy for his insomnia was to get out of bed and start walking. Early in his career, in the 1830s, he wrote journalism under the name of Boz. A typical piece recommends getting to know London between three and four in the morning, the time when she gives up her secrets: “But the streets of London, to be beheld in the very height of their glory, should be seen on a dark, dull, murky winter’s night when there is just enough damp stealing down to make the pavement greasy.”
Just under twenty years later, in 1852—a period during which his marriage to Catherine was unraveling after the pair had had ten children, one of whom had sadly died—Dickens wrote a piece called “Lying Awake” for the magazine he edited, Household Words. He says that, since he was a “very small boy,” he was familiar with Benjamin Franklin’s “paper on the art of procuring pleasant dreams,” the one in which he urged insomniacs to have two beds. Dickens did not find Franklin’s advice very helpful, writing, “I have performed the whole ceremony and if it were possible for me to be more saucer-eye than I was before, that was the only result that came of it.”
Dickens runs through the disjointed chain of thought that filled the hours of his insomnia before reaching the conclusion that he would afterward stick to:
I found I had been lying awake so long that the very dead began to wake too, and to crowd into my thoughts most sorrowfully. Therefore I resolved to lie awake no more, but to get up and go out for a night walk—which resolution was an acceptable relief to me, as I dare say it may prove to a great many more.
Dickens loved the hours when he could have London all to himself, especially the time between when the church clocks struck three and when they struck four. He wrote an article in 1860 for All the Year Round, the magazine he edited after he fell out with the management of Household Words, about “the restlessness of a great city and the way in which it tumbles and tosses before it can get to sleep.” “Night Walks” is a guided tour through London on a cold night in March after the last of the public houses have sent their patrons home. Dickens walks and walks and walks, weaving through the “interminable tangle of streets,” stopping outside the Debtors’ Door of Newgate Prison (“which has been Death’s Door to so many”), a place that had been the source of special fear and loathing in his life. As a church bell strikes three, he stumbles over a sleeping kid of about twenty, and the two are terrified of each other. As another bell peals four, he enters a dark and empty theater and gropes his way to the stage. After four, he could get coffee and toast at Covent Garden, but he needed to wake the stall holder; Dickens remarks that the fruit and vegetables at Covent Garden get treated better than the people who sell it.
There is a touching moment when Dickens stops outside the walls of Bethlehem, a place that has given the word bedlam to the language. Bethlehem was a prison that should have been a hospital; it housed people whose minds had frayed to such an extent that even the frayed streets of London couldn’t accommodate them. Dickens wryly suggests that he is not much different from one of the inmates on the other side of the wall whom he once met; this man used to believe Queen Victoria dined with him in her pajamas. Dickens finds fellow feeling with the man in the reflection that no mind will do its owner’s bidding while the owner is asleep:
Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming? Are not all of us outside this hospital, who dream, more or less in the condition of those inside it, every night of our lives.
Tired and ready for bed, Dickens would go home at sunrise and sleep soundly. He didn’t lose sleep over insomnia; he used it to spend time with his love, the city.
The anxiety caused by insomnia can have worse effects than the insomnia itself. After centuries of experimenting with drugs, tonics, aromatherapy, and hot bedtime drinks, some of the best advice to those who can’t sleep is often to stop trying to sleep and, at the very least, to stop looking at the clock. Insomnia loves attention; deprived of this, it occasionally sulks and goes away. I once knew a nurse who said that patients in the hospital were regularly plagued by poor sleep. It is curious, given the importance of sleep to both physical and psychological healing, that hospitals are among the hardest places in the world to get any. My friend used to walk the wards in the small hours, noticing the number of eyes looking for something to look at. She’d switch on the televisions that hung over the beds, turning down the volume. Twenty minutes or half an hour later, she would go around the ward again: the patients would now have nodded off, and she’d turn off the screens. There are times when the best form of attack is surrender.