Sleep, the Brother of Death
Over the course of history, sleep and death have been associated with each other extensively. In Greek mythology, the gods of sleep (Hypnos) and death (Thanatos) are twin brothers. Flashing forward to American literature, Steinbeck writes, “Death was a friend, and sleep was Death’s brother,” (Grapes of Wrath). Nas, a 1990s hip-hop artist, has a famous lyric: “I never sleep, ’cause sleep is the cousin of death.”
Yes, its possible that sleep and death could be historically connected merely because a sleeping person can appear dead at a glance; however, Shakespeare chose to dive deeper into this comparison in Hamlet:
To die; to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. ’Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die; to sleep; —
To sleep? Perchance to dream! Ay, there ’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffl’d off this mortal coil. -Shakespeare, Hamlet
So why are these two phenomena associated so deeply? It must be more than just the idea that a sleeping person could be mistaken for a corpse.
Shakespeare hits the nail on the head here in the sixth line of the excerpt: “To sleep? Perchance to dream!” In the process of dreaming, the human body abandons its obsessive focus on the five senses and allows the subconscious to exist uninhibited, to create alternate realities and reveal itself in all of its eccentricities.
Shakespeare presents the idea that dreams within sleep may be a small taste of what we are to experience after death. He observed that in sleep, as in death, we are detaching ourselves from the corporeal world and existing as a version of ourselves that cannot be influenced physically.
It is thought-provoking to me that this process of ‘leaving the world behind’ is one of the fundamental necessities that unites us all. Without regular sleep, it does not take long before our minds start to lose their ability to function properly.
In fact, a study on sleep deprivation published with the National Library of Medicine states, “Perceptual distortions, anxiety, irritability, depersonalization, and temporal disorientation started within 24–48 h of sleep loss, followed by complex hallucinations and disordered thinking after 48–90 h.” In other words, we literally start to lose our grip on reality after only one or two full days without sleep, which is our ‘break’ from material reality.
So, the next time you lay down to take your nightly break from reality, remember that you are more than just a body collecting data with the five senses. Your sleep is, in some real sense, a pseudo-death, in which you escape the flood of information from the world and exist in whatever capacity you can apart from it.
I will conclude with another quote from Shakespeare for your consideration and meditation, this time from The Tempest and famously inscribed on Percy Shelley’s tombstone:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
