“Night Wisdom: The Spirituality of Sleep”
March 8, 2020
The Rev. Heather Janules
Sleep. It is an unconscious experience that – if we are fortunate – will constitute a full third of our lives. It is essential for life and health yet it renders us vulnerable. Only recently have be begun to understand how sleep functions and why it is so necessary. This service invites us to reflect on this mysterious and universal phenomenon.
As always, it is good to be together in worship. Yet, on this particular Sunday, I can’t help but recall a service held at my previous congregation.
The senior minister and I were standing in the lobby of the sanctuary. The sounds of a beautiful instrumental piece, being played on the piano, swirled around us. The congregation was seated and silent, in rapt attention to the music. There was a collective energy suggesting that something was just about to happen.
As the tune played on, through the plate glass windows, I saw a member of the congregation park her car and begin to walk towards the front door. I smiled inside as I had a sense of what was to come.
She walked through the lobby doors and quietly greeted us; we said hello in return. And just before she entered the sanctuary, the music ended…and the congregation got up from their seats. I looked at her expression, which very quickly transformed from surprise to confusion to recognition, concluding with a small burst of embarrassed laughter. What she thought was the prelude and the worship leaders getting ready to process in was really the postlude, after we had left the chancel. She was an hour late to worship; she missed almost the whole thing. It was the Sunday of daylight savings time; she obviously forgot to change her clocks.
But you did not forget to change your clocks. Or, like me, you surrendered to the timepieces in the sky that control our cell phones and your phone alarm went off at the usual time, albeit minus one hour of rest. The change happened without your active participation or, I imagine, your consent. It is the rare person that voluntarily gives up sleep.
I am grateful you are here, perhaps in a sleep-deprived state. I wish we could give you back that hour. You are going to have to wait for November when we gain an hour of sleep in the strange, twice-a-year ritual of maintaining daylight savings time.
While we cannot give you back that hour, we can give you an hour of worship in which we consider the role of sleep in our lives. And, for this Sunday only, you have my explicit permission to sleep through the entire sermon.
Sleep is so much a given in human life, it seems like there is not much to think about. It’s like dedicating an hour of worship to…breathing. Yet, sleep is essential to on-going life. And, if you think about it, the experience of sleep – a time when we are unconscious and hence vulnerable, when the body becomes inactive, when our everyday lives fall away and our subconscious moves center stage – is inherently spiritual. How we sleep, how much we sleep and what we dream shapes so much of who we are, our life experience and, as we now know, our longevity.
My spiritual curiosity inspired me to explore the “night wisdom” of sleep. But my inspiration also came from my own sleep life. Last spring, I found myself feeling tired almost all the time. I could not get through the day without taking a nap. Was I sleeping so poorly that I never got the rest I needed? Perhaps there was an underlying issue, such as a vitamin deficiency or one of the obscure illnesses the internet suggested might be the cause.
All this motivated me to learn more about sleep. And it motivated me to get my annual physical. Good news! I had normal levels of all vitamins and minerals and no mysterious diseases. I was just tired. The downtime of the summer brought my energy back into balance.
In my learning more about sleep, it was during the summer that I read a great book by Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams, whichserves as a primary resource for my reflection. And, if I am to be honest, much of my research was experiential. But I will get back to my relationship with naps later.
Early in his book, Walker acknowledges our limited understanding of why we sleep with a light touch. He imagines a hypothetical scenario of a doctor informing a man that his son was just born. She assures him that the newborn is healthy and well but then goes on to say:
“For the rest of your child’s entire life, he will repeatedly and routinely lapse into a state of apparent coma. It might even resemble death at times. And while his body lies still his mind will often be filled with stunning, bizarre hallucinations. This state will consume one-third of his life and I have absolutely no idea why he’ll do it, or what it is for. Good luck!”[1]
As the title Why We Sleep suggests, Walker’s goal is to explain to this hypothetical doctor why this hypothetical infant will sleep throughout its life. Why we all sleep…and by “we” I mean all living creatures. For while some animals sleep for very short periods or keep one half of their brain awake, and apparently bullfrogs only need periods of rest,[2] for the most part all beings sleep some of the time.
As you likely know, there are two distinct kinds of sleep – rapid-eye movement and non rapid-eye movement, or REM and NREM sleep. When we are in NREM sleep, our brain sorts through the information it acquired throughout the day, holding on to what is necessary. During REM sleep, the brain then strengthens our cognitive connections.
Perhaps we as a species should appreciate our sleep for the intellectual gifts it has provided. Walker shares a fascinating theory about human evolution. At the point when our evolutionary ancestors discovered fire, there was a distinct change in their experience of sleep. Campfires deterred both insects and large predators. This comfort and protection gave early humans the freedom to sleep on the ground. Since they did not have to worry about falling out of trees anymore, sleep became deeper. The advanced brains of these early humans developed even faster because of the deeper sleep.
It is during REM sleep that we dream; dreaming is important for both integrating memory and processing our emotions. Our dream life is also remarkable for its capacity to boost learning and creativity.
Walker recounts a practice of the inventor Thomas Edison. Edison was well-known for not sleeping much at night but he often napped throughout the day. Sometimes when he was struggling with a new invention, he would sit in a chair with an arm rest. On the arm rest, he would place a pad of paper and pencil. At his feet, he would place a metal pot. Before drifting off to sleep, he would grab a handful of ball bearings and place his arm on the rest. Once Edison began dreaming, his muscles would relax, causing the ball bearings to fall into the metal pot. This primitive alarm clock rendered him lucid during the fertile creativity that is dream time. With his notebook at hand, he could then record what his mind produced, liberated from the familiar patterns of conscious thought.
Walker’s mission with Why We Sleep is to also challenge widely-held beliefs he names as false and dangerous – that some people do not need a full eight hours of sleep a night and that older adults need less sleep. From his perspective, there is a global pandemic of sleep loss, contributing to workplace accidents and fatal car crashes caused by drowsy driving. And incidents of medical errors caused by doctor fatigue are significant; it was only after the death of the Johns Hopkins doctor that designed the model of medical residency – where students work many hours in a row without sleep – that we learned he himself was a cocaine addict.
Much of Walker’s book carefully details the ways sleep maintains health and equilibrium in the body and, conversely, how impaired sleep correlates with a number of diseases. His research reveals that disruption to the sleep cycle through working a night shift correlates with the development of many cancers, leading some to label shift work a carcinogen. I was fascinated to learn how sleep debt fosters development of proteins in the brain. As people age, these proteins interfere with sleep even further, creating a vicious cycle of collecting proteins and impaired sleep. Alzheimer’s Disease and dementia are linked to this process. As anecdotal evidence, Walker references Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, two world leaders who proudly stated they slept only a few hours a night, both of whom who went on to develop Alzheimers. In brief, the case of a man who developed a rare syndrome that prevented him from falling asleep proves Walker’s point: if we do not sleep, we die.
Given how important sleep is to our survival, it is strange that sleep receives so little attention. And, if we turn our attention to sleep, it is easy to realize that the common metaphor of sleep as ignorance or sleep as unconsciousness is somewhat inaccurate. In a way, our bodies, our minds and – if you have ever had a powerful dream – our spirits are fully engaged. We are hard at work when we sleep.
While preparing for today’s service, I read a number of Rumi’s poems and noticed a theme. Rumi often compares one who sleeps to one who is not aware of the mystical realities of life:
The power of Love
is exclusive to us,
you can go back to sleep.
I have been burnt
by the fire of Love.
You who have no such yearning in your heart,
go back to sleep.
This analogy appears again when we think of those who move towards enlightenment, they who have “a spiritual awakening.” Considering how sleep is a primary function through which we come to understand the world, a process by which we retain our memories and hence – night after night – add to the cognitive collection that constitutes our self, if anything sleep is a frenetic process of growth and personal development even though we are not conscious at the time.
Walker also affirms the wild nature of the sleep state. He writes:
Last night, you became flagrantly psychotic…First, when you were dreaming….you started to see things that were not there— you were hallucinating. Second, you believed things that could not possibly be true— you were delusional. Third, you became confused about time, place, and person— you were disoriented. Fourth, you had extreme swings in your emotions— something psychiatrists call being affectively labile. Fifth…you woke up this morning and forgot most, if not all, of this bizarre dream experience— you were suffering from amnesia. If you were to experience any of these symptoms while awake, you’d be seeking immediate psychological treatment.
This past spring, when I began my odyssey of exploring sleep, I decided to pay attention to my sleep habits. I downloaded an app to my phone which, when I place the phone next to my bed, tracks my sleep. Somehow, it can tell when I am in deep sleep. It records my snoring. The app claims that it does not pick up other sounds or movements but I am convinced that at least one snore recording was from my dog, Temple, as it sounded just like when she makes little muffled barks in her sleep. Perhaps the best thing about this app is that, when given a range of when you would like to wake, it plays delicate music when you are in light sleep as the alarm so the transition between sleeping and waking is gentle.
For the past 239 nights, I have averaged 7 hours and 49 minutes of sleep. This doesn’t include any afternoon naps as the app disregards short sleep sessions. I have an average sleep score – whatever that is – of 83%. The US average is currently 74%. Saudi Arabian sleepers have the lowest score at 62% and sleepers in the Netherlands have the highest at 79%. Again, we should envy the Scandinavian quality of life.
But perhaps my most important learning, from Matthew Walker’s research and about myself, is that instead of resisting a daily nap, I should always try to schedule one. Walker asserts that humans are “bi-phasic” in our sleep, with the two phases coming at different times, depending on cultural norms. During Colonial times, long before there were electric lights, people often went to sleep not long after the sun went down but woke in the middle of the night for a time. They called this “first sleep” and “second sleep.” Think of cultures with siestas. Walker’s book demonstrates a correlation between those who give up the afternoon nap siesta tradition and a dramatic increase in cardiovascular disease. As Thomas Edison’s experience reminds us, we can actually boost creativity and productivity by setting aside some time midday to sleep.
“Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.”[3]
These familiar words from Genesis suggest that perhaps as all creatures sleep some of the time and God themselves rested, a spiritual case can be made for sleep. There is day and there is night and there is waking and there is sleeping, each its own mystery, each providing its own gifts. As an unconscious experience, our awareness of sleep may be dim and obscure but we ignore this one third of our life at our detriment.
There is night wisdom waiting for us
when we surrender the control we have in our waking hours. May this wisdom be
yours and, for those who are struggling with our clocks “springing ahead” this
morning, may it come soon.
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=ZlU3DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA5&lpg=PA5&dq=%22he+will+repeatedly+and+routinely+lapse+into+a+state+of+apparent+coma.+It+might+even%22&source=bl&ots=MVSa4CWWiT&sig=ACfU3U3eVF3-6jgT2doQLph8uyJZKIz1ow&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjmn4rVtPfnAhWIlnIEHW8KArEQ6AEwAHoECAsQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22he%20will%20repeatedly%20and%20routinely%20lapse%20into%20a%20state%20of%20apparent%20coma.%20It%20might%20even%22&f=false
[2] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/10-animals-that-don-t-sleep.html
[3] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+2&version=NRSV
Topics: Sleep