The Modernization of Western Sleep: Or, Does Insomnia have a History?

With the arrival of the twenty-first century, historians, anthropologists, literary scholars and sociologists awakened to the importance of sleep. The past fifteen years have occasioned a remarkable outpouring of monographs, articles and dissertations devoted to human slumber and its discontents. Topics have ranged from medieval somnambulism, sleep deprivation in Byzantium and Thoreau’s bed to the Japanese custom of public napping ( inemuri ). 1 Since 2013, an academic website, ‘Sleep Cultures’, has featured an updated bibliography of scholarship and a forum for fresh research. In light of posts touting lectures, art exhibitions and conferences, an especially promising portent lies in the growing number of graduate students drawn to ‘sleep studies’. 2 Academic interest in sleep, aside from the study of dreams, has been overdue. As early as 1753 Samuel Johnson wondered why ‘so liberal and impartial a benefactor’ should ‘meet with so few historians’. 3 Scholars appear to have concluded, much like the nineteenth-century Scottish cleric Robert Wodrow, that ‘sleep can scarce be justly reconed part of our life’. 4 However banal it might seem to modern sensibilities, the liberal arts can no longer disregard such a vital dimension of human behaviour. Rather than representing an uneventful interlude between episodes of consciousness, sleep has played a multifaceted role in the lives of diverse populations. Far from being ignored, the subject has routinely absorbed the thoughts of the waking world. Painstaking steps to ensure the safety and tranquillity of nocturnal repose testify powerfully to its past importance, as does the attention that many traditional cultures have accorded dreams, not least as sources of divine instruction and personal insight. More than that, notwithstanding popular conceptions of sleep as a biological constant, impervious to changes in time and space, the structure, length and ecology of this universal necessity have, in the past, varied enormously — as they still do today.