Sleep Sutra | Reading with Frontline

Dear Reader,

“Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep”

This kept playing in my head in a loop last Friday, which was March 14 and, as online shopping and tourism portals kept reminding me, “World Sleep Day”. Since March 14 was also Holi, I was awakened rudely at 6 am by Amitabh Bachchan’s ghoulish voice singing, “Rang barse” on soundboxes as residents of the neighbouring apartment made merry by the poolside. “India does murder sleep,” I muttered fiercely under my breath as I slid out of bed.

As a lifelong insomniac, I am intrigued by sleep as one is intrigued by a new crush. I crave it but cannot have it; so, I go for the second-best option, which is reading about it. 

Macbeth, of course, is full of references to sleep because it represents what the power couple lost in their ambitious pursuit. The way Shakespeare expends his poetic energy on describing sleep—“Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care/The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,/ Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,/ Chief nourisher in life’s feast”—I feel he too, like me, was in love with the brother of death.

Incidentally, the idea of sleep as death’s kin must be one of the most comforting concepts dreamt up by literature. It takes away the fear of death, making it something familiar, everyday.

Sleep has its scary sides too. In Greek mythology, the moon goddess Selene so liked the sleeping face of the shepherd Endymion that she granted him eternal youth and eternal sleep. She had 50 daughters by him while he slept. Exploitative, I know, but I cannot help admiring the way the usual narrative of the male objectifying the female is turned on its head here. In Keats’ long poem on Endymion, the Aeolian shepherd is made into an English Romantic, an aesthete looking for the immortal in the beautiful.

Keats’ sonnet “Ode to a Nightingale” is my all-time favourite sleep poem: its first lines perfectly describe me on a given day: “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,/ Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains.” As does the question with which it ends: “Do I wake or sleep?” 

Please don’t mistake me for a junkie for admiring these lines (Keats was probably addicted to his pain medication). It’s just that my insomnia makes me feel like I am sleepwalking through life, and Keats superbly captures the sense of being awake and asleep at the same time.

In Murakami’s short story, “Sleep”, an insomniac finds liberation in her permanently wakeful state since it gives her more time to spend on herself. As always with Murakami, I found myself losing patience while reading the story. The tiny flash of revelation at the end was too small a compensation for having to endure loads of banality.

Here is the woman describing her sleepless nights: “After ten minutes of lying near him [her husband], I would get out of bed. I would go to the living room, turn on the floor lamp, and pour myself a glass of brandy. Then I would sit on the sofa and read my book, taking tiny sips of brandy and letting the smooth liquid glide over my tongue. Whenever I felt like it, I would eat a cookie or a piece of chocolate that I had hidden in the sideboard. After a while, morning would come. When that happened, I would close my book and make myself a cup of coffee. Then I would make a sandwich and eat it.” Frankly, this lengthy description of daily routine (how do I care if she eats chocolate with brandy?) made my eyes glaze over.

Here, for me, lies the chief attraction of Murakami—his books are soporific, they save me from popping a sleeping pill. Since Murakami fans must be sharpening their knives on reading this, let me say in my defence that I made the mistake of starting on Murakami with 1Q84, which has such thrilling nuggets of wisdom as “Time always passed slowly on Sunday mornings”. But even after going through Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore, my opinion of Murakami has not changed dramatically. He has been called the “balladeer of the banal”, but the banal need not always be boring. I find Murakami ponderous, wasting too many words on saying the obvious.

If Murakami acolytes are enraged by my views, they can cool off by reading Aditya Mani Jha’s kind and thoughtful review of Murakami’s latest, The City and its Uncertain Walls here.

When it comes to expressing stark truths about the basics of life in a way that is so real that it seems surreal (which Murakami presumably intends to do), nobody can beat children, or, in the case of fiction, adults ventriloquising as children. The profoundest statement on sleep/dream/reality, in my opinion, is to be found in Bengali author Leela Majumdar’s novella for children, Halde Pakhir Palak (The Yellow Bird’s Feather). In it, a character, a child, says with an immense sense of wonder, “Whenever I get up from sleep, I find that I am awake!”

Think about it—very few can beat this plainspeak, which artlessly makes a clear distinction between the sleep of the innocent, where the states of sleeping and wakefulness are mutually exclusive, and the sleep of the damned (like Macbeth’s), in whose disturbed, hounded mind, the two states have started leaking into each other, toppling the order of things.

With that, I hit the snooze button in my head to dream of fairy lands forlorn. See you again soon. 

Till then, 

Anusua Mukherjee

Deputy Editor, Frontline