Creative dozing: In praise of the nap

Hearty Canadians, gather round and endure the season. Now that we are deep into the sloughs of winter, I can only be truthful: We have months, endless months, to go until spring (and believe me, even that might not improve our mood much).

Have you winterized your horse yet? The Strathcona Country Talk magazine wants to know. Even though global warming may have made our climate more temperate, all sorts of animals are still hibernating. Groundhogs, marmots, jack rabbits and, of course, bears.

Not that a certain raccoon knew what he should be doing. Raccoons don't hibernate but they sleep more during the cold weather and the other day, during one of our manic thaws, this one could be seen waddling down my Toronto street, stupid with sleep. He had just woken up and was fat beyond belief.

His internal, biological clock was askew. Perhaps like the majority of us humans who retreat to our climate-controlled homes and offices where we are forced to stay alert (for the most part) all the livelong day.

Too bad humans can't hibernate, you say? In fact, as a species, we almost have. That is what the New York Times told me in an article I read the other day after my well-disguised, mid-afternoon nap.

Bon soir

Apparently, at times in the past, peasants in France and Russia took to a semi-state of human hibernation. So writes Graham Robb, a British scholar who has studied the sleeping habits of the French peasantry.

And they really did sleep. Robb tells us that after the French Revolution, bureaucrats were horrified to discover that the "workforce had disappeared between fall and spring."

"As soon as the weather turned cold, people all over France shut themselves away and practised the forgotten art of doing nothing at all for months on end."

This Big Sleep was, indeed, an ancient tradition in certain parts of the frigid world where the byword was: "Seven months of winter, five months of hell."

After the ordeal of work was over in the summer, farm families settled in with their cows and pigs for the big freeze. Like hibernating animals, their metabolic rates wound down to prevent starvation.

Let the winds howl

Robb tells us these habits were not just for the mountain folk. Even in temperate areas of France (such as Burgundy after the wine harvest) peasants simply settled in, comfortably, for a long snooze.

The same thing happened among Russian peasants, Robb says. They would rouse themselves once a day to eat a tiny meal of hard bread. People took turns keeping the fires going inside their shelters. Outside, the land was abandoned to the wolves and the hoary winds of winter.

The occasion for this article in the Times was to warn the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, that weaning French men and women from their accustomed 35-hour workweek will not be easy. (That is his pledge: to tune the economy and work his fellow citizens to the bone, like Japanese and North Americans.)

Besides, Robb argues, these long sleeps are good for the environment: Nobody consumes much for seven months. They may be an opportunity for the industrial world to wean itself of its gas-guzzling, carbon-burning ways.

Fat chance of that, I would think. But if the notion does take root, perhaps we Canadians can even call this period our "David Suzuki Winter."

The Watch

If this environmental argument is not convincing you or your boss, who frowns on you sleeping in, let me try another tactic.

Next time you come in late to work, tell your boss your body has simply settled into its natural, rhythmic sleep cycle.

My friend and colleague, Jeff Warren, an occasional producer at CBC Radio's The Current, has written a sprightly, well researched book called The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness.

In it, he tells us that the way we sleep has changed fundamentally since the invention of artificial lighting and the ubiquitous light bulb.

When historians began studying medieval texts, they noticed something referred to as "first sleep." It was never defined. But now scientists are telling us our ancient bodies are predisposed to "segmented sleep" — slumber in discrete chunks. This business of eight hours uninterrupted sleep is a modern invention. And who gets that much, anyway?

In the past, without the artificial light of the city to bathe in, humans went to sleep when it became dark and then roused themselves around midnight. That late night period was known as The Watch.

It was when people literally kept watch against predators, although many of them simply puttered around or visited neighbours and family.

This period of wakefulness could last an hour or two. One scientist claims people who experienced it entered a quasi-state of "altered consciousness."

Creative dozing

According to some sleep researchers, when you place people in pre-modern conditions, they tend to divide their sleep into two shifts. Some subjects report feeling "something like bliss" in that period between the two.

Seen in this light, a midnight bout of insomnia is not a disorder. It is normal.

Humans can experience another altered state of consciousness around their sleeping. Called the hypnagogic state, it occurs in that brief period before we fall asleep or rouse ourselves in the morning. Then we are still drowsy, like that groggy raccoon I saw shuffling down the street the other morning.

This twilight zone can be an extraordinarily creative time for some people. The prodigious inventor, Thomas Edison, used this hypnagogic state to conjure up many of his new ideas.

He would doze in a chair, using a system of plates in his hand to wake him when they fell to the floor. Then like a fisher of dreams, he would collect his thoughts from the net of his consciousness.

We sleep, we stir, we move slowly from the dream world to wakefulness. This is a remote, strange country — and the way our ancestors lived for millennia.

Playing with your sleep rhythms can be adventurous, if you don't have to get to work early the next day. Otherwise, anxiety sets in.

Medical science doesn't help much on this front. It offers us medications for a full night's continuous sleep, which sounds natural. But according to the Head Trip theory, it is really the opposite of what we need.

When it comes to sleep, we humans are Pleistocene creatures living in artificial circumstances. But then, do we want to give up indoor plumbing, hydro and pot lighting for a return to segmented sleep and semi-hibernation?

Some undoubtedly will be happy to abandon earthly conveniences and the fluorescent office cubicle for a healthy, natural life. Civilization has its costs.

As for me, I'm feeling drowsy. I must shut off my computer. I can feel myself falling off to sleep as I write this. I hope my editor will rouse me in time to make my deadline.