Sleepy Time Blues

Whatever you may feel about sleep, you can’t live without it.

Insomniacs don’t get enough. Noisy and oversexed neighbors interrupt. Parents of colicky infants go without. According to novelist Stephen King’s “Insomnia,” sleep “is the only escape we have.”

Many begrudge the time it demands. Shakespeare called sleep “the death of each day’s life,” while Ursula K. Le Guin noted “the sleeper turns his back on everyone.”

Sleep heals and replenishes, particularly when in our own beds. It can also comfort, as writer Julia Armfield reported: “Sleeping gave me time off from myself – a delicious sort of respite. Without it I grow overfamiliar, sticky with self-contempt.”

Sleep can even have spiritual implications. “Bed, its utter inactivity, offers a glimpse of eternity, without the drawback of being dead,” Lynne Sharon Schwartz wrote.

That we seniors need less rest is contemptible myth. It’s the quality of sleep that declines. Physiological advances like aches, pain and aging bladders limit its benefits. Dozing and naps don’t make up for such deficits.

“The old sleep poorly. Perhaps they stand watch,” King suggests in “Pet Sematary.”