Night Time 11.27.22

Golden Slumbers, Wildest Dreams...and yet Sleepless in America

Greetings, as we wind up this week of feasts with a taste of one that Shakespeare deemed the most nourishing: Sleep.

The bard was specific about what he considered:

“… the main course in life’s feast…”

Innocent sleep. Sleep that soothes away all our worries. Sleep that puts each day to rest. Sleep that relieves the weary laborer and heals hurt minds. Sleep, the main course in life's feast, and the most nourishing.
(— William Shakespeare, Macbeth, circa 1606)

The Beatles, too, were eloquent on the subject more than three and a half centuries later in lyric and tune — for instance with this classic from the iconic 1969 Abbey Road album (pictured at top center):

“… Golden slumbers fill your eyes…”

Smiles awake you when you rise

Sleep, pretty darling
Do not cry
And I will sing a lullaby

Once there was a way
To get back homeward
Once there was a way
To get back home

Sleep, pretty darling
Do not cry
And I will sing a lullaby.

Meanwhile artists, thinkers and psychologists from John Lennon to C. G. Jung through the ages have similarly recognized, mapped and tapped the unconscious realm of soul via dream — as with the 1986 song title (above top left) from the Moody Blues:

“Once upon a time… (in your wildest dreams”)

And, yet…

Today the crisis-level struggle with health-harming sleep-deprivation across American society is as severe as portrayed in the excellent 2014 National Geographic Channel documentary (pictured at bottom center column) — if not far worse:

Sleepless in America

Today newShrink notes this season of the year’s longest dark nights with a nocturnal focus: The many dimensions of sleep, the purpose and value of dream, and whether or how clock-time is a factor.

No, you’re not sleeping enough, and it’s a problem: 15 Scary Facts in the National Geographic Documentary (The Washington Post, from 2014)

Among the scary facts (which have stuck with me, along with many other accumulated, since I saw the original documentary):

🔷 8-hours a night is goal, but even 7 isn’t happening for 40 percent of American adults and 70 percent of adolescents.

🔷“Every aspect of who you are as a human, every capability is degraded, impaired, when you lose sleep. What does that mean? Your decision-making, reaction time, situational awareness, memory, communication, and those things go down by 20 to 50 percent.”

🔷 Well-documented research shows direct links between lack or poor-quality sleep and obesity, heart disease,Type II diabetes, some cancers — as well as much anxiety and depression.

🔷 Risk of accidents, and more fatal ones, is dramatically elevated by driving, particularly in the dark, while sleep-impaired — which nearly half of adult Americans are at any given time.

And number 15 on the list:

One of the most frightening facts was all the benefits that we’re missing out on if we miss good sleep every night. The good news is that sleep can “inspire creativity, re-balance emotions, help refresh cardiovascular health, metabolic health and boost our immune system.”

We just have to figure out how to get it.

Toward this end, a primary resource this week, pictured above at bottom center, is Arianna Huffington’s excellent 2016 book The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life One Night at a Time.

Arianna Huffington

You perhaps are most familiar with Greek-born Huffington as co-founder of The Huffington Post, author of some 15 books and CEO of Thrive Global. Less well known may be her scholarly cred. While in England earning a degree in economics at Cambridge she excelled in debate serving as the first female or foreign-born president of the school’s prestigious Cambridge Union Society.

The seasoned writer brings a rare mix of invitingly accessible touch with a story and exhaustive scholarly research — nearly 70 fine-print pages of detailed, usefully trackable notes plus solid index. (In this disciplined regard she models much from which many journalists writing in the long-nonfiction genre might well learn and imitate.) This book has been among my most-recommended, frequently consulted both personally and professionally with patients.

It likely offers new knowledge and options if you’re among legions already dealing with sleep issues from insomnia to apnea, strategies from medication to CPAPs. And it’s a great comprehensive look at prospects and issues if you or a loved one haven’t been for a sleep-study… but may feel the need to.

Regarding the various kinds of sleep-expertise that can be useful, from the clinical psychotherapy standpoint in my decade and a half working with adults of all ages, the lack of regular healthy sleep with its multiple combined effects is a near-universal factor in disorders across the spectrum. Closely related are lack of regular exercise, healthy diet and daily time in natural light (preferably outdoors).

As a newShrink subtheme on the journalism side today, Arianna Huffington is an emerging example of journalists, long-nonfiction authors and memoirists whose work demonstrates exemplary psychological knowledge, expertise, scholarship, reporting and writing. Future editions will be spotting and highlighting more of these adept at either or both clinical and mental-health and/or attention to the unconscious/depth dimensions of soul — “the psyche in psychology.”

The Sleep Revolution: Night-to-Night Practicalities

Here’s a good NPR interview about the book with Huffington on the Diane Rehm Show in 2016. In the book and interviews about it Huffington openly discloses her own sleep-deprivation/workplace burnout crisis — a fainting collapse at her desk that shattered her cheekbone and turned her immensely energetic attention to sleep as a very real personal topic.

Arianna Huffington: “The Sleep Revolution” (Diane Rehm Show Interview, 2016. Audio and text transcript)

As co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, for many years Arianna Huffington led a fast-paced, under-slept life. Then one day, she fainted from exhaustion, seriously injuring herself. With that she began a journey to learn about the importance of sleep — and why our current culture seems to prize sleep deprivation as a symbol of busyness and achievement. In a new book, she argues for a total overhaul of our relationship with sleep, and points to the many areas in which its value is being rediscovered, from education to politics.

Here with Scott Simon, also on NPR, the focus is on societal impacts.

Sleep Deprived: We're Recharging Our Phones, But Not Ourselves

(NPR Interview with Scott Simon)

Millions of Americans recharge their phones, screens and laptops before they go to bed at night, but do they recharge themselves?

Author Arianna Huffington, co-founder, former editor in chief of The Huffington Post and CEO of Thrive Global , says we are in the midst of a sleep-deprivation crisis that creates anxiety, as well as exhaustion, depression, a higher risk of motor vehicle accidents — and overall sleep-deprived stupidity.

Effects of sleep-deprivation are a particular concern this dark time of year with its higher levels of Seasonal-Affective Disorder (SAD)-aggravated depression. This perennial issue, along with research findings, are discussed extensively in a November 2021 edition of newShrink, Darkness Visible, Owl Season, “Howling Tempest in the Brain” section, as novelist William Styron described his decades-long often-debilitating depression. (This edition title Darkness Visible was taken from Styron’s memoir on the subject.)

The following two recent stories examine current research developments with depression. This first one, from The New York Times, underscores what is increasingly understood about the importance of healthy sleep, exercise and daylight as part of effective mood regulation.

Antidepressants Don’t Work the Way Many People Think (NYT November 8, 2022)

This one is interesting too (and opens with a cool color visual that I couldn’t fit anywhere here!)

Drug found in mushrooms lifts depression in clinical trial (from The Washington Post in The Charlotte Observer)

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There’s a big reason focus here has been first on practical, health and clinical aspects of sleep. If we aren’t sleeping regularly, long and well, we aren’t coming even close to connection with our most deeply authentic selves via the unconscious/soul accessible through our dreams. And this quite often becomes a chicken-or-egg problem. Stress from lack of good sleep increases Self-alienation, which in turn makes it even harder, less desirable, even more stressful to have the kind of sleep that richly nourishes…

“Our banquet of dreams…”

Along with its extensive look at historic, biological and day-to-day practical health aspects of sleep, in Sleep Revolution Huffington gives extensive attention to the importance and many practical aspects of our dream life:

We live in a world in which we relentlessly track our time, revere data over wisdom and are consumed with our work and our devices, from the moment we get up to the second we drift off to sleep. That’s why the mental real estate that our dreams occupy is more important than ever.

Huffington’s description and practical applications of Jung’s work with dreams effectively presents this often-esoteric material in interesting, accessible language. And the many diverse sources cited point to paths for more exploring. She cites Jung’s memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections as one of her all-time favorite books — a preference I share — and other Jung works. Here’s an excerpt:

“As scientific understanding has grown [as Jung wrote in Man and His Symbols], so our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature…” Here dreams help, as “the essential message carriers from the instinctive to the rational parts of the human mind,” and fill in “the forgotten language of the instincts.” Dreams “restore our psychological balance” by re-establishing a “psychic equilibrium… What we consciously fail to see is frequently perceived by our unconscious, which can pass the information on through dreams.” Or as he put it in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, “The dream gives a true picture of the subjective state, while the conscious mind denies that this state exists, or recognizes it only grudgingly.

Jung revealed the unique and essential function of dream when he wrote:

Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of the [ego’s] will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is to give us back an attitude which accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse.

This second portion of The Sleep Revolution includes practical tips for intentionally inviting awareness of dream both in preparing to sleep and on fully waking. Basics include simply keeping a notebook and pen — not keypad or lit screen — nearby and writing shorthand recall of images that come. Also useful is setting an intention, with question of interest or concerns to which images from dream appear in response.

To these I add tips both from professional and long personal practice. Involving both dream and healthy sleep in an intertwined way, I echo and expand Huffington’s emphasis on having a ritualized “powering-down” period of preparing for dream-quality sleep. I view this, along with equally important gradual waking-and-rising, as essential thresholds of liminal time between waking consciousness and that of sleep. The word liminal, in fact, has the Latin root limen, which means threshold. In preparing for sleep this is part of what psychologists value as time and space for integrating — effectively chewing and swallowing all that has been bitten-off during the day.

At the wakening point(s) of the morning — or sometimes during the night when a lot is going on and there’s more dream content — the similar stillness of liminal time allows dream images to come vividly to mind that weren’t apparent at first waking. It’s a bit like casting and then checking fishnets from the night!

In the book Huffington describes different responses and experience people have with dreams. Perhaps you’re among those who don’t and haven’t worked with dreams, are convinced you don’t have or remember them, or aren’t much interested/don’t see much point in it. Many others of us, based on long experience over decades — both with profound, even life-giving guidance and wisdom from dreams and consequences of neglecting them — can’t imagine making choices and decisions mundane or large without considering what the dreams are saying.

In Dream and the Underworld, Hillman drew conceptual links in his Imaginal Psychology between the world of dream and the unconscious underworld. A warm, rich affect permeated his relationship with his subject:

Whatever the nature, there is a loving in dream work. We sense that dreams mean well for us and urge us on, understand us more deeply than we understand ourselves, expand our sensuousness and spirit, continually make up new things to give us . . .

Further into Huffington’s “Dreams” chapter is a rich trove of material from history across cultures — Egyptians, Greeks with temples of Asklepios, Biblical, earliest indiginous societies. A common thread is the practice of dream incubation: consciously setting intention and using the material from dreams for healing, practical wisdom in decision-making and creativity.

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Along with these dimensions of sleep and dreaming, another repetitive question this time of year is where clock-time fits into all of this. The impending early darkness brings perennial debate about the fall change from Daylight Saving Time back to Standard Time.

About that (clock-) time…

For full disclosure I find all of the dithering about this whole topic a bit crazy-making for a couple of reasons. (A sampling of news and op-ed pieces is in Post Notes at the very bottom after the closing of this post.)

First, points presented by politicians and reporters who aren’t thinking or questioning enough and factual or scientific “experts” are just not logical. Second, and more alarming, America still has a gigantic sleep-deprivation crisis that’s getting worse and isn’t fixed either way by what’s done, or stalemated, with Daylight Saving Time.

Many of these “expert” pieces first argue, validly, that for healthy sleep our bodies and brains respond to natural sunlight and darkness, not human-contrived standardized clock-time and systems. This is cited to build a case for permanent Standard Time, vs DST. But then that very point is contradicted, when disturbance to sleep health is attributed to our being forced to get up in darkness for work, school, catching planes or trains and having to stay up after work and school past evening dark. Also cited is disruption by exposure to highest midday sunlight “at the wrong time” — a time that’s different from some clock-time standard called solar noon.

These latter sleep disturbances are all in response to human-created clock-time and systems; our bodies and nervous systems do not know or care what the clock says, or whatever time the clock says highest “solar noon,” is supposed to be! (Besides, unless we are outdoors in natural sunlight or exposed to a daylight lamp for at least a half-hour, not in windowless offices or on screens all day, the melatonin-production and inhibiting sleep systems of our brains are already disrupted.)

We’re exhausted if we have to get up when it’s still dark outside, because early start-times for our child’s school or our job or the train or flight or manufacturing etc. schedule require it — not because of what the clock says. We’re (often more) exhausted when it’s dark even before after-school, much less after-work, commute time. For what human of any age really and “naturally” heads to bed at 5 p.m. sundown and sleeps through until morning?

There are valid discussions to be had — important, sleep- and even potential life-saving ones — about what are best, safest, most sleep- and health-affirming hours of daylight for school, work and other start times etc., for the most people. Those discussions aren’t primarily about DST or Standard clock time. We could eliminate the twice-annual time changes, simply split the hour-long difference to a half-hour…

And then what?

America and Americans would still have a giant, worsening problem in our relationship with sleep. In my view that’s where the thrust of our time, attention, lobbying efforts with school and workplace leadership, and personal habit-adjustments needs to be.

It also seems reasonable for focus and priority here to be on first improving and supporting better sleep health for the adults — those responsible for driving, running the buses, schools, businesses, thousands of decisions a day, along with getting kids to bed, up, fed and leading and modeling the next generations into adulthood.

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I’ll leave you now with some light notes from another year’s Turkey Trot race. A great reminder of the benefits sometimes of just being old enough to outlast about everybody!

I came in first! (There were only three of us…)

At first a bit bummed by my slightly slower than usual minutes-per-mile pace, I thought it may be due to caution with this year’s slightly changed course route.

(Then I saw that both second- and third-place contenders had been 5-6 minutes per mile slower — finishing a total of 25-30 minutes later.) Guess they must have walked the whole course… or maybe stopped for coffee and a bite of breakfast!

A great day, fun holiday tradition and wonderful to pound pavement through such familiar pretty areas of my hometown.

And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.

🦋💙 tish

•🌀🔵🔷🦋💙

… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”

🔵

Post Notes:

Clock runs out on efforts to make daylight saving time permanent (The Washington Post, November 4, 2022)

Clock switching isn’t healthy. Neither is daylight saving time (The Charlotte Observer, Saturday 11.5.22)

Clocks’ fall-back is today as usual, and bill to change future DST changes stalls in Congress (Providence, RI Journal, Tuesday 11.1.22)

Clocks turn back this weekend, but the future of daylight saving time is far from settled (NBC News, Wednesday 11.2.22)

Some History of DST (Bureau of Transportation Statistics, www.bts.gov)