Obsession: Andrew Solomon on Sleep

I can hear the voice of my mother saying all those years of education and what did you end up as a nightclub entertainer I was contacted by this festival and asked to talk about my obsession but really what I was asked was what is my obsession and I thought well my obsession is sleep and then they said they wanted me to talk a lot about sleep and I said no no the way that I have explored that obsession is by sleeping not by staying up reading about sleep that much of the time so and I think I was always obsessed with sleep and I was obsessed with sleep partly because I have a shifted sort of biological clock I write until 2:00 or 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning and then I sleep until 11:00 or 12:00 o'clock most days and when I was a kid I would always stay up late and then I would always fight against getting up to go to school and my parents would say to me you know when you grow up and you're in the real world you're going to have to get up early every day and go to school I go to work and I thought no I'm going to foil that I'm going to become a writer instead and that way I can get up in the morning and whatever hour I want to and I can staff as late as I want so when people say to me what was it that motivated you to become a writer you know there's a lot of high-minded stuff about having a vision the lyricism of language the beauty of communication the scheduling thing however played very big in that reminded of a friend who is a teacher who said that the motivation for being a teacher was June July and August so and I then became very obsessed with the fact that I really need quite a lot of sleep and if I don't sleep well serious trouble ensues so my husband is fond of reminding me that on the day that our son was born or on the night rather that our son was born we went through we were settled into our hospital room and he said well I I'll take care of the the baby in the middle of the night I guess I'll sleep closer to the I said yeah that's a good idea because if I don't get eight hours tonight I'm gonna be in really bad shape so this is the the dad in the in the hospital room so and then I also became obsessed with sleep because I discovered that so few people seem to be getting the amount of sleep that I'm getting and I kept wondering why all of these people weren't getting as much sleep as I was getting and then I read a book about depression and when I read about depression it seemed to me that the center point of the depression problem is sleep when you're depressed you do one of two things which oddly almost paradoxically are equally bad you're in a state of anxiety that prevents you from sleeping at all and during a state of meditative sedation and disconnection that leaves you sleeping all the time and whichever of those things you're doing and frequently people who are depressed have the sleepless phase and then the exhausted sleeping phase and then the sneakers ways either way you're kind of completely off-base and it turns out that for most people as indeed for me your depression gets worse while you're sleeping so you go to bed feeling sort of okay and when you wake up the next day you feel like hell all over again and these when the whole day gradually climbing up to feeling okay and then you think well it's the middle of the night I should go to sleep so you go to sleep and you wake up and you discover all that progress in nature right back in that dark and terrible place and there was work done which showed that you could actually effectively treat depression for a short time by preventing people from sleeping the problem is that preventing people from sleeping has a lot of shall we say negative side effects and it's not such a great idea and there's been a lot of work done with rats and I actually believe in animal experimentation science and I hear about you know whatever is being done to test mascara and other people are outraged and I think well okay but better than for human service problems the sleep stuff that's been done with rats had me totally freaked out and I thought those poor rats how can anyone do that to them but there's been a set of experiments in which the rats were simply not allowed to go to sleep at all and you know how you keep them awake beyond a certain point but I think you keep poking them and prodding Melon keep them going indefinitely and the rats of course eventually die of exhaustion proving that you can in fact die of exhaustion we all feel like we're about to die of exhaustion much of the time but it really can happen and then they did an experiment in which they burned the skin of rats and then check to see what happened if they didn't let those rats who now have not only had their skin burn but we're also now being denied sleep what would happen and they discovered that they didn't recover from the burns and anything like the rate of the other rats in fact it isn't Weiss as long to recover as it took the well-rested rats and so people are always saying to me okay you wrote about depression there seems to be more and more depression why is that and there are a million pieces of the explanation we have accepted depression as something people can admit to that's not a personal weakness that allows people to be more frank about it that's absolutely true there's no question that the existence of treatments for depression has made people more in touch with the possibility that they have depression because basically a hundred years ago if you had depression and you decided to really come to grips with it you come to grips with it but there was nothing to be done about it while now you feel depressed you talk to your doctor medications ensue so but when people say why do you think that there's so much depression so much more depression out in the world I can to say that a lot of it has to do with how much less sleep we're getting the amount of sleep that the average human being gets went down a big chunk with the invention of electric light it went down another big chunk with the invention of television and it's gone down a further big chunk with the invention of the internet now everybody has an imagine eat they naturally require and how much they require varies from person to person so there's a gene and I think it's the DECA to gene which if there's a particular abnormality and it means that you need two hours less of sleep per night and if you breed it in two mice those mice need two hours less of sleep per night and if only someone had known enough to breed it in to me then I could have actually got more things done in life than I've been able to but so there is a genetic basis for how much sleep we need but by and large the people who live the longest are the people who consistently get seven hours of sleep now I myself like to get eight or nine hours of sleep and so I was little freaked out by that 7 number and then helpfully the material on the seven hours of sleep also includes the information that having seven hours of sleep because you said an alarm clock will not work you have to naturally get seven hours of sleep and that's then correlated with living to a ripe old age so make the most of me now no I may not be here for long but being under slept being under stepped contributes to diabetes it contributes to heart disease it contributes to anxiety and depression it contributes to basically everything that has ever gone wrong with any of us really has been partly caused by the fact that none of us is consistently getting enough sleep none of us ever is none of us ever have and the thing that's most puzzling in all of this and that made this evening feel particularly like a challenge is that nobody really knows very much about sleep it's been endlessly studied there are whole Institute's devoted to it I will read you a quote this is from William DeMint or demin I think DeMint DeMint works for me who found at Stanford University sleep center and who has studied sleep for the last 50 years and someone said to him what is the why do we need to sleep and he said remember this is after 50 years of research he said as far as I know the only reason we need to sleep that is really really solid is because we get sleepy I think that will give you a feeling for how much knowledge and insight we have about sleep at this point and sleep debt I've talked about the rats I've told you a little bit about there's also a disease which is untreatable and incurable called fatal familial insomnia and if you have that disease you start off life doing perfectly fine and as you get older you find it harder and harder to sleep and ultimately you can't go to sleep at all and in a state of acute exhaustion you ultimately die from it and there's nothing to be done about it and I just thought gee I've had non-fatal and potentially familial insomnia but that's um that's a whole new level now I also want to talk about napping we have a four-year-old son our four-year-old son whenever he is told that it is time for his nap rises up in fury he wants to play he wants to do things why are we making him take a nap and I sit there as his 49 year old dad and I think okay the only thing I want right now is to take a nap and I'm not allowed to there's that old expression youth is wasted on the young and I would like to add the supplementary idea that naps are wasted on the young who have them all the time in Mediterranean countries of course there's a siesta and there is also a much lower rate of cardiovascular disease everyone says you know that popular thing oh they don't have so much cardiovascular disease because of all the olive oil or something like that and actually it turns out the siesta when you're in siesta your heart has to work less hard the energy that your body is consuming is down by 15% and getting into that state more than once a day is actually a sure way to and so I feel like my aforementioned husband is going to live to be a hundred and seventeen years old because I think this napping thing is really caught on in that particular quarter so the chrono type is what kind of sleeper you are my chrono type is the so called all chronotype distinguished from the Lark chronotype it's not because I go hunting silently in the middle of the night though I have been known to do such a thing but it has to do with where your city of Nexus of comfort is in your sleeping so I you know I'm shifted on this late schedule that I've described going to bed late and sleeping late in the course of trying to find out more about sleep I discovered that this can frequently be incredibly dangerous your lowest body temperature it's at 4:00 in the morning that should be the midpoint of your sleep there are all kinds of theories going around about it but I can't I mean I've tried it various stages when I come back from a trip to Europe I always work on what I call a program of jet lag maintenance in which I attempt to just keep with that thing where I want to go to sleep early and I want to get up early but it just slips away from me and I've often said that I follow my private law of sleep inertia which is that an object asleep remains asleep and an object awake remains awake so I essentially never want to go to sleep and then once I go to sleep I never want to wake up and in terms of my chronograph I've always thought that if I were put in one of those weird experiments and I've never understood how they get people to volunteer for these experiments but one of those weird experiments where you're put in a basement perhaps very much like this with no access to artificial light and you just go about your life without ever knowing what time it is people set it adjust and many people go to a 23 hour day and I think I'd go to a better 32 hour day I think awake for 24 12 awake for 20 as leap for 12 seems to me like a pretty good arrangement so that's the chronotype thing and then there's the question of sleeping pills which I think obsesses almost everyone who has any interest at all in sleep because let's be frank those of us interested in sleep are on the one hand hugely person on the other hand occasionally afflicted with crippling insomnia so ambien you've probably read all of that press saying that people take ambien and then they get up and make lasagna in the middle of the night and don't remember having done so so I took ambien I took it mostly on airplanes when I was traveling and I was going to on a trip to South Africa and I took ambien on the plane and I remember taking the ambien and the next thing I remember is waking up in the house of one of the people I was interviewing who I was I'm pleased to say already scheduled to visit and stay with but I woke up and next to me interestingly there was a notebook full of those little scrawled bits of half sentences that you scroll down when you're interviewing someone but don't actually expect to have to remember everything you think oh these will just remind me of what he said I had no recollection had no idea how I've gotten through the airport I had no idea how I got to the house it was a completely terrifying experience and I spent a lot of time talking to people about various sleeping pills I myself tend toward xanax it's not primarily a sleeping pill but the thing he keeps me awake is being anxious and overwrought I take xanax I'm a little less anxious and overwrought and we had a lunch recently with some friends including several French people and we were all talking about the sleeping pill problem are they addictive are they doing something terrible to you do they make you more depressed are we supposed to break away from them and I am as we went along was talking about the ones that I'd taken and one of the people who was there who was French said for to know in France you can get this amazing sleep aid he said and it actually comes in the form of a suppository but it's unbelievably effective and I said Oh and so when else was at the table said do you know that that's full of opiates and the person who would start it said I don't think so he said because you can readily get it over the counter and when at the other gift said you know I found out it was full of opiates and I actually said to a pharmacist in France they said how is it that you can get this over the counter and he said to me madam try to commit suicide using suppositories so so sleep sleep is uh sort of a big story here I actually know someone who got a plane ticket to go to a wedding in Australia he flew all the way to Australia he took ambien on the plane he arrived in Australia he started to get dressed to go to the wedding which was that very day he fell asleep again and he woke up the next day when it was time to get on the train to come back having missed the wedding entirely so I have my my doubts about the the ambien thing my father when I was little used to use the euphemism all the time that various people had slept together and I of course therefore have always confused at slumber and sex as being somehow the same basic thing I hope that's not manifest to anyone who's been exposed to my amorous tendencies but there is that thing of showing how intimate sleep is by saying if you sleep together and I actually do think that it's very intimate I think it's not sex but I think if it follows sex the fact of sleeping next to someone or sleeping beside someone is a very intimate thing and I have to say in I had imagined when I was younger that I would get married I thought but how will I sleep with someone who's snoring or squirming or making noise or whatever it is that was going to be going on and actually I found that I really loved sleeping next to someone and so the intimate quality of sleep and I feel as though the greatest vulnerability that you can show is that vulnerability of saying you can be with me while I'm asleep you can see me when I'm no longer in control of what I'm saying what I'm doing or how I'm coming across but I would add to that the little corollary that snoring is one of those things when hears about one's own snoring it's a myth that one has to somehow live with I of course believe that I don't snore because I've never heard myself snore and fortunately so far no one has tape recorded it there is always the restoring struggle and we all know about REM sleep REM sleep rapid eye movement sleep was first detected in about 1937 by Alfred Lee Loomis who then came up with the stages of sleep and in the city of little world of sleep research there's an endless argument about those stages is there are there three stages of non REM sleep or four stages the official line now is that there are three but people question it a lot and then there's REM sleep which occupies about twenty to twenty-five percent of our sleeping time is REM sleep and REM sleep is the part that appears to be the most curative and we go back to that question of why people sleep it appears that sleeping increases white blood cells again rats who were deprived to sleep these poor exhausted rats but they were deprived of sleep it was shown that their white blood cell count after a couple of days went down by as much as 25% so it's a big immune booster it's an anabolic process sleep which means that it takes the simple molecules that have been extracted from your food and your lungs and so on and builds them up into the more complex structures that actually make up make up your body it may have served an evolutionary function by preventing our animal ancestors from running around in the night when they couldn't see anything were more vulnerable to predators and REM sleep which I mentioned you know it's the one we all know about it's often called paradoxical sleep because your brainwaves and REM sleep are more similar to your brainwaves in ordinary day-to-day wakefulness then the brainwaves at any other phase of sleep and yet it's the hardest kind of sleep to wake people up from and that brings me to my other favorite topic of the moment which is the relatively new alarm clocks that have been made that are supposed to respond to where you are in your sleep cycle so instead of waking you up from REM sleep which can leave you feeling hungover and groggy all day they wake you up from one of the non-rem stages of sleep the problem with this is that they therefore can't automatically wake you up at for example 8:30 in the morning or even at 11 o'clock in the one because you might be in REM sleep so you go to bed with a wristband on the wristband is hooked up to a monitor and you allowed the city of general hour hour-and-a-half in which you want to wake up and when you're inappropriately light sleep then the alarm goes off and wakes you up at that at that stage it strikes me the idea of having an alarm clock that woke you up at some point within a 90-minute spectrum of possibility well very attractive to my own basic way of life nonetheless seems to me to be a little bit beyond beyond impractical we've all got a circadian rhythm we've all got a clock that's sort of directing us there are lots of people doing shift work we're working directly against their prana type it doesn't usually work out very well for them they don't live as long as the rest of us do think it through before you take a job as a midnight cocktail waitress and let's see that's the seven hours oh and then I just think it's interesting to know that almost all animals sleep there are some fish who appear not to sleep but many fish are able and marine mammals are able half of their brain goes to sleep and the other half stays active so they can keep swimming around in the water and then the other half goes to sleep and the half that was previously asleep wakes up seems to me such a convenient arrangement if one could only muster that for oneself and how long animals sleep is frequently correlated with their size as well as a variety of other things but elephants and giraffes sleep on average only three hours per night that's from the fun and interesting trivia portion of this talk and people who don't sleep have more behavioral problems so we've said I've said hopefully you will now go out and say that one of the reasons we see so much depression is because people aren't getting enough sleep but it's also frankly one of the reasons that we perhaps have seen a lot of crime is that people aren't getting enough sleep and then they try to compensate for not getting enough sleep by consuming a lot of caffeine or consuming other less obviously readily available substances which by and large exhaust bait their feelings of anxiety and the way that in the way that stimulants do and I think that I will now go to the Q&A thing except to say that one of the revelations about which there are you would not believe how many articles is that exercising helps you to sleep if you do a lot of exercise during the day you will be more tired in the evening and I'm grateful to live in a country in which research is developed to that astonishing conclusion as well as to so many others so that's me on sleep and now we can have a dialogue about thank you it's the suppository image now that one is stayed with me for a long time I also buy them I left our friend Leibowitz great line which was that sleep is deft without the responsibility I also think it's a really good encapsulation so so tell me what you're thinking about sleep good obsessive good it's a good I mean in general if you're living a healthy life it should be a little less than a third of your life and I just think we should pay some attention to it and after all you know Freud was full of all of that oh your dreams your dreams are full of meaning and I can find out what they are and then you say to sleep people what are your dreams and the most current theory which has I think almost no grounding in scientific fact but is that you are your brain produces these random bits of information because it's kind of powering down while you're asleep and then powering back up before you wake up and your conscious mind then tries to take all of those completely random things and put them into some kind of coherent narratives but you know there's there's that phase I love these two words there's the phase when you are falling asleep which is hypnagogic your hypnagogic and then the thing I really love is when you're waking up you're in a hypnopompic state it's fun to say you should all feel free to say hypnopompic but I think dreams remain incredibly confused you're an analyst do you work on dreams I'm always very interested in the relationship between dreams and memory because I tend to remember my dreams unbelievably vividly for about three minutes and then they are gone that they are just gone and I think why I don't have a great memory in general for anything I think why is it that they disappear so quickly and you're a believer Union and there was this incredible book of Jung's drawings from his dreams that was published a few years ago the red book exactly I mean it has dreams of drawings of other things too with drawings of his dreams I can't draw but I thought wouldn't it be amazing to have drawings of all your dreams then I thought maybe not it would not be amazing to do that there's that moment and here I go from the occasional high literary allusion down to childhood but in the voyage of the Dawn Treader one of the Chronicles of Narnia there is the island where dreams come true and as they're sailing toward this island they have this thought that it will be very pleasant and that what's going to come through come true are the sort of daydreams where one imagines that one has won the Nobel Prize and that the entire world is gathered in youthful praise and that incredibly beautiful people are eager to sleep with you at a moment's notice and so on and so forth but actually what happens in the island where dreams come through in the Chronicles of Narnia is that all of these horrific things rise up and I love sleep and I occasionally have dreams that are very joyful and interesting but I often wake up from deded dreams feeling disturbed by them and and anxious about them so I don't know how your patients do with that but the dress you know I don't think so because I don't take that extra ambien that regularly ambien I can't even remember what I did while I was awake much less what went on when I was asleep so may have been very vivid but it's lost to us all and xanax I didn't think makes one's dreams more vivid but I definitely think I mean I had depression or a book about depression I take antidepressant I think the antidepressants have strengthened my resolution to sleep enough always and when people said to me well what do you do if you feel the depression is coming on I'd say okay if you sleep all day you're going to feel really terrible but regularize your sleep and get it under control that's what you really need to do if you want to be okay yes I mean I work on nutrition but I actually like eating a lot of things that aren't good for you and I try to work on exercise but it's my least favorite thing there is to do and then there sleep and I think sleep is good for you and I would love I would be happily go to sleep right now if it didn't seem rude to all of you who paid to come in and hear me this evening exactly I'm up for those two if anyone has a stash it's true actually I've had that experience then you think how can I get back there and I love that whole further children's books with no allowance and wonderland idea that you know maybe this is a dream and you're all exist only in one of our dreams and you know if we woke up everything would disappear I mean that question always in dream it's very odd when you have a dream and know that it's a dream as opposed to the dreams you have where you think that it's reality and then you suddenly realize that it's a dream as you're waking up there's that that little as it were hypnopompic moment of disillusionment that comes with waking up so and waking up really when I was little my father is a sort of captain of industry-type he wears a suit every day he has meetings with shareholders and other executives he's a man of enormous dignity many people find him somewhat intimidating when I was little because I had to a trouble waking up my father would come in every morning singing jolly Jolly jolly Jolly the wakeup man is here ah jolly which I hated I hated it more than anything and then he would come over and he would tickle me and while continuing to sing the jolly Jolly song and when people asked whether I had traumatic experiences in my childhood there was a struggle with being gay there was the bullying there was the splitting my head open on a beach in Cape Cod but really the primary trauma was the jolly Jolly routine he brought along so and part of it was I would be right in the middle at some at that stage mostly reasonably pleasant dream and then all of a sudden there would be this and I I just should say I love and adore my father he's an amazing father and I'm lucky to have him in virtually every way and it's true that if I had simply not woken up and gone to school all the time I wouldn't have the life I have now so I appreciate the motivation but really I mean my brother and I talked about it sometimes he was better at getting up than I was so he got a less of it than I did but we all have that song kind of permanently into Armond wake up man is here well the great thing about fathering children with my husband John who's here someplace in the audience now is that he's essentially a morning person and I'm essentially a night person which means that I'm usually up until at least three and he's usually awake by six and it means there's only about a three hour period when both of us either you know someone would have to be woken up to deal with a crisis or emergency so and I'm I'm afraid that my children have reached the point now of beginning to say why aren't you why don't you eat breakfast with us why aren't you awake in the morning why aren't you there and taking exception to my my schedule and I'm hoping that the period in which they will cease thinking that it's bizarre and aberrant and begin thinking that it's a charming eccentricity is not far off but it has to be said that I also once I'm asleep I'm a very sound sleeper everyone seems always treating it kind of weird pride in being a light sleeper you know oh I hear everything oh well you know when I'm there they only at traffic Targa's right it's like The Princess and the pea or something and I actually can't sleep through almost anything and the first time that our son was really sick John was helping him all night and singing to him and I managed to sleep through the whole thing he claims without so much as a shift in the rhythm of my breathing while our infant shrieked at the top of his lungs so how his fatherhood affected my sleep schedule less than it should I think just a short answer per day sleeeeep why why what is it fast asleep you know I think I would start by saying that I love those late night hours I love the time between about 11:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m. when the rest of the world is silent and when there are very few intrusions on my thinking or my writing for my living but I also feel as though sleep is and there's medical evidence to support this sleep is necessary to the processes of memory and to the process of assembling all of what one has experienced in the day into a coherent form and coherence is of course the thing that writers strive for and I don't make any great claims to have achieved it but I think there is a feeling that when I finally go to sleep late late late I finally go to sleep that sound out all of what I've learned during the day gets consolidated and I treasure that consolidation and when I wake up the next day I can then exploit that consolidation and then begin to reach out to the new topics which will in turn require consolidation in that night anyone else yeah I've always admired what I think it was the Anthony Trollope model which is the model of having four hours a day consecrated to writing if Trollope finished one of his novels he would in two hours he would start the next one in the remaining two hours my my writing behavior is very erratic I have periods when I feel incredibly inspired and I can wake up and sit down and start writing and I do a lot of writers retreats I go off to places like Yaddo George our son will now say to me oh please say you're not going to yato he's only four but he's already it's that but anyway I just veer off to yato for a stretch of time I wake up I start writing I take a shower and get dressed and eat dinner and then I go on writing all night and I really love doing that but by and large when I'm at home and in my regular life there are doctors appointments there's email to deal with there's that weird leak in the kitchen sink that I have to somehow figure I mean it's just stuff that didn't pin joes and I'm not good at closing a little bit and there is in fact also I mean they're all so glorious impingements there's the fact that I have children and I want to be able to take care of them it's the fact that I have a husband and I want to be in dialogue with him there's the fact that I have friends and they call on the phone or want to go out and get a drink so there's a lot of joyfulness in it nonetheless I find I write best when I have extended periods of silence and whenever I can block them out I block them out and by and large in my life here in New York City they're late at night yes just behind there really sick oh my goodness Wow yes we've had endless correspondence but I mean of endless we've had glorious correspondent but I mean lots of correspondents and we never actually met face to face hi hi I just wanted you to really define the difference between being down well thank you and I'm just so thrilled to meet you in real life in 3d at last and so the question of the relationship of what the difference is between depression and being down you know we suffer from a linguistic impoverishment in English because we use the word depressed to describe how a child feels that when his baseball game gets rained out and we use the same word to describe someone who is paralyzed and catatonic or who is thrown himself in front of a train and I think that that's really a problem and yet at the same time I think that there is a continuum between ordinary down feelings and depression depression represents a kind of hyperactivity of the system of sadness and sadness is an unbelievably precious thing for us to have I mean if I were married but thought well if something happens to my husband I'll just get another one it wouldn't be marriage as we know it the intimacy lies in the anticipation of sadness the sense of sorrow about the the possibility of loss and if we were to take sadness out of the human experience we have a very much reduced experience there's a reason that people write and go to see tragedies depression is mostly a state not so much of feeling sad but a feeling paralyzed I think the opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality and that people who are really severely depressed it's not simply that they aren't feeling much joy though they're mostly anhedonic which means that they do not in fact get joy or pleasure out of anything much but it's that feeling of paralysis that feeling of nullity that feeling of blankness that feeling of purposelessness in which everything seems to be so heavy and effortful I can remember being depressed and thinking I should eat the idea of getting out the food and putting it on a plate and cutting it up and chewing it and swallowing it all seemed like more than I could begin to imagine it was it was the Stations of the Cross for me when I was four they depress and depression is a lifelong condition and takes a lot of management I manage mine with medication with jock therapy with social relationships I manage it by regulating my sleep I regulated in all kinds of ways and whenever I feel a little down I wonder if it's going to escalate into depression but don't think that just because people say depressed when they're only feeling sad that means that they understand or recognize what it's like to have a really major depression anyone else yes sorry the light turn my odds it's hard to see simple question hi I was just wondering and you discussed reasons for tonight tears at all to use for tonight jurors all night terrors are actually it's a very interesting question whether one is explored night terror night terrors occur during nr3 which is a non REM sleep stage three and that is the phase in which you have night terrors in which you talk in your sleep and in which you have what is the third thing that you have in that and in which you can walk in your sleep it's a stage when the you're quite deeply asleep but you are much impinge on by the outer world and especially people who have apnea or for some other reason are awakening in the course of that sleep and then falling very rapidly back as they will often express themselves and say thing and will feel those terrors and I think night terrors are related to the fact that actually the world is terrifying and life is terrifying and it's a permanent it's a permanent optimism for us to get through the day without feeling them but when they come they're incredibly acute and some people have wakeful night terrors so instead of just having that thing where they're sort of asleep and can't read poet you lie there in bed and you suddenly think I I'm going to run out of money I'm going to run out of money and I'm not going to be able to support myself but you suddenly think my kids are going to grow up and they're going to say why were you out performing late-night cabarets instead of being at home with me or whatever it is that you think and you think they'll never love me I'll be on la I'm going to grow old and viola and it escalates and you find yourself going to these extreme points night terrors are often said to be primarily an affliction of little children but they really aren't most people have experience at four o'clock in the morning that sense that somehow their life has become impossible untenable and they won't be able to get through what they need to get through and sometimes I've said to people who said what does depression feel like I've said if you can get to that night terror feeling you can remember what that's like and then imagine it lasting for six months instead of disappearing when the Sun comes up that's what depression is like so I'm just curious you touched on sleep as sort of a period of time where you would consolidate you find yourself do I find myself very productive during sleep yes I mean my novel which was pleasantly alluded to in the introduction which is being reissued next month of stone boat the title for it came from a dream that I had and I woke up from the dream and it was a dream about a stone but but I woke up and I thought oh my god that's the title of the book it was suddenly very clear to me you know I sometimes think that there's the question that people who hear voices have to deal with people with psychosis the question of whether the voices are ego-syntonic so can you tell the de voice is coming from inside your own head and sometimes when I wake up from a dream and I have an idea that I didn't have before I went to bed it almost feels like cheating I feel like but I didn't really think of that it came to me in that dream and I have to remind myself that the thing that was dreaming was my own brain and that whatever has come to me actually whatever part of the creative process has emerged from dreaming has emerged from me and it's not from something else but yes I've often found I mean sometimes I go to sleep thinking there's a problem and I wake up and I think I know what I'll do and sometimes I go to sleep and there's a specific thing that comes to me a dream that I'd never thought about before and I become fascinated by it I will tell you that I also sometimes wake up in the middle of the night with the sense that I had a dream and things have become really clear to me and so there was one night when I remember I was asleep and I woke up briefly and I went back to sleep and when I woke up in the morning I thought I had that dream last night and I figured out the title for the depression book I thought that's amazing and I thought I think I actually got up and wrote it down though this is so great I've needed a title here there finally is one and I looked at the little piece of paper beside my bed and it said tales from the dark side this was not the title I ultimately went with so yes a lot in dreams but it needs some filtering anyone else so the question is whether I eat or read before I sleep I am told that it's a bad idea to do either of those things and I do both of those things so I basically wake up in my weird off the charts strangely time day at 11 o'clock and I actually find it quite difficult to eat when I wake up and I get steadily hungry or as the day goes on and I get steadily hungrier as the day goes on whether I eat or don't eat it's just as the day goes on I get hungrier so I often late at night so you've ever descend into embarrassing behavior with an ice cream tub and as for reading I said if I'm awake and the rest of the world is asleep I'm either writing or reading and so that's what I'm doing up until just before I go to sleep and it takes me a long while than to fall asleep I think because all of the images from what I've been reading and the flavors indeed of what I've been eating are still very present to me but yes that's a it's one of the nice things about that private time is that there's scope for for reading and it's one of the nice things about any time really is that there's still for eating drawing it oh yes so the question is about the mechanism through which depression gets worse while you're sleeping and the simple answer is that nobody knows why we know that it is the case we know that these wakefulness protocols will help to stave off depression or help to reduce depression we know that when you're in an acute depression if you don't limit your sleep the depression will escalate and that often in a depression you really should try to keep your sleep to a you know a relative minimum but what the mechanisms are inside the brain you know we don't really understand very much of what depression looks like in the brain and as I said at the beginning the the greatest learning expert on sleep said we don't have any idea why we go to sleep so I think that piece of information which would be incredibly interesting for a long way from from getting there prince there are others who deprived answer that question better than I could but it was rather odd I sleep frequently in a semi fetal position sometimes on my back that often innocencio positions and often with my head resting on my hand even lying down and it had been commented on that I slept in that peculiar position and then when our son was about six months old we went in and there he was sleeping in that exact position and I thought wow it's not you know it certainly isn't something I've modeled for him he hasn't seen me asleep very much it must be there in the in the genetics and I always grew up with that thing that you know sleeping on your back is supposed to be the Imperial King position and shows you our master of the universe sleeping tightly curled in a fetal position means that things are going seriously awry and sleeping in a semi fetal position basically means nothing at all and I was a little disappointed but that was the way I tended to go but but there it is and I'm not convinced that people who sleep on their backs ruled the world but the study should be done yeah in that moment when you're still awake oh I call that conscious oblivion and I was trying to escape that is the hypnagogic moment and and there are some people who claim i'm not among them but there are some people who claim that it's in that moment did you actually have visions not very substantial ones but at things that will happen to you over the next few days so you know I had dinner last night with a friend and she said oh I go into this hypnagogic state and I suddenly see a box of tied on a black surface and three days later I'm at someone's house and I go into their laundry room I don't know why she goes into their laundry room but but I go into the laundry room and there's a box of tied on a black surface and so on and they often feel prescient those moments and I think that there's a lot of thinking through that comes then I often find myself thinking if I don't pull myself into being more awake I will very shortly be asleep which was my objective and yet what I have just thought through and figured out while I was lying here in this semi slumbering state is so interesting that I feel I don't want to lose it and I will lose it if I go to sleep and sometimes I get up and more often I just go on to sleep and the thing is lost yeah you have tapas asleep for everything I have okay I change the life at work from reading and then you put the book down and then between putting the book down and then falling asleep there's the security of time which one second or whatever what you do then you just wait for safer I can the questions about what you do between putting the book down and falling asleep I think about a lot of things and then at a certain point I think if I don't stop thinking I'm never going to get to sleep and then I try to sort of count llamas or whatever there is to actually do but I just don't know count Mamas yes but I certainly count my account numbers but I often I mean I find I find it wearing to be interacting to be on all the time it can be fun it's fun right now but it can be very wearing and when I am awake and not getting ready to go to sleep I don't give myself a lot of time to sit and think I'm usually I'm writing or I'm reading or I'm out doing something or I'm playing with my kids or there's something going on and so I very much like that that moment and I use it to think through a lot of things that need to be thought through very precious when you're about to vote oh there's actually a term for that which I think I have somewhere buried in these notes but it it has to do with the fact that you're moving toward a state of muscle dystonia when you're fully asleep your muscles aren't being commanded by your conscious mind and it's almost the blip of transition from your being in control conscious control of what you're doing with your muscles to this unconscious process taking over I think they're just disconcerted for a moment as the command center switches do you tell yourself things before you go to sleep that you want to have solved in the morning I'm a poet and sometimes I say I need to get something more what I'm working right well I do sometimes go to sleep with thoughts of what I want to what I want to fix or accomplish and sometimes I wake up with a solution and sometimes I wake up with a feeling of unremitting despair so there can go either way but there's no question that the one is aware that the sleep process can sometimes solve things and often I find I go to sleep obsessing about something and I wake up in the morning with a resolution of one kind or another yeah I was wondering what do you see that the absolute darkness is that we ride at night that machines at me right in the morning it was all science for non-competitive the question is about how writing at night differs from writing in the morning difference from writing in the evening you know I think we all are different selves at different stages of the day and I think there's a freshness to the morning and there's a richness to the evening in terms of what one has experienced in the day you know by the time you get to the end of the day your mind has had a lot of thought going on and sometimes you're able to focus much more narrowly and much more clearly precisely because of all the press that's been you know coming in because of all the things you've seen because of all the things you've read because of all of what's happened and sometimes what you need is the sort of that freshness of the morning when nothing has embedded yet in effect if you write before you interact with people you're writing with a pre social self and if you write after all your interactions with other people you're writing with a post social self and those are two different selves would you please talk about sleep Thank You meditation so I'm not an expert on meditation by any means but I think meditation is frequently a way to accomplish some of the goals that are accomplished in sleep I mean one of the things that happens in sleep is that your heart rate goes down your temperature drops there are all kinds of other physiological changes associated with sleep and a lot of those physiological changes are also associated with meditation it's a state of calmness and containment which is which is very precious and I have heard people who meditate say that they use some of the techniques for meditation as a means of getting to sleep so I think there's a connection but I don't feel I knew enough about meditation just be kind of with authority when I went a little tiger lesson as a teenager it seemed perfectly rational book there was no such concept as magical realism at that time and what shocked me is one point was that the therapist the book is basically about the two great ideas 20th century Marxism and psychoanalysis and the analyst says to one of the characters and now you go home and bring about XY and Z and I thought this is really off-the-wall you know how can you command somebody or instruct somebody to dream about something and then sometime later I found out from the psychologist or psychiatrist acquaintances that this could actually be done and it can form part of therapy I asked both of you are either if you have any experience with this or any it's fascinating the ever since you want to take on what you said that for me the hope that you would answer a process of dreaming or not we need to put in the book a therapist says to a patient I want you to dream about this or that then to resolve an issue or a problem or question I think the question is whether your conscious mind can control whatever dream I don't know that you can reliably make yourself dream something I don't know that you can consistently say well today I'm going to dream about X and do it but I think that often and it relates to the question that came earlier if you're thinking about something quite obsessively a problem it will be solved while you're asleep and often the way it gets out is by appearing in a dream in which you're able to work through some aspect of it so and some people are better at deciding what to dream about than others I always remember as a particularly poignant moment when I had an upsetting dream that I'd had several times and I said to someone who I thought very much that I've been having this dream and how distressing it was and a few weeks later I saw this person and she said to me I had your dream and I thought it was such an intimate thing to feel that this dream which would come burbling out of my neuronal structures of the of the brain had somehow been something that someone else could incorporate into their lives and I always thought that that was in a way the very definition of intimacy and love was to be able to hear uh someone else's dream and habbit yourself to incorporate it into your own experience is there any understanding of the biological alarm clock I talk to people they can set it for seven just wait from seven you know I've always wondered about the biological alarm clock and I'm impressed by people who have it I don't have it myself so that being said I often when I have set an alarm find that I wake up five minutes before the alarm is due to go off so there's something in my body that's keeping time and that new to wake up then one of the things that became very interesting to me in looking at sleep is that there is a state and I'm trying to remember what it's called but it's essentially a state of delusion in which people believe themselves to have had less sleep than they've had so people will get up and say oh I was up much of the night I only got four hours of sleep and the clinicians who are watching this person sleep say no you had eight hours it's like anorexia conflation says knew you had eight hours of sleep Norton says no no I was up a lot no because I was watching you the whole time we got it on videotape he's left great hour there's always that sense of it so how one understands the time while one is asleep varies enormously from person to person but I think that one can actually I mean there is enough consciousness going on in the body so that it monitors more or less where you are timewise and what's surprising to me is the precision with which it can sometimes do that for some people I mean to be able to have a body that's it Eve knows you should wake up early or that you can sleep until late is one thing to have a body that actually knows when it's seven o'clock seems extraordinary given that in our lives I mean if I don't look at my watch right now I won't know how long I've been up here I know roughly how long but not really how long I think it's it's another of the miraculous mysteries and I feel bad about saying over and over again these things were mysterious but hey I'm not a sleep researcher it's just sort of an obsession and B there really is so little solid concrete science on this front thank you

Channel: PEN America

Views: 35,980

Keywords: andrew solomon, obsession, chez andre, sleep, pen america, pen world voices, 2013, lecture, literature, insomnia

Id: bYX-YabMqqI

Length: 58min 56sec (3536 seconds)

Published: Mon May 13 2013