Duff - The Secret Life of Sleep

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The Secret Life of Sleep is a charmingly written compendium of perspectives on sleep from sources ranging from the authors personal experience to folklore from many cultures to literature and philosophy to recent scientific studies. Kat Duff offers a rich understanding of the subject in which personal insights blend with an amazing array of perspectives in ways that always seem to enhance and complement one another.

Jeannette Mageo , professor of anthropology at Washington State University and author of Dreaming Culture and Dreaming and the Self

Kat Duff has taken an aspect of everyday life, this thing called sleep, dusts it off, and then shines such an incredible light on it, allowing us to be able to view all its wondrous facets from every imaginable angle. Kat has done an incredibly skillful job of pulling together the most recent scientific research on sleep studies and intermixed it with what artists, poets, and sages for centuries have offered us on the subject. It is both entertaining and enlightening and was my treat to myself as I read it every night before bed. I found myself carrying bits of it into my own sleep and feel she has given us a tremendous gift of renewal!

Loretta Ortiz y Pino, MD , chief medical officer, Holy Cross Hospital, Taos, New Mexico

Like the mythic Pandorabut without her naiveteKat Duff shines the light of her open-minded curiosity into a darkened and mysterious world. With wit, charm, perspicuity, humor, and wisdom Duff draws from a diverse array of perspectives not ordinarily found together: neuroscience, philosophy, folklore, sociology, shamanism, literature, psychology, mythology, zoology, mysticism, ethnologyall seamlessly woven together with her own vast storehouse of experience, stories, dreams, and insights to produce this multifaceted gem of a book.

Arifa Goodman , Jungian analyst

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Copyright 2014 by Kat Duff

Excerpted from the English translation of a poem by Wen-Siang. English title Not Sleeping on a Quiet Night, from Sleepless Nights: Verses for the Wakeful , translated by Tomas Cleary, published by North Atlantic Books. Copyright 1995 by Thomas Cleary. Reprinted by permission of publisher.

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The information contained in this book is intended to be educational and not for diagnosis, prescription, or treatment of any health disorder whatsoever. This information should not replace consultation with a competent healthcare professional. The content of this book is intended to be used as an adjunct to a rational and responsible healthcare program prescribed by a professional healthcare practitioner. The author and publisher are in no way liable for any misuse of the material.

Managing editor: Lindsay S. Brown

Editor: Emily Han, Sylvia Spratt

Copyeditor: Ali McCart

Proofreader: Michelle Blair

Interior Design and Jacket Design: Devon Smith

Composition: William H. Brunson Typography Services

Author Photograph: Kathleen Brennan

First Atria Books/Beyond Words hardcover edition March 2014

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Duff, Kat,

The secret life of sleep / Kat Duff. First Atria Books/Beyond Words hardcover edition.

pagescm

Includes bibliographical references.

1.SleepPhysiological aspects.2.Altered states of consciousness.I.Title.

QP425.D842014

612.821dc23

2013034884

ISBN 978-1-58270-468-5

ISBN 978-1-4767-5328-7 (ebook)

The corporate mission of Beyond Words Publishing, Inc.: Inspire to Integrity

To the worlds within, the communion of life on earth.

One cannot properly describe human life unless one shows it soaked in the sleep in which it plunges, which, night after night sweeps round it as a promontory is encircled by the sea.

Marcel Proust

Seeing everybody so up all the time made me think that sleep was becoming pretty obsolete, so I decided Id better quickly do a movie of a person sleeping.

Andy Warhol

B irds do it. Bees do it. Salamanders do it. Even roundworms do it. Giraffes do it standing up. Bats do it hanging upside-down. Sea otters spiral downward like falling leaves. Dolphins do it with one eye open.

To the best of our knowledge, all creatures display some form of sleep behavior, a regular time of quiet when they settle into familiar postures, lose awareness of the outside world, and rest for anywhere from two minutes to twenty hours. The universality of sleep suggests its origins are as old as animal life on earth, an estimated six hundred million years. It also implies that sleep is more than a creature comfort. It is a requirement for life on this planet.

When I was a girl, and still believed in a God who took care of us, it occurred to me one night that God could have created a world in which we slept only once a year rather than every night. I envisioned hundreds of days pounding out before me like an endless trail of falling dominoes, winding up and over the hills, one day after another without respite. The image filled me with dreadand an enduring appreciation for the gift of sleep.

What did I like so much about sleep? It is hard to distinguish what I feel now from what I felt more than half a century ago, but I remember taking a secret, fiendish delight in the very act of going to bed because I got to shut out the world and say no to everything in it without getting in trouble. It was the only socially sanctioned escape hatch available to me as a child. The sequence of closings that constituted preparing for sleepputting my clothes away, saying goodnight, shutting the door, turning off the light, covering myself with blankets, closing my eyeswas a ritualized progression toward my own serene departure, each step another stage of letting go and drifting off from the dock, a further phase in my nightly disappearance.