In the second half of the nineteenth century, via Camillo Golgi and his successor Heinrich Waldeyer, neurons are identified and named. Rabl-Rückhardt suggests that sleep may be caused by a state in which these neurons become paralyzed and therefore temporarily cease communication. Lepine and Duval say this too. Santiago Ramón y Cajal says not only is this perhaps the cause of sleep but it could also explain hypnotics. Ernesto Lugaro takes the opposite face of the same coin, and says it’s not paralysis, but an expansion, the neurons growing to speak to one another more directly via sleep.
Exercise becomes more popularly encouraged, as do baths. “Healthy people always sleep well,” we are told. Sleep trouble, then, must come from something wrong within, a condition “self-inflicted,” rather than the simple disdain of a god. We begin to become hyperconscious both about the exercising, and about napping, which divides the sleep space, weakening the evening’s exhaustion, breaking time.
Our houses, in this manner, become more divided. Indoor toilets let us shit in smaller rooms beside the rooms in which we sleep. Production of a cheap plate glass allows homes to invoke windows, often called “wind eyes,” through which the sun and sky and night from overhead might see into the house. Later, the shape of glass will be found to flow in undetectable modes of motion, deforming over time, though at such a slow rate that a single pane’s approach to equilibrium would require 1032 years, several times longer than the estimated age of the universe. We continue to employ glass in our surroundings.
Our rate of growing grows. We get safety razors, roll film, cars. Freud notes how our paralysis in sleeping keeps us from acting out our dreams. Despite a sudden rash of manuals for parents, none of them addresses the nature of children’s sleep — instead they take concern with bedding, with sleep positions, frigid feet.116 We get blue jeans, chewing gum, and dynamite. Physicians begin to outline the average number of resting hours needed in a body, specific to a range of ages, bestowing practical, routinizing life advice. The saying “Early to bed, early to rise” brings new enthusiastic pressure to the method, like nod out now or you will fail. To remain productive, upbeat, making, there seems a clear method, though not all people seem equipped the same way to make it work.
We get linoleum, stock tickers, and the player piano. We get heroin, loudspeakers, typewriters, roller coasters, the alarm clock. We get DDT, barbed wire, machine guns, gasoline engines, contact lenses, escalators, zippers, the box spring. Catatonia is discovered. We get tuned wireless communication.
In an echo of Aristotle’s food fumes, Wilhelm Sommer in 1868 theorizes sleep comes from brain asphyxiation. The brain is shown to suck in more air while we are resting, breathing in the room, of a shared air. Other theorists like Thierry Preyer begin to attribute sleep to the body’s accumulations of kinds of harmful cells throughout the days: lactic acid, cholesterol, carbon dioxide, toxic waste. There are all these chemicals inside us, stuck, resounding, with more being pumped and funneled through the air. Leo Errera explains sleep as another strain of these undesirable substances, referred to as “leucomaines,” getting passed up to the brain to be broken down, fed through the body unto depletion, at which point, again cleared, we wake up. Abel Bouchard specifies that these toxins are made into urine in the sleep state, and that the agents in the new urine cause us to wake.
In 1869, the sedative properties of a compound called chloral hydrate are published. Its ease of manufacture and ability to lay a person out make it quickly popular and widely prescribed. Over the next 150 years this chemical will come to be used in date-rape drugs and in a mounting medium used to observe organisms under microscope. It will eventually be found in the blood of the bodies at Jonestown and in John Tyndall, Marilyn Monroe, and Anna Nicole Smith. The bodies, laid beneath the soil, might be seen by some to mix.
In 1880, Thomas Edison — himself a chronic problem-sleeper — patents the light bulb, taking credit for a long string of inherited versions and ideas. This new ability to control the kinds of hours of light indoors and out grants new democracy to our actions, and thus a glaze of uniformity to the phases of the day. Under contained glow, by machines, we can now work longer, late into evenings, in early mornings even, in the smallest, most unwindowed rooms. Bulbs on streets and in rising buildings will obscure the dark all through the hours, blurting the smaller stars out. Rooms inside of rooms will shine encombed. This development will be pointed to, by some, as years rise, as the number one cause of troubled sleep: all hours are the same.
In 1882, Nietzsche declares god dead: “God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?” The same year, U.S. Patent 268693 describes a “Device For Life In Buried Persons,” a periscope-style tube allowing the interred to breathe from underground and signal they are there to those above.
Around the turn into the twentieth century, we return to sleep’s cause being founded in ideological and spiritual ideas. Brown-Sequard and Heubel suggest that sleep is an inhibitory product, a space wherein the body cuts off its sensory stimulation, in the name of performing upkeep on the mechanisms of staying alert. Many minds, like Osborne, Gayet, and Mauthner, try to pinpoint to specific places inside the body responsible for the shift between sleeping and waking — Gayet pinpoints the brain stem; Mauthner notices the rapid movement of the eyes, but many don’t give credence to these findings — instead, we begin to tune in even nearer to our sleep-related behaviors. Mothers are advised of night-lights for fearful children, as well as taking care not to over-coddle every cry. Children are fenced in inside stationary cribs rather than cradles — new isolation.
Meanwhile, great advances are made in the awarenesses of new kinds of anesthesia, various — ologies pinpointing refined informational systems related to the body’s ways. We are more vigilant now than ever over bacteria. We wipe surfaces. We avoid. People start looking for answers to sleep disruption through new medicine, mainly centered around hypnotics: bromide, paraldehyde, sulfonal. We simultaneously acknowledge the vital healing aspects of sleep as a function, and the rising wave of stress. We get radio transmission and the magnetic tape recorder. We get methamphetamine. Around now pictures come in color, our replications that much more like us.
In 1898, we get the remote control, so we can stay in bed for longer and still see into rooms beyond the home. People sometimes press buttons they had not meant to press and see things they had not meant to see. Gelineau names “narcolepsy,” a relatively common condition wherein the body is overcome with sudden, extreme fatigue, often causing blackouts and public collapse. The name is based on two Greek words that mean “a benumbing” and “to overtake.” Another widespread condition, later termed sleep apnea, involves interruption to the sleeper by abnormal breathing interruptions, causing poor rest. The more aware we are of what is in us, the more difficult it might be, in ways, to disregard, and so therefore, to remain calm.
Entering the twentieth century, we get the tank, the bra, the vacuum cleaner, vitamins. We begin taking pictures of the brain. Death during childbirth is at an all-time low. We get machines that cool the air inside our homes and machines that burn our skin so we look healthy. William L. Murphy invents a bed that can fold into the wall so you can walk around where the bed would be usually during the day, a new concealing in the name of more frequent open air. We get sonar, cellophane, the neon lamp, and helicopters. At last the self-starting automobile is perfected. People no longer have to stand still for hours to become pictures: it is more instant. It will become more instant someday still. Harry Houdini, having hardly escaped alive from a magic trick of his own devising, says, “The weight of the earth is killing.”