Sleeping and Dreaming (review)

Arriving to see The Wellcome Collection’s Sleeping and Dreaming exhibition before it closed in March 2008, you might have thought yourself already too late. The lights behind its glass doors were set so dim they seemed to be off. Once in, however, and past the giant projected images of heads napping placidly, you in effect entered those very heads – entered the dark, mysterious and oft-neglected space of dormancy.

Sleeping and Dreaming, part of The Wellcome’s collaboration with Dresden’s Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, was a curio cabinet evincing our most intimate, unguarded, and precarious selves. Some 300 objects from medicine, psychoanalysis, art, literature, pop culture and music illuminated the unconscious state that we inhabit – as the exhibition claimed – for roughly a third of our lives.

The exhibition made ancient Greece its historical starting point: ‘The first person to consider sleep in a methodical way was Aristotle’, who attributed it to the heart ‘cooling down’. Yet earlier Greek writers, whom Aristotle synthesized and expanded on, explored sleep in ways that are still relevant and that resonated through the collection’s five major themes. Alcmaeon of Croton, more than a century before Aristotle, equated sleep with tides and lightcycles and other natural periodicities. Hippocrates, too, paired sleep cycles with diurnal phases, and suggested they should stay in synch: ‘the patient should wake during the day and sleep during the night . . . but the worst of all is to get no sleep either night or day’ (Prognostics, part 10). Alcmaeon claimed sleep was caused by a kind of tidal ebbing, a retreat of blood from the skin’s surface towards the ‘larger vessels’ of the body’s interior. Empedocles and Diogenes of Apollonia thought sleep was caused by the rise and fall, not of the blood itself, but of its temperature (Plutarch, Sentiments concerning Nature). Following such lore, Aristotle imagined sleep as a state determined by a network of superimposed, coalescing, oppositional pendulums of circulation, respiration, cognition and especially digestion. Eating, like adding fuel to a fire, momentarily heated the body, until the consumed matter rose through to the brain, the body’s coolest region, causing ‘fits of drowsiness’. The exhibition cited Galen and displayed drawings by London-based Swiss artist Beate Frommelt to evoke this Aristotelian line of thinking, illustrating sleep’s link with digestion and other natural processes.

The Wellcome Collection’s exhibition could thus be read as a story that starts with the tradition that informed Aristotle’s cooling heart, in which the body’s functions follow the rhythmic vacillations in nature, and ends with post-industrial society’s tampering with such rhythms. The thematic grouping ‘A World Without Sleep?’ described the onset of shift-work and night-work, and the mid to late nineteenth-century technologies that facilitated nocturnal activity and altered our sleep patterns: ‘The sleep of modern workers is regulated by alarm clocks, electric lights and artificial stimulants.’

‘Traces of Sleep’, another thematic grouping inspired by the Greeks, explored sleep’s relation to death, and described other sleep-like states caused by mesmerism and anaesthesia. Access to this chamber was across a threshold flanked by Johan Gottfreid Schadow’s sculptures ‘Thanatos, the Genius of Death’ and ‘Hypnos, the Genius of Sleep’, brother deities from Hesiod’s Theogony. But sleep’s mythological connections with death survived the onset of Greek rational medicine, beyond the terms ‘hypnosis’ and the less-known ‘thanatosis’, which refers to feigning death to avoid a predator. Empedocles and Diogenes characterized death as little more than sleep taken one step further, where ‘sleep is a moderate cooling of the warmth in the blood, death a complete cooling’ (Hermann Diels, Doxographi Graeci, 1879, 437, verse 25). The ‘Traces of Sleep’ chamber displayed evidence of human investigations into the boundaries between sleep and death. A 1930s marionette from Kuno Ossberger’s folk theatre, which depicted Snow White’s deathlike sleep in her glass coffin was juxtaposed with a physician’s resuscitation kit from the height of the apparent death hysteria of the eighteenth century, comprising bellows and tubes for blowing...