Sleep, that knits up the ravel’d sleeve of care

Posted on | May 19, 2009 |

Shakespeare got it right. Sleep, which Macbeth famously says he has murdered, is ‘the death of each day’s life, sore labor’s balm’. It repairs, and knits up again that frayed sleeve of our minds that has been worn through during the labors of the day. But it’s also much more than this.

I’ve worked for decades on the way sleep can put us right with ourselves. Even if we don’t recall our dreams they still communicate with us about important things, working at a pre-verbal level. And even when we don’t realize it sleep can have a way of sorting out our difficulties. Which of us hasn’t awakened with a new sense of how to transform old problems? If only it would happen more often!

What happens in sleep, and in dreaming, is that we are invited to stop living in our heads and start living from our hearts. The heart offers us a whole different language, which is why dreams are sometimes all but impenetrable when we try to explain them later. The difficulty is that one way of being, the language of the head, seeps into the other. That’s why we find ourselves dreaming about our daily troubles, or why we find we can’t sleep but are visited to obsessive thoughts that keep us neither fully asleep nor precisely awake. This is the world of the head threatening to flood the realm of the heart.

The point is that we need both. Popping a sleeping tablet may well cause the body to rest, but, depending upon the tablet, it may also cut us off from the spiritually refreshing aspects of the heart’s communications. Dreams, the ‘royal road’ to the wisdom of the Unconscious, can be inhibited - and so we are cut off from our own inner knowing.

Many things happen during sleep. It’s not just an annoyance that gets in the way of all night partying, and it’s not something we can banish with caffeine and not expect to pay some sort of price. We look at a sleeping person and we assume not much is happening, when the opposite is clearly, scientifically, the case.

If, as Jung suggested, we live over ninety percent of our lives from the promptings of the Unconscious then it’s possibly a good idea to allow that shadowy entity its own time and space. And sleep is where that happens.

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