Sleep and Wakefulness

Now we must say how, in the proper order of things, we are to go to sleep, keeping the rules of self-control in mind. After the meal, once we have thanked God for the enjoyment we have shared and for the day’s safe passing, our talk should turn toward sleep. Out go magnificent bedding, gold-embroidered carpets and smooth rugs worked with gold, long fine robes of purple, expensive fleecy cloaks, manufactured purple coverlets, mantles of thick pile, and couches softer than sleep itself. [a]

Besides the reproach of soft living, sleeping on feather down is bad for you: our bodies drop into it as into a hollow that gapes open under them, because the bedding is so soft. Such beds are awkward for a sleeper turning over in them, since the bed rises into a hill on either side of the body. They are no good for digesting food either; they burn it up instead, and so destroy its nourishment. But stretching yourself out on a level couch helps the food to digest, and gives sleep a kind of natural exercise ground. Those who can turn freely on other beds, having in them this natural exercise ground for sleep, digest their food more easily and keep themselves fitter for whatever comes. Couches with silver feet, moreover, smack of great ostentation; and the ivory on a bed — a body the soul has left — is not permissible for holy men, being a lazy contrivance for rest.

We must not let our thoughts be occupied with such things. Owning them is not forbidden to those who have them; what is forbidden is anxious concern about them, since happiness is not to be found in them. On the other hand, it savors of Cynic vanity for a man to play Diomedes:

unless circumstances force him to.

Odysseus leveled the unevenness of his marriage bed with a stone. Such frugality and doing things for oneself was practiced not by private men only, but by the chiefs of the ancient Greeks. But why speak of them? Jacob slept on the ground, and a stone served him for a pillow; and then he was counted worthy to see the vision that was above man. So, in keeping with reason, the bed we use must be plain and cheap, and built so that by avoiding both extremes it is comfortable: if it is warm, to protect us; if cold, to keep us warm. But do not let the couch be elaborate, and let its feet be smooth; elaborate turning makes runways here and there for crawling creatures, which wind themselves into the grooves of the work and do not slip off.

A moderate softness in the bed is what particularly suits a man; sleep should not be for exhausting the body altogether, but for relaxing it. So I say it ought not to be allowed to come on us for the sake of indulgence, but in order to rest from work. We must sleep, then, in such a way that we are easily woken. For it is said: “Keep your belts fastened and your lamps burning, and be like men watching for their master, so that when he comes back from the wedding and arrives and knocks, they may open to him at once. Blessed are those servants whom the Lord finds watching when he comes.” For there is no use in a sleeping man, any more than in a dead one. That is why we ought often to get up in the night and bless God. Blessed are those who stay awake for him and so make themselves like the angels, whom we call watchers. A man asleep is worth nothing, no more than if he were not alive.

But the man who has the light stays awake, and “darkness does not seize him” — nor does sleep, since darkness does not. The man who has been given light, then, is awake toward God; and such a man is alive. “For what was made in him was life.” “Blessed is the man,” says Wisdom, “who will listen to me, and the man who will keep my ways, watching at my doors, keeping guard day by day at the posts of my entrances.” “Let us not sleep, then, as the rest do, but let us keep awake,” says the Scripture, “and be sober. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk are drunk at night” — that is, in the darkness of ignorance. “But let us who belong to the day be sober. For you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night, nor of darkness.” But whoever among us is most concerned to live the true life and to hold noble thoughts will keep awake as long as he possibly can, reserving for himself only the sleep his own health requires; and that is not much, once it has been well trained into a habit.

Devotion to work, though, breeds a wakefulness that lasts on after the labor is done. Do not let food weigh us down; let it lighten us, so that sleep injures us as little as possible — for swimmers with weights hung on them are dragged down. On the other hand, let self-control raise us, as out of the pit below, into the ventures of wakefulness. The oppression of sleep is like death, forcing us into insensibility, cutting off the light by the closing of the eyelids. So let us, who are sons of the true light, not shut the door on this light. Let us turn in on ourselves instead, lighting up the eyes of the hidden man, gazing on the truth itself and taking in its streams, and so bring out clearly and intelligibly the dreams that are true.

But the hiccuping of men loaded with wine, the snorting of men stuffed with food, the snoring rolled up in the bedclothes, the rumbling of aching stomachs — all of it covers over the clear-seeing eye of the soul, filling the mind with ten thousand fantasies. And the cause is too much food, which drags the reasoning part of a man down into a state of stupidity. For much sleep brings no advantage to our bodies or to our souls; nor is it any use at all to work that has truth for its object, agreeable to nature though it is.

Now just Lot — and I pass over for the present the account of the plan of rebirth — would never have been drawn into that unholy intercourse if his daughters had not made him drunk and sleep had not overpowered him. So if we cut off the causes that make us so prone to sleep, we will sleep the more soberly. Those who have the sleepless Word living in them ought not to sleep the whole night through. They ought to get up in the night, especially when the days are drawing to a close, and one devote himself to his books, another begin his craft, the women take up the distaff; and all of us should, so to speak, fight against sleep, training ourselves to it gently and by degrees, so that by staying awake we may have a share of life for a longer stretch — for sleep, like a tax collector, takes half of our life for itself.

We, then, who assign the best part of the night to wakefulness, must not sleep by day on any account; and slack spells, dozing, stretching yourself, and yawning are all signs of a frivolous restlessness in the soul. Besides all this, we must know that the soul has no need of sleep. It is ceaselessly active. It is the body that is relieved when it is given over to rest, while the soul is not working through the body but exercising its intelligence within itself. And so the dreams that are true — in the judgment of a man who thinks rightly — are the thoughts of a sober soul, undistracted for the time by the body’s feelings, and taking counsel with itself in the best way. For the soul to stop working within itself would be its destruction. That is why, always contemplating God and by unbroken conversation with him grafting wakefulness into the body, it raises a man to a level with the grace of the angels, and out of the practice of wakefulness it lays hold of the eternity of life.