Ravelled Sleeves

In his stage play of revenge, treachery and pride Macbeth (1606), playwright William Shakespeare gave his restless protagonist a famous speech on the topic of sleep: 

Sleep, dreams and simple rest and relaxation are fundamental necessities of the human condition. Perhaps unsurprisingly, science fiction has explored this topic extensively. Here we take a look at the importance of downtime in science and science fiction [1].

Sleepless Nights

In George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), sleep deprivation is part of the many and varied methods by which the State controls and manipulates its people, particularly those who transgress. The protagonist Winston and his peers routinely work for eighteen hours in twenty-four, with two three hour breaks for sleep - insufficient to establish a deep and regular sleeping pattern including dreaming. This would impact the cognitive and critical abilities of the population, and hence the risk of resistance against totalitarian rule.

When Winston finds himself in detention, both drugs and sleep are used as weapons against him over a prolonged period, both to disorient and to induce a vulnerability to sympathy:

It was O’Brien who was directing everything. It was he who set the guards onto Winston and who prevented them from killing him. It was he who decided when Winston should scream with pain, when he should have a respite, when he should be fed, when he should sleep, when the drugs should be pumped into his arm. It was he who asked the questions and suggested the answers. He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend. And once—Winston could not remember whether it was in drugged sleep, or in normal sleep, or even in a moment of wakefulness—a voice murmured in his ear: “Don’t worry, Winston; you are in my keeping. For seven years I have watched over you. Now the turning point has come. I shall save you, I shall make you perfect.”

The sinister results of this coercion play out through Winston’s gradual mental decline, and eventual realisation of what he is prepared to sacrifice rather than face his greatest fear.

While the officially-sanctioned tortures which led Winston to his ultimate betrayal attract attention, the work and sleep pattern that was the ‘normal’ in his society is arguably a more insidious abuse. Repeated studies have shown that the majority of human beings require a regular pattern of sleep for continued health. For most, this needs to pass through a number of stages - from the light sleep that immediately follows waking, through to a deeper phase, and into what is known as Rapid Eye Movement (or REM) sleep. It is in this latter phase that humans dream several times a night - although most dreams are not remembered. To complete such a sleep cycle takes at least 90 minutes, and each stage is believed to have a role in physical and mental health. Adults restricted to four hours of sleep at a time show a range of chemical and neurological impacts, which is cumulative over time [2].

Since the 1950s, it has also been recognised that each phase of sleep is associated with different frequencies and patterns of brain waves. The work of researchers such as William Dement and colleagues established that sleep could be monitored and the advent of dreams reliably determined. Moreover Dement’s experiments demonstrated that not only sleep but also dreaming itself is essential for optimal cognition. This research was widely reported and Dement is referenced by name in subsequent science fiction.

Of course, in real life as well as science fiction, a sleepless state is more often self-induced, a product of stress and responsibility, rather than an external imposition. Such routine sleeplessness is perhaps more likely in the active and often driven characters of science fiction than some other genres - for example in military officers, archetypal single-minded scientists, inventors, explorers in unfamiliar environments and others. This recognition is nothing new. In H G Wells’ The Invisible Man (novel, 1897), the scientist protagonist Griffin notes that:

“I was surprised to find, now that my prize was within my grasp, how inconclusive its attainment seemed. As a matter of fact I was worked out; the intense stress of nearly four years' continuous work left me incapable of any strength of feeling. I was apathetic, and I tried in vain to recover the enthusiasm of my first inquiries, the passion of discovery that had enabled me to compass even the downfall of my father's grey hairs. Nothing seemed to matter. I saw pretty clearly this was a transient mood, due to overwork and want of sleep, and that either by drugs or rest it would be possible to recover my energies.”

The natural consequences of overwork in the form of irritability, burnout and, in extreme cases, paranoia or hallucinations, feature in many such settings. However certain examples are still more dramatic.

Importance of Sleep and Dreams

Author J G Ballard had a fascination with altered states of consciousness. He explored the necessity of sleep in his short story Manhole 69 (appearing in New Worlds, November 1957). In this narrative, three men are the subjects of an experiment to surgically sever a connection in the brain, rendering them unable to sleep. The objective is a noble one: to give humanity back the third of its lives spent unconscious and so expand human potential. The three subjects are roused from their recovery under close observation, in a facility equipped with entertainments, exercise and distraction, and for a day or two all appears to be going well. As the chief doctor, Neill, tells his colleague:

“None of you realize it yet, but this is as big an advance as the step the first ichthypod took out of the protozoic sea 300 million years ago. At last we’ve freed the mind, raised it out of that archaic sump called sleep, its nightly retreat into the medulla. With virtually one cut of the scalpel we’ve added twenty years to those men’s lives.”

…

“For the first time Man will be living a full twenty-four hour day, not spending a third of it as an invalid, snoring his way through an eight-hour peep-show of infantile erotica.”

However, with their untreated doctors growing weary, the men are left alone for just ten minutes. Experiencing a subjective acceleration of time, the men begin to show paranoia and claustrophobia, the walls closing in on them and their living space becoming smaller and more limited. By the time the doctor on duty returns, all three are catatonic. It’s left to Neill’s assistant to articulate the problem:

Morley shrugged. “Continual consciousness is more than the brain can stand. Any signal repeated often enough eventually loses its meaning. Try saying the word‘ cow’ fifty times. After a point the brain’s self-awareness dulls. It’s no longer able to grasp who or why it is, rides adrift.”

The story ends with the men’s ultimate fate left uncertain.

The television series Doctor Who confronted the importance of sleep in the Twelfth Doctor story “Sleep No More” (2015). Landing on the Le Verrier lab [3] in orbit around Neptune in the 38th century, the Doctor and Clara are alarmed to encounter a rescue team from Triton, investigating the space station’s silence, and then to be attacked by monsters that turn to dust. The sole survivor of the station crew, Rasmussen, proves to be the inventor of the Morpheus sleep-pod system. This aims to condense sleep into five minute bursts, using an electronic signal to change brain chemistry, in order to improve work productivity.

The Doctor quotes Macbeth's speech on “sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care” [4] before telling Rasmussen:

“Congratulations, professor. You’ve revolutionised the labour market. You’ve conquered nature. You’ve also created an abomination.”

The premise here that the anthropoid monsters are made of sentient organic debris in the form of sleep dust, and have digested the crew, lacks scientific credibility. Instead it's used to symbolise more indirectly the more subtle monstrosity of sleep deprivation in the name of profit. It nonetheless makes for an interesting story.

The importance of sleep, but also its vulnerability, became a key point in Asleep in Armageddon, a short story by Ray Bradbury, published in Planet Stories, Winter 1948. This begins with a man called Leonard Sale surviving a spaceship crash on a planetoid in the asteroid belt. When he sleeps, he becomes aware of two alien minds trying to take over his own mind and body, each the leader of a nation on a long-gone planet that had been destroyed by war.

Afraid that one or both will steal his body and soul if he yields to his tiredness and drifts off to sleep, he determines to stay awake for the six days it will take for a rescue ship to arrive. By the fourth day:

“He couldn't read, he was bothered with splitting headaches. He was so exhausted he couldn't move. He was numb with medicine. He resembled a waxen dummy, stuffed with things to preserve him in a state of horrified wakefulness.”

While a rescue is able to reach him on the fifth day (earlier than expected, but still too late), he is exhausted to the point of both incoherence and collapse, unable to warn them against the threatening entities on the small world.

Sleep disruption and its negative impact on judgement is a recurring theme in the Star Trek universe. In particular, the officers of the various starships are shown as vulnerable to insomnia or hypersomnia and associated irritability throughout versions of the television series - whether due to stress or alien influence - with examples including ST:TNG “Schisms” (1992), “Phantasms” (1993), Voyager “Scientific Method” (1997), “Waking Moments” (1998), Enterprise “Breaking the Ice” (2001) and others. Interestingly, Star Trek has also considered the importance of one particular aspect of sleep - dreams.

Dreaming of Downtime

A story of particular note for its treatment of dreams is the Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV series, 1987-1994) episode “Night Terrors” (1991). Searching a missing starship adrift in a binary star system, the crew of the Enterprise find a single catatonic survivor amongst a crew who have brutally murdered one another. Trapped in a space-time fissure for three weeks, the crew became irrational and paranoid. When the Enterprise also becomes trapped, and her crew also starts snapping irritably and suffering sleep disturbances, the need to unravel this mystery becomes urgent. Fortunately, the android officer Data remains unaffected by the phenomenon. It becomes clear that no one on the ship is dreaming - causing brain chemical imbalances - except the empathic Counsellor Troi who has nothing but nightmares. Doctor Crusher lays out the problem clearly:

“We have to dream in order to survive. If we don’t reach REM sleep, we don’t dream, we begin to lose our cognitive abilities. We find it hard to concentrate. We forget how to do the most ordinary tasks. Then we become irritable, paranoid. Some people experience hallucinations.”

Crusher is unable to induce REM sleep, even through medic intervention. The usually perfectly-groomed crew begin to look increasingly frazzled. Eventually, an alien vessel which is also trapped in the rift proves to be both the source of a telepathic transmission causing the dream disruption, and an avenue for escape before the entire crew goes permanently insane. The episode nonetheless explores the importance of sleep for human (and humanoid alien) function - and in particular the hallucinations, mood changes, poor decision making, memory lapses and confusion that results from its lack. Since virtually all of the crew are affected, the episode gives an insight into their fears and emotions.

By contrast, a very different outcome can be seen in the short story Such Stuff by John Brunner (F&SF, June 1962). This describes a dream-deprivation experiment undertaken by psychologists, based on the (real-world) 1960 study by William Dement on the same topic. Volunteers were wired to an electronic monitor (EEG) which sounded a buzzer whenever they entered REM sleep, causing them to semi-wake and thus preventing the dream from occurring. The experiment proceeds much as expected, except for one subject, Mr Starling, who presents the experiments with an ethical dilemma:

“Well — all our other cases suggest that serious mental disturbance results from interference with the dreaming process. Even the most resistant of our other volunteers broke down after less than two weeks. We’ve prevented Starling from dreaming every night for five months now, and even if there are no signs of harm yet it's probable that we are harming him.”

While the other subjects became “nervous, irritable, victims of uncontrolled nervous tension”, the passive, oppressed and unreactive Starling seems unaffected. Instead, it is one of his doctors who appears to be becoming more and more irrational and strained. Eventually, just too late, the doctor realises that the patient has found a different kind of mental escape, placing his disturbing dreams into other minds rather than his own.

Another tale which considers both the importance of dreams and the ways they affect others is Ursula K LeGuin’s novel The Lathe of Heaven (1972). This focusses on a man called George Orr who is arrested for drug abuse, having overdosed on sleep-suppressants. Assigned to psychiatric treatment, he admits that he is terrified of dreaming - because some fraction of his dreams are “effective”, changing reality around him. The novel follows the changes in the world and his life as the psychiatrist, Dr Haber, begins trying to use his abilities to reshape reality to his own design. Haber develops an ‘augmenter’ to his own design, mentioning the different brain wave patterns of waking and sleeping, describing the work of Dement and others.

In this case, Orr’s sleeplessness and the associated anxiety, paranoia and physical and mental ill health are just the launching point for a narrative about how human nature is reflected in its actions, regardless of the scenario. Whatever Haber asks Orr to dream about is distorted both by Orr’s unconscious mind, and by unexpected implications of the request. The story also considers the premise that what one man considers utopian and desirable may be less positive when seen from other viewpoints.

However it also considers the possibility that dreams can be shaped by electronics, by hypnosis and by suggestion, and that they can be used to promote well-being through careful guidance and direction. As such it is a key example of an area known as “dream hacking” - the deliberate modification or use of dreams. This occurs relatively frequently in science fiction - in the aforementioned ST:TNG episode “Night Terrors”, for example, Troi mentions that she frequently uses directed dreaming as a therapeutic method.

Of course, science fiction nonetheless provides examples of characters who circumvent the need for sleep in a variety of ways - more or less plausible. Amongst the more interesting is pirate captain Kraiklyn in Iain M Banks’ novel Consider Phlebas (1987, first novel in The Culture series). This individual has a division between two halves of his brain, each of which can sleep for a third of the time. Since the halves differ, his personality changes depending on which is awake, and whether both aspects of himself are conscious simultaneously. This allows the captain to remain awake at all times, reducing his vulnerability, without compromising his mental acuity. This is implausible using current technology and given what we know of human physiology, but is amongst the many advanced technologies in Banks’ Culture series.

Rest and Recreation

While sleep or dream deprivation is a serious health problem, ongoing stress and a lack of time to relax can be equally so. Both mental and physical health can suffer if tension is not relieved by rest and relaxation - often referred to as downtime. In some scenarios, particularly those in strictly regimented organisation, such downtime is even formally mandated. 

An important example of a (quasi-)military organisation recognising this need can be found again in the Star Trek universe and its Federation Starfleet. The classic 1960s television series laid the groundwork for this in its 1966 episode “Shore Leave”, written by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon. In this story, the USS Enterprise reaches a habitable and apparently-safe planet after three months of exhausting continuous duty, and Captain Kirk orders his crew to take some time for rest and recreation (R&R). As Mr Spock observes, “there is not a crewman aboard who is not in need of a rest.”

Spock also reports an underperforming crewman suffering physical symptoms of stress, and so tricks his captain into ordering himself to take a break. 

However, unfortunately for Kirk and the Enterprise crew, events on the planet take a surreal and dangerous turn, and it only later becomes clear that the world is manifesting figments of the crew’s own imaginations. Eventually they find that the entire world is an amusement park, designed by an advanced race. When one of his crew comments with surprise that the aliens still needed play, Kirk corrects them: “The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play”.

The world is perfectly safe if its special effects and abilities are understood. With that determined, the shore leave planned for the crew continues.

Episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation picked up on the same theme, and indeed the role of one of the bridge crew, Deanna Troi, was to ensure the emotional and mental health of the crew. In the episode “Captain’s Holiday” (1990), Captain Picard is also edgy and irritable, in this case after successfully completing weeks of intense peace negotiations. Echoing Spock, Doctor Crusher informs him that one of the crew is resisting medical advice: “it’s a classic case of stress-related illness brought on by overwork.” Unlike Kirk, Captain Picard is amused but not taken in.

The crew finally wear down his resistance to suggestions that he take a break, sending him off to the holiday world of Risa. Unfortunately for his crew’s hopes, he becomes caught up in both a love affair and the search for a time-travelling artefact [5]. However, despite its excitements, this change of scene and pace actually leaves the captain better rested and more relaxed.

While the same theme comes up in various later incarnations of Star Trek, an explicit treatment of the importance of downtime can be found in the animated series Lower Decks episode “Temporal Edict” (2020). Upset by a perceived snub by Starfleet Command, Captain Freeman of the USS Cerritos becomes intent on making her ship the fleet’s most efficient and productive. Finding that her crew are accustomed to building in ‘buffer time’ - a short period for recovery - into any task, she bans the practice and implements a regime in which all tasks must be completed within tight time limits.

After a week, the crew is so frazzled with exhaustion and stress that they make mistakes and are unable to respond to intruders aboard ship. It takes the only character who actually enjoys the tight scheduling and pressure, Ensign Brad Boimler, to point out that most people can’t cope with that kind of workload - including Freeman herself. They all need space to think and time to rest and the independence to determine for themselves when a break is appropriate: “You're a great captain. Let them be a great crew.”

In honor of the success of this strategy, Captain Freeman names the principle of allowing the crew to judge the time they need, taking buffer time where needed, the Boimler Effect - to the disgust of the regulation-obeying, workaholic ensign.

Starfleet is not the only organisation that routinely places its members in danger and under stress, nor the only one to mandate that its staff takes a break. In the marionette television series Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-8), for example, Spectrum requires its pilots captains to take a break (e.g. episode “Seek and Destroy”, 1968) - something emphasised in the children’s tie-in novels by John Theydon, which describe both a relaxation room capable of inducing deep, restful sleep, and compulsory holidays. Indeed, in the first of the three Spectrum Files novels, Colonel White orders Scarlet to continue on holiday rather than returning - at least until things become urgent. The theme was picked up in the CGI-animated series New Captain Scarlet (2005) where, for example, Lieutenant Green and Destiny Angel holiday at a domed beach resort on the moon in the episode “Duel”. 

Similarly, the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement in the spy-fi television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-8) has something of a duty of care for its operatives. While its commander Mr Waverley often complains about his personnel taking holidays and putting in excessive expense claims, he nonetheless does occasionally require them to take breaks - particularly but not exclusively when injured. An interesting example can be found in “The Sort of Do-It-Yourself-Dreadful Affair” (1966). Here UNCLE’s chief enforcement officer, Napoleon Solo, is attacked by a beautiful young woman who appears to be indestructible. On his reporting this, his sceptical commander orders Solo off-duty and on to a recuperative spa holiday in the Bahamas, reassigning Napoleon’s work to his second in command, Illya Kuryakin, with a single matter-of-fact comment:

“Rest, Mr Solo. You’ve been working much too hard. This latest episode only confirms a preliminary diagnosis medical section has had on you for some time.”

Neither Waverley nor Kuryakin is accusatory or critical, and both accept the necessity of Napoleon’s holiday without any suggestion of shame for his (presumed) hallucinations. It is not until both Napoleon and Illya are attacked again by the same woman, who turns out to be a cyborg under remote control, that his rationality and fitness for duty are reestablished.

While these large, structured organisations have inherited the military tradition of leave and R&R, they are not the only employers to recognise the necessity of caring for their staff in science fiction. In Diving into the Wreck (novella, 2009), Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s protagonist runs a business exploring wrecked starships and recovering technology from them for sale or further research. This is both employment and excitement for her crew, all of whom enjoy the danger and exertion of such a ‘dive’, as much as its profit potential. However, as the protagonist-narrator notes:

All of us get too enthusiastic about our dives—we take chances we shouldn’t. Sleep, relaxation, downtime all prevent the kind of haste that gets divers killed.

As it is, the dive does not end as well as the protagonist hopes - but not due to a lack of care for her employees.

A more morally ambiguous situation occurs in It’s a Sunny Day, a short story by Spider Robinson that appeared in Galaxy in January 1976. This describes a sixteen year old boy who has been genetically engineered for an eidetic memory and trained since birth for knowledge retention and synthesis, in the hope of out-performing computers on an industrialised, sanitised world: 

“They trained and sleep-taught and indoctrinated you in logical and non-logical analysis until you were eight, stuffed you with data until you were twelve, gave you four years to integrate it and then put you to work at sixteen. Only you didn’t work.”

In fact, the experiment results are luckluster at best, and the boy is delivered to his father’s old college friend Zack on a more rustic and anarchic agricultural colony world for six months of rest and recreation. After a short while, the boy’s new guardian diagnoses the problem. The boy has been designed to work on what he calls ‘life-support chores’, such as supply management, urban planning and similar tasks:

“But when life-support chores become too complex to allow for the kind of cheerful inefficiency with which I run this farm, people don’t enjoy doing them, or living with the end-results.”

As Zack points out, without rest, relaxation and an emotional collection to his work, the boy simply cannot perform at his best. Given that it’s his parents who were proud to have him selected for this gene-engineering and raised him as a human computer, his new mentor Zack has a moral dilemma: he can and does teach the boy to take pleasure from activities and to laugh and play, but is it right to then return him to his aseptic, work-focussed world when the six months are up?

Insomnia as Illness

Some relatively recent science fiction has considered sleep and its lack as a form of disease, providing a physical analogy for the increasingly pressurised and sleep-deprived routines of modern society, particularly given the increasing use of screens and information technology until late at night (which is believed to cause sleep disruption).

Sleep Donation is a novella by Karen Russell, published in 2014, in which the Americas are in the grip of an epidemic of insomnia. The causes are unclear, but the effects are lethal - victims gradually lose the ability to sleep and, after some weeks of total sleeplessness, eventually die of organ failure and cardiac arrest. As the narrator, Trish, relates:

In the months following the CDC release, many people dismissed the disorder as an exaggeration of a universal American condition. Who was sleeping enough? Nobody! The “crisis” seemed like more TV hyperbole designed to keep us glued to our screens, watching mattress commercials.

The story follows Trish’s efforts on behalf of a volunteer organisation which collects donations of healthy sleep which can be infused in victims of the disease. Moral dilemmas abound over the need for frequent donations from a baby, whose infant dreams prove to be something of a panacea, over the impact of an adult donation which proves to be contaminated by a highly-contagious and horrifying nightmare, and over Trish’s use of her own now-deceased sister’s memory as a recruiting tool. A vivid picture is drawn of the new and desperate subculture of both those who are sleepless and those whose sleep is haunted by the nightmare. While the origins of the disease and the mechanism of the sleep donations are obscure, the nightmare plague is associated with a prion - the same self-replicating protein structures which cause real-world degenerative neurological disorders including Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy.

Russell’s narrative was one of several published at around the same time which treated sleep disruption as a plague. Sleepless (novel, 2010) by Charlie Huston, for example, also suggests that epidemic insomnia could be caused by a prion disease, with a tenth of the population affected, causing breakdowns in society and providing the background for a noir detective story. Other stories such as Nod (novel, 2012) by Adrian Barnes and Black Moon (novel, 2014) by Kenneth Calhoun consider more acute scenarios, in which virtually the entire planet stops sleeping suddenly. In both cases this sudden plague causes mass psychosis, hallucinations and death in a matter of days to weeks, leaving characters to adjust. The flip slide, the idea of extended sleep becoming a plague, has also been explored in recent science fiction, as for example in The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker (novel, 2019) [6].

While older examples of epidemic sleep and insomnia exist in fiction, this strong interest in the twenty-first century reflects aspects of concern in modern society - the nature of work has changed, and the accessibility of individuals through information and telecommunications technology has massively increased, removing some of the historical division between work and leisure time. Social media has also provided a platform on which many feel the need to perform and keep up appearances around the clock, bringing social pressures into home spaces which have historically provided for downtime. The increasing financial inequalities between individuals and between generations has led to rising anxiety, while the use of strongly-illuminated screens and artificial lighting until shortly before sleep is believed to affect the quality and depth of sleep.

 At the same time, an increasing recognition of the very real impacts of mental health conditions has led to an increase in discussion of the resulting issues. More so than ever, burnout is recognised as a serious issue affecting people in a range of roles and at all ages. Many smartphones and similar devices now routinely monitor sleep through movement and pulse, offering suggestions to improve and modify its patterns through mindful activity - reminiscent of some of the earlier fiction, although far short of the electronic intervention in examples such as The Lathe of Heaven and Manhole 69.

Science fiction may, in places, have anticipated some of these trends and fears, although - as its conscious recall of Shakespeare’s famous words reflects - in doing so it built on a vast wealth of earlier fiction which explored sleeplessness and exhaustion in more conventional scenarios. While SF may have explored ways of monitoring and modifying sleep, warning against the dangers many of them, it could not fully anticipate the dawn of social media and the way that technology now shapes our lives. It does nonetheless provide a constant and insistent warning that humanity must recognise its physical and mental limits in certain respects.

 Whatever our technology, sleep is not something we are currently equipped to do without, and does not ever seem likely to be. Rest, relaxation and the physical benefits of regular deep sleep, as well as the escape of dreaming, appear to be fundamental to our physical and mental fitness. Our natural ability to ‘knit the ravelled sleeve of care,’ even at the cost of time which might be spent elsewhere, is a miracle of regeneration and self-repair which we modify at our peril.