When bottom says to Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “But I pray you, let none of your people stir me / I have an exposition of sleep come upon me,” we know he is feeling rather tired, and we guess, as the Arden editor helpfully explains, that “exposition,” which is at once an exposing, an expounding, and an explaining, is “a malapropism for ‘disposition,'” which is at once a natural tendency and a plan for disposing one’s property. The natural inclination to sleep is more likely to come upon one than an explanation of sleep, because sleeping is something we do when we are not aware that that is what we are doing. When we sleep, when we act in plays, when we are under magic spells, we cannot at the same time give an account of what we are doing, without waking up, without breaking the spell. As the play is at pains to show us, we can only be in one place at a time, and yet we are often in two places at once. But what does my waking self have to say about my sleeping self? Not much.
It must be from sleep that we get our sense of being here and not being here, of losing ourselves and finding ourselves, of absence and return; and perhaps most interestingly of all, sleep must be our original and easily lost experience of an absence that is not a form of waiting. Sometimes—though more often as children—we can’t wait to wake up, but once we are asleep we are not waiting for anything. Waking up every morning for years on end may reassure us that the lost can be found, that something comes from nothing, that long swathes of experience cannot be remembered because they were never forgotten, that we need to be interrupted, and so on. And yet sleep, unlike what Seamus Heaney calls the “pre-reflective lived experience” of childhood, is not something we grow out of. It is as though we need to be regularly absent from ourselves, and in a way that cannot be spoken of; we can speak about sleep as a phenomenon—scientists and the people who see us sleeping can tell us about how we looked, what we said, and so on —but we can never report back about what we did, about what happened, except in the most banal way (“I slept really well,” “I had a bad night,” and so on). Sleep, in other words, is a need that we can only experience in, and as, anticipation.
We can experience wanting it, but not having it, the expectation and the aftermath, but never the thing itself. No one will ever say, except in his sleep, “I’m having a wonderful sleep.” We can sometimes tell the story of our dream but not of the sleep in which we had it; we don’t experience dreams as happening in our sleep (nothing about the dream tells us we are sleeping). One of our most intimate and essential activities, sleep can only be known about from someone else. So if we think of sleep as an experience, it must radically change our sense of what an experience can be; if we think of it as an object of knowledge, it confirms our dependence on others for such knowledge as is available; and if we think of sleep as an object of desire—and as one of our original paradigms or blueprints for desiring—we may end up radically redescribing the obscurity of such objects. Sleep, after all, is by far the most time-consuming of our earliest desires—and, of course, the only one of those desires that cannot be satisfied by an external object (the parent can create the conditions for sleep, but cannot give the child something called sleep). There are two questions: what kind of object of desire is sleep, and so what can it tell us about desiring? It would not be strange if sleep was the model for many things that we do. And it would not be strange if we tended not to notice this. Because sleeping is something that we do without knowing that we are doing it.
If sleep is a peculiarly obscure object of desire, that is because it is not an object, and cannot be located in the external world. If it is anywhere, it is inside us, as a disposition, as a need, as a process; but unlike other appetites, it requires that we be unconscious for it to be gratified. And we are likely to think of it as a means to an end, not an end in itself; we want what it can give us, but we don’t think of it as an exchange, and in this sense our capacity to sleep is a model for our capacity for self-reliance, sleep being the necessary thing we provide for ourselves. Wanting to sleep is wanting something that no one can give you, but that anyone can stop you having.
So as an object of desire sleep is something I always already have, but that I can be prevented by myself and other people from getting to. Other people, including myself, have to collaborate with me, not to let me get it, but to let it, in Bottom’s words, come upon me, come over me. It is not something we can grasp, but only something we can receive. So when people talk about “grabbing some sleep,” they are making a category error; sleep is not a woman or man you can grab. If we took sleep as our preferred picture of an object of desire, began to see desiring as more like desiring sleep, we would be doing things very differently. We would, for example, see satisfaction as something we had to relinquish ourselves for, and we would relish anticipation and longing. And we would never think that reporting back was possible or the point.
Adam Phillips is the editor of the new Penguin Freud and the author of numerous books, including On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored and Going Sane.
