The night is a woman: not sleeping doesn’t hurt so much

PWe think we know everything about sleep. The various phases: falling asleep, light, deep, Rem sleep. We measure it with the smartwatch. We urge him with sleeping pills, perfumes, masks, pillows and special mattresses. We think we know everything, but instead we still have so much to discover. To sleep (or not) could have a feminist reading, if we consider how many brilliant women have used their waking hours to write. Annabel Abbs tells it in the semi-autobiographical essay “Never trust insomniac women” (Einaudi), which starts from the case of Laura Cereta, in the 1400s, to arrive at Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf and the superpop Stephanie Meyer, author of Twilight: there’s nothing wrong with ithe claims, to have a nocturnal Self and to leave space for it.

To sleep or not

Sleeping (or not) could have a political meaning, it could be the beginning of a revolution that starts from the bedroom. According to the German writer Theresia Enzensberger it is capitalism that decides the “right” hours of sleep to be good workers and perfect consumers. The wise man “Sleep“(Edt), between Marxist quotations and sleepless autobiography, explores a fundamental need, often sacrificed in the name of efficiency and considered synonymous with weakness. He explains: «Sleep problems should be individual and privateyet rest is socially regulated in a rather rigid way, with eight hours expected for everyone. The advent of capitalism made habits homogeneous, because work also imposes constraints on sleeping. It’s bad to sleep little, and we need to fix it. It is bad to sleep too much. Anyone who does this is considered lazy and on strike. Staying in bed late is an unheard of luxury. Early risers are the true models of productivity.”

Fewer hours of sleep, more active life

Robin Sharma, one of the leading leadership experts, knows this well. He wrote “The Five in the Morning Club” (Tea), on the beauty of getting up early like the greats who made history, from George Washington to Nelson Mandela. “The supreme victory”, he assures, “is achieved when no one is looking and everyone else is asleep”. 4.30am former first lady Michelle Obama and Jennifer Aniston wake upat 5 Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, at 6.02, with his inner clock, Oprah Winfrey. They gain years of active life, almost 64 thousand hours more. Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, moderately disagrees since, after a burnout shock, she published “The sleep revolution“: «Resting is important», he says, «even a nap is enough, and we must learn to disconnect to be less stressed. Putting your cell phone to sleep in the evening to wake up in the morning with full batteries.”

Is she right? Or maybe Annabel Abbs is right: «It’s not drugs and devices to monitor sleep that we need, but of a new, revolutionary approach to darkness, to the lost Night Self. Women have always taken time out of the night to write, paint, study, reflect, finding a solitude, a creativity that the day is rarely able to offer. According to the latest research, women have an exceptionally robust circadian clock: they can stay awake without major health consequences. We welcome our Night Self. We all have it. One different from the other. A mix of individual circumstances, genes, hormones, memories, physiology. Those who sleep like a log might not encounter it until they find themselves mired in pain or mourning” (for the author the cause was the loss of her father, ed.).

A reverse Penelope

There is also a scientific hypothesis that Abbs really likes: «The prefrontal cortex, responsible for dominance and control, struggles to keep us in check if we sleep less. We women suffer the limitations imposed by certain cultural expectations, but we are also equipped with a larger, more complex and active prefrontal cortex than men, which is why our impulse control is particularly tyrannical. Freeing ourselves from the overbearing voice of conformism has always been a great effort. It’s easier during nights of insomnia.” Virginia Woolf couldn’t sleep after finishing a book. And while he was in bed, he was already thinking about his next job. His most visionary novel, Orlando, has all the characteristics of a nocturnal brain without constraints. The protagonist travels through time and even changes sex…

For Alice Vincent, journalist and podcaster, the darkness of four in the morning is fantastic: «In that strange suspended time my thoughts reach the maximum purity, they are fresh and new like dawn, something impossible for the thoughts of the following hours; they are not contaminated by the debris of the day.” This is why insomniacs are dangerous. They think, they use irony. Giorgia Fumo, stand-up comedienne (debuts with Outof office on 5 December in Milan), collects her very funny improvisations at night, «when, without messages, emails, phone calls, ideas can become books like Engineering of adult life. I’ve never really liked mornings.”

Insomniacs can express what the Day Self represses. Enrica Tesio does it in the novel “Things I tell you while you sleep” (Bompiani). A woman contemplates the sleep of the one she loves and finally finds space for the words that are difficult to pronounce in the sunlight. “I am a Penelope in reverse” reveals Tesio: “Penelope wove during the day and unraveled at night, at night I look for the key to the skein that the day has the habit of ruining.”

The no-sleep revolution will be individual

We will probably have to reevaluate the gifts of darknesschased away by the lights always on, confined to horror films, to discover starry skies, moths, nocturnal fragrances. In the Paris of the jazz years, filmed in Woody Allen’s nostalgic Midnight in Paris, life began with the darkness broken by the frenzy of electricity: masquerade parties, surrealist salons and artists’ soirées, Joséphine Baker dancing naked, underground gay clubs, rivers of champagne at the clubs de nuit for the rich. The habit of stopping by to visit a friend at two in the morning, as Francis Scott Fitzgerald did, was quite common. Proust wrote all night, Colette until dawn, wrapped in a blanket.

ùJean Cocteau stayed up drawing. In Paris we never slept. And perhaps that mixture of creativity and rebellion arose from a sleepless core of darkness. For Theresia Enzensberger we need to put aside prescriptions and conformism, a bit like in that fabulous Paris: the sleep revolution will be individual and personal. The voice of the Night Self has convinced Abbs and perhaps it will convince us too: «The decision to give up sleeping pills was the first act of disobedience. The first heretical idea in an era in which the sleep industry makes billions and considers sleeping uninterruptedly for eight hours the panacea for all ills. This is not to glorify insomnia. During the day we need sunlight, at night we need darkness. When we live in the company of both Day and Night Selves becoming aware of each other, life becomes richer and more enjoyable. We are whole. We can heal. And in the end we even manage to sleep.”