The Lost Art of Sleep

Bed is the best place to read Michael McGirr's new book. Also, the worst.

Bed is the best place to read Michael McGirr's new book. Also, the worst. The Lost Art of Sleep is a light-hearted exploration of that third of our lives spent semi-conscious, if we're lucky, that also charts McGirr's experience with three children under two years old. One baby is disruptive enough to sleeping patterns; having twins soon after would seem to be disastrous.The book is more than a five-year journey of interrupted sleep, it is a way for McGirr to lovingly capture the memory of his children at a special time in their lives. The Lost Art of Sleep is also peppered with stories of the sleeping habits, patterns and rituals of some of history's most influential figures, from the God creating rest on the seventh day on. And, while far from a self-help book, there is an examination of sleep disorders, insomnia, sleep apnoea, and the health effects of sleep deprivation.

So after a few restless nights, the book can make you worry. And, of course, worrying about a lack of sleep will keep you awake. So while in many ways it is the perfect book to curl up in bed with before drifting off, there are several passages that may cause you to over-analyse your own sleep habits and rituals, and keep you awake fretting about them. When bed is suggested as the best and worst place to read the book, while chatting over an appropriately ritualistic assortment of implements for chai tea, McGirr smiles. "I just hope people read it," he says.Those familiar with McGirr, whether as a priest, author, schoolteacher, or instructor in the ways of chai tea, will know there are deeper thoughts lurking behind the lines and between the pages. As a society, he contends, we are exhausted. "The whole culture is like a child that needs to go to bed," he says. "All the problems in the world are caused by people who get out of bed. Florence Nightingale did more to improve the world by staying in bed than most people do getting out of it. Our culture is red cordial."Certainly there is evidence to support McGirr's theory. There are more devices than ever to keep us stimulated. Between text messages, emails, Twitter, Facebook, iPods and the like it is a wonder we find the time to be bombarded by images from the television. Then there is caffeine, not only in an increasing variety of sugary soft drinks that will keep you awake but also coffee, one of the world's biggest commodities.

Coffee, the drink that killed Balzac, is all around us at 4pm on a Melbourne Monday, and we had each had the day's quota.The warm milk of the chai, with its honey and cinnamon, seemed more conducive to sleep, but did not deter McGirr's lively manner. The desire to explore the extent of society's restlessness struck him during a bike ride along the Hume Highway yes, all of it for his previous book Bypass: the story of a road. Writing that book, his second, McGirr found stories from the characters he met along the way, and shared something of his own journey from priesthood to fatherhood."It was a book about restlessness," he explains, adding there were 5500 truck movements a day along the Hume when he made the trek earlier in the decade. "It was a monument to restlessness. I was drawn to characters who found stillness on that road."There are examples from the Hume Highway where humans are simply making work for themselves. At truck stop 31 one morning he met a truck driver taking a load of eggs to Sydney. In the evening, he met another with a truck full of eggs bound for Melbourne.

Society is too wired to rest, too stimulated to sleep, too busy to sit down on a park bench and enjoy the world around them. "I wanted to write a book about rest," he says.Just as there is stillness to be found in Bypass, there is much activity in The Lost Art of Sleep. For an activity that should come naturally to everyone, there can be tremendous difficulties in nodding off. To understand why sleep has become a lost art, some explanation of humanity's nocturnal activities is necessary. McGirr explores this to some extent, with the need for sleep and dreaming more important for the young, but also explains there is still much mystery around the practice and its benefits as there had been little thorough research until recently.On the other hand, the effects of deprivation are well known. In people, the effect is a loss of memory and a loss of language. These symptoms are exhibited in society, where so much data is retained and stored on computers rather than in people's minds, and despite the ever-expanding language only an average of 1500 distinct words are used weekly."I believe we are an exhausted society," McGirr says.

"I think this is a broader idea than merely sleep deprived. It means that we make more and more ludicrous attempts to keep ourselves stimulated, to stop ourselves falling asleep at the wheel of the lives we drive so hard."In one of the early scenes in The Lost Art of Sleep, the new parents Michael and Jenny are too tired to stop watching television and go to sleep. That is the first analogy for McGirr's opinion, or subtle argument, that the world has become a stimulant keeping people in a trance-like state of sleeplessness. "We have created a world which acts like a drug to keep us partying when really what we want and need to do is just rest," he says."Rest is the basis of creativity. It is the foundation of civilisation. It is the real purpose of religion. The tired mind just keeps rehashing old ideas in ways that might look a bit different."Our society is hyped like a kid before bedtime. We use more and more words to say less and less. We run around faster and faster to go places that don't really matter.

Meanwhile, our vocabularies are diminishing, our memories have been handed over to computers, our inner juices are drying up. Let's all choose a day in the year when we just stay in bed. That might be a step in the right direction."Along the journey that begins at 9pm and ends way past bedtime the following morning, McGirr introduces us to some of the world's most famous people through their bedroom habits. Thomas Edison hated bed so much he invented light to chase away the night; Florence Nightingale spent more than half a century in bed; Charles Dickens had a nocturnal affair with London.McGirr, who has moved from Gunning to Melbourne in recent years to work and complete the book, is currently teaching high school boys who he thinks are living an Orwellian nightmare of constant light. "I'm teaching exhausted boys who are texting each other at 1am," he says.So for Year 11 English he makes them work with pencils and paper, which sparks groans at first but invariably leads to better results and a more positive experience by the year's end.

They are not quite as restless.Exploring and encouraging rest was one of the motivations for the book, another was the growing family. The family's first son Benedict was not an only child for long before being joined by twins Jacob and Clare, so there was much sleep not to be had."Part of the humour is the celebration of having the little people in the house and three people under the age of two," he says. "I wanted to remember and celebrate that time."The dressing as pirates, the years where Peter Pan dominated not only the children's imaginations but McGirr's conflicting desire for them to grow up yet forever be young, are celebrated along with examples of the cute things that children do."The book would never have happened except that we suddenly had three children under two, including twins, and I discovered the meaning of sleep in its absence," McGirr explains."Our eldest is about to turn six which I think is nearly the age to stop telling the world all the wonderful things he says. But honestly, Benny is in his first year at school. I have recently watched him write his name for the first time. It was magic. He so carefully wrote the B. Next he laboured over the E. Then he looked at me and asked, 'Daddy, do the mountains come next?' How could I not want to share a moment like that?' The Lost Art of Sleep by Michael McGirr is available through Picador.