Why is it called beauty sleep?

“Sleep,” I muttered from under my blanket and pillow, “I know I forsook you when I was a child, but I yearn for you today, so much.” Who, after all, doesn’t like to sleep? Yes, hardly anyone... and some people live to sleep, don’t they? You know them, they always must be, usually virtually, but sometimes actually, dragged from the ‘pit,’ kicking and screaming. There’s one in every house! But maybe we should accord them more latitude, as Caesar did, saying, “He is a dreamer. Let us leave him.”

Dreams are weird toys, aren’t they? Antigonus, in ‘The Winter’s Tale’ surely thought so. The great unfinished symphonies of our modest lives, our dreams see us achieve mightily, fail spectacularly, and mirroring life I guess, we find they, like Groundhog Day (Remember Bill Murray and Punxsutawney Phil?) are re-occurring, and the same situations tend to revisit us, frustratingly unresolved. America’s National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Strokes, tells us that our dreams occupy us for up to two hours a night, so it’s no wonder we wake up tired, and like Caliban, in ‘The Tempest,’ thought “When I waked, I cried (I wanted) to dream again.”

The mighty William Shakespeare found time to dream, and at length, to ponder their influence on our lives through ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ where he wondered what it is to be human in the guise of Puck, who spoke of “slumbers, while visions appeared,” as naught but a dream, inconsequential. Or Hamlet’s “To die, to sleep – to sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there's the rub, for in this sleep of death what(ever) dreams may come...” as he ponders whether sleep will be easier than life? Or the Tempest’s inimitable Prospero saying “We are all made of dreams, and our life stretches from sleep before birth, to sleep after death.

We do seem to need sleep, and life does seem to be better after a sleep, but considering we spend around a quarter (for some, more) of our lives doing it, we don’t know much about it, do we? And quoth Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” And the bard’s philosophies on the longest sleep, ensure we know that of that little we know, we find much to consider, as Hamlet again contemplated its possibilities saying, “To die, to sleep – to sleep – perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause,” or at least something, to think about.

The romance of dreams and sleep is never far away, that romance perpetuated in Sonnet 43’s beautiful, haunting, “All days are nights to see till I see thee, and the nights bright days, when dreams do show me thee.” What more could one ask of sleep, of dreams? Indeed, Leontes, in ‘Much Ado About Nothing,’ tells us of her daughter’s saying, “she hath often dreamed of unhappiness and waked herself with laughing.” However, even in literature, the realities of life, its pressures and demands, stay contrary to all hearts and roses, at least for ‘Merchants of Venice,’ among whom Shylock muttered, “Look to my house. I am right loath to go: There is some ill a-brewing towards my rest, for I dreamed of moneybags to-night.”

Closer to home, those who don’t have to must find it incredibly comfortable to hear their other half getting ready for work, as they snuggle just a little lower, and cuddle their pillow a little tighter. Me, I just subscribe to the teachings of Kobi Yamada, who says, “Follow your dreams, they know the way.” I hear you Kobi, but to follow my dreams I need to go back to sleep, so I just go back to bed... “Forsooth, if ye tell the dream, and the expounding thereof, its rewards, gifts, and much honour... then tell me the dream (Daniel 2:6),” and let me share in it. It may even be worth waking up for.