quotations about sleep
There, in the depths of sleep, is the communion of the living and the dead.
GENNADY AYGI
Veronica's Book
Even sleep is characteristic. How charming are children in their lovely innocence! How angel-like their blooming hue! How painful and anxious is the sleep and expression in the countenance of the guilty!
KARL WILHELM HUMBOLDT
attributed, Day's Collacon
I don't know if you've ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That's why I'm trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Sleep delays my life (get up, get up)
R.E.M.
"Get Up"
Sleep is so like death, I dare not trust it without my prayers.
THOMAS BROWNE
Religio Medici
How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads, to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
Our sleep is like a rollercoaster going through 90 minutes of sleep cycles, starting in deep sleep and then light sleep ... going across the night. That deep sleep stage is the period where the conscious part of the brain -- the upper part of the brain -- is least activated. If you wake up and are quite confused as to what time it is, where you are, or who your friend is that just woke you up, you're likely to have woken up out of the deeper stages of sleep.
LEON LACK
"Sleep is like a rollercoaster which may contribute to waking up confused", ABC News, August 11, 2017
Close your eyes and you will see
Microflashing neon lights
Open your eyes and you will see
It still looks like the same thing
Lie and wait for sleep and listen
To your heart beat too fast for sleep
Close your eyes and you will see
The sound-a-sleep
BLONDIE
"Sound Asleep"
I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people's sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
The great modification which the act of awakening effects in us is not so much that of ushering us into the clear life of consciousness, as that of making us lose all memory of the slightly more diffused light in which our mind had been resting, as in the opaline depths of the sea. The tide of thought, half veiled from our perception, on which we were still drifting a moment ago, kept us in a state of motion perfectly sufficient to enable us to refer to it by the name of wakefulness. But then our actual awakenings produce an interruption of memory. A little later we describe these states as sleep because we no longer remember them.
MARCEL PROUST
The Guermantes Way
For six months I couldn't sleep. With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Fight Club
I go to bed, and I wait for sleep as a man might wait for the executioner. I wait for its coming with dread, and my heart beats and my legs tremble, while my whole body shivers beneath the warmth of the bedclothes, until the moment when I suddenly fall asleep, as a man throws himself into a pool of stagnant water in order to drown. I do not feel this perfidious sleep coming over me as I used to, but a sleep which is close to me and watching me, which is going to seize me by the head, to close my eyes and annihilate me.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
"The Horla"
My bones wish to escape
And run along an alien expanse
To collapse from the heat
In a cartoonish heap
To sleep oh to sleep
SPARKLEHORSE
"Box of Stars"
Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.
AUDREY NIFFENEGGER
The Time Traveler's Wife
A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
The Professor
Of all the things a man may do, sleep probably contributes most to keeping him sane. It puts brackets about each day. If you do something foolish or painful today, you get irritated if somebody mentions it, today. If it happened yesterday, though, you can nod or chuckle, as the case may be. You've crossed through nothingness or dream to another island in Time.
ROGER ZELAZNY
Isle of the Dead
Blessed sleep, kindest minister to man,
Sure and silent distiller of the balm of rest,
Having alone the power, when naught else can,
To soothe the torn and sorrow-ridden breast.
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON
"Blessed Sleep"
Good night, sleep tight
Don't let the bedbugs bite.
But if they do, take your little shoe
And beat them black and blue.
ANONYMOUS
"Good Night, Sleep Tight"
Far from a passive state of being dead-to-the-world, sleep is part of a complex neurological rhythm that we can condition ourselves to. Much as an exercise regime conditions the muscles, establishing a sleep routine trains the brain to undo the stresses of the day.
RICHARD E. CYTOWIC
"Four Ways to More Restful Sleep", Psychology Today, August 24, 2017
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.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet