Читать книгу Counting Sheep: The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams - Paul Martin - Страница 10

Like all other forms of pleasure, sleep may become a passion.

Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste (1825)

Sleep is far more than just a biological necessity. It is also a neglected source of pleasure. Consider this. Activities that are biologically important for survival and reproduction tend to be enjoyable: think of sex, or eating, or drinking, or being successful. Pleasure is one of nature’s ways of ensuring that animals do enough of the right things. Whatever happened to sleep? It is clearly essential for survival, and yet for many people it is merely a maintenance activity that brings little positive enjoyment. They sleep because they have to rather than because they want to.

In some respects, sleep has acquired the dismal status that eating had in post-war Britain, where austerity and a cultural blind spot reduced the culinary arts to a joyless act of refuelling. Bland, fatty food was daily shovelled in to keep the boilers stoked, with scant attention paid to its preparation or enjoyment. Fortunately, Britain has since developed more enlightened (if not self-indulgent) attitudes to food, and recent decades have witnessed cooking and eating emerge as pleasurable activities in their own right. For some people in wealthy nations, cooking and eating have become more a form of entertainment than a biological function.

Meanwhile, sleep is mired in the cultural equivalent of a 1950s British canteen meal: an inadequate and faintly unhealthy affair, indifferently concocted and consumed with more haste than enjoyment. Too many people regard sleep as the brain’s equivalent of fast food or overboiled cabbage. If gastronomy is ‘the reasoned comprehension of everything connected with the nourishment of man’, as it was originally defined, then should we not start thinking about sleep in the same way? I hope that by the end of this book you will be pondering the gourmet delights of sleeping, napping and dreaming, and starting to savour more of their lost pleasures for yourself.