SLEEP: BEDTIME READING

SLEEP: BEDTIME READING
Robert Peacock and Roger Gorman
New York: Universe Publishing, 1998
96 pages, 45 illustrations, hardcover, $19.95
ISBN 0-7893-0112-1

Reviewed by Lynne Lamberg

"Hearing people talk about their sleeping habits is a little like hearing them talk about their digestion. An unexpected note of pride creeps in, as if the person doing the talking were his own prize county-fair steer.... The only individuals who seem content are the ones who cheerfully announce how little sleep they need, and they are often making it up."

These wry observations come from an essay, Sleep, by Verlyn Klinkenborg, who teaches creative writing at Harvard, in a book that amply fulfills the promise of its title. It is terrific bedtime reading, and there is plenty in it that bears rereading, especially if you like to read just a page or two before turning off the lights.

It includes poems, stories, essays, and song lyrics by a dazzling array of contemporary writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Alice Walker, Paul Auster, Jules Shear, and some 30 others.

Here is John Updike on the trials of getting comfortable in bed: "The spirit has infinite facets, but the body confiningly few sides. There is the left, the right, the back, the belly, and the tempting in-betweens, northeasts, and northwests, that tip the heart and soon pinch circulation in one or another arm."

Andrei Codrescu frets over insomnia. "It isn't fair: I, who am a worshiper of dreams, am locked out of the kingdom of dreams, while others, who have neither the vision nor the skill to fully tend their dreams, get to roll like pigs in the treasures of the moon goddess."

Photos by William Wegman, Mary Ellen Mark, Laura Levine, Tim Rollins, and other noted photographers include a cherubic baby blissfully asleep, Rene Magritte dozing on his couch in coat and tie, and many surreal dreamscapes.

In the last essay, Fran Lebowitz makes us grin. "I love sleep because it is both pleasant and safe to use. Pleasant because one is in the best possible company and safe because sleep is the consummate protection against the unseemliness that is the invariable consequence of being awake. What you don't know won't hurt you. Sleep is death without the responsibility."