International Journal of Polities, Culture and Society, Vol. 6, No.

3, 1993

Unconsciousness and Society:

The Sociology of Sleep
Brian Taylor

Sociology is concerned with only two-thirds of the lives of its human

subjects and has systematically ignored one-third of them either as sources
of data or as occasions for theorizing. Such an initial exaggeration has, I
hope, despite its admitted crassness, a serious intention. My purpose is to
direct attention, albeit speculatively, to the question of how a sociologist
might approach a topic which is, for once, quite literally a 'taken-for-
g r a n t e d , c o m m o n - s e n s e f e a t u r e of e v e r y d a y life', the a p p a r e n t l y
a-sociological phenomenon of unconsciousness, the unsurprising human
habit of sleeping, or at least of wanting to sleep, for several hours of every
night of all of our lives. Of course, the elementary objections to such an
enterprise appear, at least at first, fairly convincing. Sociology, after all,
despite its multifarious definitions and its all-embracing, even imperialistic,
disciplinary tendencies is concerned, following the recommendation of H.
Stuart H u g h e s - - a s useful as any that have followed i t - - a t its most basic
level with the relationship between individual consciousness and social
structure. Any interest in the social dimensions of sleep would therefore
seem to deny even the possibility of any sensible sociological comment.
Sleep would seem to be one genuine example, death being the other, of
an arguably non-social experience characterized by a lack of individual in-
tention and as such situated beyond the intellectual reach of a discipline
more involved with the structural constraints on and 'unintended conse-
quences' of the rational action of individual members of society. Even the
language conventionally used in describing s l e e p - - ' f a l l i n g asleep', 'drop-
ping off', 'dead to the w o r l d ' - - w o u l d seem to emphasize this lack, not
only of social control but of individual volition. The question might then
be posed, not so much of what sociology can say about sleep, as what has
sociology to do with sleep at all, given its apparently essential 'asocial in-
action'? It is tempting to suggest that this very reluctance of the topic to

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9 1993 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

464 Taylor

yield immediately to sociological analysis might itself serve as a challenge.

A social science which can assist in the understanding of practices conven-
tionally labeled asocial, even anti-social, is a discipline which has undeniably
expanded its explanatory powers. There is, however, a less hubristic motive
for wishing to address this sociologically extraordinary if socially mundane
topic, and this concerns its conceptualization more as a culturally-defined
and influenced practice than as an extra-sociological experience. Without
wishing to adopt the somewhat jaded jargon of ethnomethodology, there
is some benefit to be gained from shifting the common-sense notion of
'being asleep' to the more sociologically amenable one of 'doing sleeping'.
Even if sleep cannot be presented entirely convincingly as a social practice,
it might at least be admitted that the language in which it is discussed, and
the cultural constraints on what we may call its motives, meanings and
m e t h o d s - - t h e 'discourse of dormancy' if you l i k e - - a r e genuinely socio-
logical concerns and do bring these aspects of an everyday, or perhaps more
properly every night, event into the sociological domain. Prior to embarking
on such a speculative exercise, however, some introductory caveats will be
required.
Even a cursory examination of the hugely increasing literature in what
has come to be called 'sleep research' over the past few decades reveals a
dominant interest in its physiological and medical aspects. Apart from some
data on the commonly-observed relationship between age and sleep, there
is little in the way of clues for any entry-point for sociological interest in
the subject. There is little mention of the topic in the journals and abstracts
of the discipline itself, and even an issue of Current Sociology on 'the so-
ciology of everyday life' disdains to mention the subject. Indeed, there is
more material of substance to stimulate sociological curiosity about sleep
as a social phenomenon in the poet Walter de la Mare's ever-relevant 1939
anthology Behold this Dreamer, with its gratifyingly all-encompassing sub-
title 'Of reverie, night, sleep, dream, love-dreams, nightmare, death, the
unconscious, the imagination, divination, the artist and kindred subjects'.
Much of the existing natural-scientific research is devoted, naturally
enough, to such matters as variations in sleep patterns, sleep pathologies
and encephalographic recording of brain activity during sleep. Running
through these particular concerns is the larger question of the biological
functions of sleep, the business of what sleep is actually for in the first
place. Whether the suggested answers are couched in terms of metabolic
rates, with those of humans differing from those of and hence also the
sleep requirements of mice or elephants, for example, or whether they con-
centrate on the idea of sleep as a 'cover', or biologically-imposed 'vehicle',
for the more important necessity of dreaming, the questions are posed in
'what' t e r m s - - w h a t is sleep for, what forms does it take, etc. If, in place
Unconsciousness and Society 465

of these large 'what' and 'why' questions, we ask instead how, when and
where people sleep, and perhaps even the ever-interesting 'with whom',
then we have the beginnings at least of enquiries which are more socio-
logical in their motives and their methodology. My first caveat is, then, one
that is reasonably familiar to social scientists--sociological answers only
come from asking sociological questions. My second caveat is a more nega-
tive one, and is intended to rule out of court for this investigation at least
the interesting, but very well-documented, area of dreams and dream con-
tents. My interest here is with the topic of sleep and not in the phenomenon
of dreaming and even if each may be considered necessary for the other,
there is nevertheless an important empirical distinction to be drawn be-
tween them. At a stroke, then, is obviated the need even to consider the
whole area of dream analysis, as discussed at great and fascinating length
by philosophers and psychologists from Descartes to Freud and beyond. I
would suspect in any case that the Freudian interpretive paradigm is now
so firmly established in this context that any sociological attempt to present
dreams in anything other than a symbolic framework is unlikely to convince.
Against this, I would only hint that, despite the emphasis in the documen-
tary literature on Freudian and Jungian dream 'meanings', much anecdotal
evidence exists to suggest that more people recall dreaming of more so-
ciologically-relevant subjects as their job, their family and the past day's
experiences than ever record dreaming in classically Freudian imagery or
Jungian archetypes! With these two recommendations and restrictions in
mind, then, let us consider what sociology might have to say about sleep,
beginning with its correlation with some familiar sociological variables.

THE SOCIAL DISTRIBUTION OF SLEEP:

AGE, GENDER AND SOCIAL CLASS
It is a common, and clearly common-sense, observation that sleep,
its frequency, length, quality and consequences of doing without, is related
to age. Babies spent a greater proportion of their time asleep than do old
people. Eight-year-olds don't want to go to sleep but can, eighty-year-olds
do want to but find it more difficult, or at least less necessary. At an ele-
mentary level, sociological hypotheses could be formulated to test the
relationship of this 'biological given' with such social factors as school
hours, so that children who rise earlier might benefit from a 'continental'
school day, beginning early and finishing early rather more than their adult
teachers, for whom a six-thirty start might carry with it other 'blue-collar'
of non-professional working practice, risk of arriving late, etc. The growing
literature on aging refers also to the apparent 'unfairness' felt by many
retired people who find a desire for rest after a lifetime's work frustrated
466 Taylor

by longer waking hours. All this is fairly obvious and, arguably, of no great
excitement. Concepts derived from more interactionist sociologies are, how-
ever, of more direct relevance, especially those ideas clustered around the
public/private distinction and the notion, odd sounding though it may in-
itially seem, of sleep as an interaction between observer and observed. One
might postulate, for example, that sleep becomes more private and less
'interactive' as age increases. The sleep of babies, we may say, is necessarily
an observed activity. Whether this happens though the medium of the bed-
room intercom or the more culturally-prized image of mother literally
'watching over' the sleeping child, the idea of small childrens' sleep being
accessible to others as an acceptable object of observation--'come in an
see baby sleeping', etc - - renders it a relatively more public activity than
that of older people. A necessary rite de passage of growing up is therefore
the right to be first left alone unobserved when sleeping, and then achieving
the right to go to sleep at a time, if not for a period, of one's own choosing.
Few adults, therefore, have their sleep observed in this way except, inter-
estingly enough, during those periods of medical or other institutional-
ization which interactionist sociology indicates as regenerating childlike
status in their adult inmates. Part of the experience of being in hospital,
or indeed in prison is of having one's sleep inadvertently, and often delib-
erately, observed by others, a situation not usually encountered since one's
own childhood. Again, documentary texts on the aging process often refer
to institutionalized old peoples' complaint of a 'lack of privacy'. One com-
ponent of such denials of privacy is the ability, power and authority of
others, of strangers, to 'look in' when residents are asleep. The reversion
to child-status, and the likely shame that accompanies this unwanted proc-
ess, might have a class or status dimension as well as an age-related one.
Part of the business of one section of society 'looking down' on another
involves the necessarily public sleep of the homeless. Bag-women, tramps,
teenage runaways, the entire urban tribe of street-dwellers are commonly
observed, stepped over, walked around, when 'privately' asleep in public
space. It is difficult for higher status groups not to 'look down' on urban
street dwellers if they are asleep on the sidewalk. Many sociologists have
commented on the necessity of privacy for the maintenance of civilized
social life, and sleep, for adults, is that activity most usually protected by
privacy. Special p l a c e s - - beds, special r o o m s - - bedrooms 2 8M~ even spe-
cial clothes, what de la Mare calls the 'uniform of sleep', all serve to
demarcate the sleeper as most physically vulnerable, least socially active
and hence afforded the status of private person par excellence. If this pri-
vacy is withdrawn, adult status is threatened and the sleeper reverts to that
of other such relatively powerless people, babies and patients, who also
have no say in the matter of who may publicly observe them when they
Unconsciousness and Society 467

are privately asleep. There is a more obvious class dimension related to

sleep and this again concerns the public/private distinction but at the other
extreme of the scale of social status. For example, a furor erupted some
years ago in Britain over the discovery of an intruder in the Queen's bed-
room. The scandal, initially about security, was given added piquancy by
the revelation, reported by an apparently perplexed tabloid Press that the
Queen of England slept in a single bed of her own, in a separate room of
her own, and that Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Queen's
husband habitually slept elsewhere in Buckingham Palace. The curiosity
behind this story indicates part of the problem for any sociologist interested
in the social distribution of sleep. One possible surmise is that as the ability
to command privacy in domestic affairs increases with socio-economic
status, it is then hardly surprising to find that married members of the up-
per classes are more likely to make private sleeping arrangements than
those elsewhere on the scale of social status. It is the tenement dweller
who, living five to a room, would find sleeping alone an impossible luxury.
It is in the bedrooms of penthouses and palaces where we might expect to
find single sleeping as a mark of economic achievement. Another point
here, and one which again draws on the unexpectedly available data on
Royal sleeping habits, relates the correlation of social class and sleeping
time- tables. Some years ago, Queen Elizabeth's State visit to Morocco was
thrown into some confusion because of a strict rule governing the sleeping
habits of that country's King Hassan, who had been invited to the State
banquet given in his honor. As it was unheard of for the King's private
bedroom to be entered by any commoner to wake the monarch before his
sleep had come to its natural end, the Queen was left waiting for some
hours for her guest's eventual arrival, an affront to Royal protocol certainly,
but a fascinating insight into the curious correlation between the public
and private dimensions of social class and time operating in high status
groups! Time and status may also be said to operate with reference to
gender as a correlate for sleep patterning. It would be interesting to specu-
late from the commonly-accepted notion of gender relations as indicative
of wider inequalities of power. The question of whether females' sleep is
considered less important than that of males' could be operationalized
through a simple research project designed to discover which married part-
ner, for example, is less likely to have their sleep broken by such necessities
as ringing telephones, crying babies, or burglars. Of course, these hypothe-
sized relationships of sleep to age, gender and class are simplistic enough
when presented in this preliminary way. There are, perhaps, more complex
ways of examining the sociological dimensions of sleep and these ought to
involve consideration of the wider cultural context. We might proceed from
the social distribution of sleep, in other words, to some investigation of the
468 Taylor

definitions and meanings conventionally attributed to it and to some other

cognate areas of cultural life.

SOCIO-CULTURAL DEFINITIONS OF SLEEP:

SLEEP, SEX AND DEATH
I have suggested that a large part of the scientific literature on sleep
is concerned with its physiological and pathological aspects. It is curious
that if a search of the social-scientific literature were taken as a guide for
a sub-disciplinary location for its sociological research, then it would most
probably be considered a suitable topic for the growing area of leisure studies.
Despite its often-repeated aspect as a 'biological imperative', many respon-
dents, asked what they do or intend to do with their leisure time, either
in terms of weekends, vacations, or retirement offer sleeping both as an
acceptable and a desirable leisure pursuit. Without extending such ideas
into the realms of historical sociology, it's probable that such an initial con-
ceptualization of sleep as leisure is only possible for groups in a society
which have attained a certain level of social and economic development.
A hard-working peasantry, by contrast, is less likely to define sleep as
leisure but more as rest after, and a respite from, exhausting labor. Again,
another perspective is offered by the responses of athletes and exam can-
didates, for whom 'a good night's sleep' is considered necessary as a
preparation for some important later activity. The way in which sleep is
commonsensically conceived will depend on an individual's social location
and their economic function. As is often the case, poets have made this
point more elegantly than any sociologist, and Sir Philip Sidney neatly
catches this idea in his invocation to 'Sleepe, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting-place of wit, the balme of woe The poore man's wealth, the
prisoner's release, Th'indifferent judge betweene the high and low." And
if innocent sleep is, in Shakespeare's famous lines "Sleep that knits up the
ravell'd sleave of care, The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
balm of hurt m i n d s . . . " , then we are at least informed that Macbeth's life
was undoubtedly one full of cares for sleep to be considered a temporary
cure for them. These are, then, contingent influences on the meanings at-
tached to sleep. A n o t h e r approach to the question of definition is by
relating it to those apparently unconnected areas with which sleep has been
traditionally, if depressingly, associated. Phrases associated with sleep are
often found in common discussion of sex and death. 'Sleeping with', 'sleep-
ing a r o u n d ' and such cognate cliches hardly refer to the unconscious
inactivity of sleep but quite literally to their opposite! Given the relatively
recent incorporation into the vocabulary of phrases explicitly linking sex
and sleep, clearly through the link of their shared setting, it's worth
Unconsciousness and Society 469

considering how that linkage, certainly in the case of unmarried couples,

can only come about in a social context which permits such individuals
both privacy and the permission to use as a setting for sexual activity. Ex-
tended family networks, with their pressure on bed-space, can hardly have
permitted such luxury, and the linguistic link with sex, again as mediated
by poets and novelists, is more usually the arcadian one of 'bowers of bliss'
for would-be lovers of high status, and 'tumbles in the hay' for others less
amorously privileged. It would be an intriguing exercise to investigate the
social history of the domestic bed in terms of its cultural iconography. Ex-
amination of the shift away from its use as a place for giving birth and as
its common use as a shared sleeping space towards its modern use as a
private site for sleeping and for sex would, in addition to its intrinsic in-
terest, indicate how, despite unlikely initial prospects, a sociological account
of sleep and the ways in which it has been defined and discussed could be
constructed. Running through any historically and culturally-situated influ-
ences on sites for sleeping is, however, a more permanent link, made by
many cultures at many times, between sleep, considered as a trans-social
state of being, and death. Tombstone inscriptions may be relevant data
here, especially in the case of children, who are commonly claimed not to
be so much dead as 'just sleeping'. Again, relevant and useful quotations
are very numerous here. From the optimistic Christianity of Sir Thomas
Browne's "These are my drowsy days; in vain I do now wake to sleep again;
O come that hour, when ! shall never Sleep again, but wake for ever" to
Emily Bronte's rather more depressing "Sleep brings no wish to fret, My
harrased heart beneath; My only wish is to forget In endless sleep of
death", the linked themes of sleep and death have proved irresistible to
moralists and even to film-makers. One of the more curious aspects of the
hugely-successful 'Freddie' films--Nightmare on E l m Street and its follow-
u p s - - is that the hynophobia at the center of the plot is based not so much
on a fear of nightmares, as disturbing dreams, but on the more horrific
fear of the supposedly real consequences of falling a s l e e p - - a fatal
encounter with a murdered child-molester. Sleep has often been metaphori-
cally associated with death; only Hollywood could succeed in making money
from manipulating the fear that sleep itself might actually cause death.
There is no great difficulty in understanding this repeated association with
sleep and death, the apparent similarities are too great, with the same sense
of individual's being 'beyond' the reach of mundane social reality. Unlike
death, however, about which Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed little could be
meaningfully said as it was a process which we do not 'live through', sleep
is a temporally bounded phenomenon and there are consequently many
ways in which it has been specifically talked about. That analysis has not
ordinarily been undertaken by social scientists, and yet the insights of
470 Taylor

novelists provide much interesting material for any sociology attuned to

the 'meanings of the margins' of social life. The 'Watchman, What of the
Night?' chapter in Djuna Barnes' 1936 novel Nightwood contains the ele-
gant assertion that "I used to t h i n k . . , that people just went to sleep, or
if they did not go to sleep that they were themselves, but now . . . I see
that the night does something to a person's identity, even when asleep".
Again, the exquisite phenomenology of the opening pages of Swann's Way,
the first volume, of Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, be-
ginning with the words "For a long time I used to go to bed early" provide
an excellent introduction to what might be rather more inelegantly be called
the philosophical sociology of sleep. Prior to these abstruse considerations,
though, one last area in which a sociologist might find something to say
about sleep concerns the notion of discourse, the ways in which people
talk about sleep in social interaction and, crucially, exploit that talk for
purposes of social interaction.

SLEEP AND THE SOCIAL USES OF SOCIAL INACTION

Social historians of gender relations often mention the ways in which
'respectable' ladies would make use of impending unconsciousness--
having a 'dizzy spell' or even actually fainting in public, to bring to a
sudden and perfectly acceptable end their involvement in a social setting
no longer agreeable to them. The ploy had the pleasant effect of trans-
forming the sufferer's boredom into a concentrated attention to their
immediate medical needs necessary for their desired removal from the
scene, all carried out without any intimation of anti-social behavior. There
is a reasonable surmise that sleep, and its necessity, may have taken over
from the rather less acceptable social uses of fainting, as what might be
termed one of the conscious uses of unconsciousness. Claiming that one
'has to be up early in the morning' can terminate an evening social
gathering without embarrassment and, importantly, any possibility of the
truth of the claim having to be tested. The need for sleep, then, as a
preparation for tomorrow's events, can be safely exploited as a device for
bringing to a premature end a social activity of the previous evening
considered unendurable or simply boring. Whereas a bald assertion that
the activity or its participants has become 'tiring' would risk social censure,
the sleep requirements of the supposedly busy may have much the same
effect as that afforded the fainting fit of Victorian ladies with apologies,
understanding, acceptably swift removal from the scene and perhaps even
envy. Sleep, then, may be socially inactive, but talk about sleep can have
its undeniably social uses. Similarly, claims about the amount and quality
of sleep can carry subtle messages about social status. Successful
Unconsciousness and Society 471

executives lay stress on the short a m o u n t of sleep which their hectic

schedules allow and there are fascinating aspects to the literature on
unemployment which suggests that individuals who are initially able to
sleep late nevertheless attempt to keep to the sleeping timetables of their
previous working lives. The framework provided by such timetables is an
important bulwark of personal identity in the newly unemployed. Sleep,
in short, has social uses and carries social meanings.
These brief notes have attempted, albeit speculatively, to suggest that,
despite initial impressions, social scientists may, after all, have something
to say about a feature of social life so common, so mundane and so eve-
ryday to have largely evaded serious sociological interest. Admittedly, this
indifference may have arisen because the discipline has had more serious
subjects to consider and more pressing matters to concern itself with. Yet,
as Samuel Johnson reminds us, our curiosity ought to be aroused if only
because "sleep is a state in which a great part of every life is passed" but
that perhaps because of this, "nature has taken sufficient care that theory
shall have little influence on practice" and the 'speculatist', not content
with superficial views, "harasses himself with fruitless curiosity, and still as
he enquires more, perceives only that he knows less". Sociologists, no less
than other intellectual enquirers, ought at least to agree with the wisdom
of that ambition. A final, less serious note, is sounded by the poet Robert
Southey's recollection of the soporific effects of some of his undergraduate
lecturers, whose "manner, the matter, even the very atmosphere" served
to induce slumber. The drowsy image of the student "who when by strong
effort, lifted up his head and forced open the reluctant eyes never failed
to see all around him asleep", serves as a cautionary reminder. No matter
what sociology may have to say about sleep, many generations of its stu-
dents can at least attest to the remarkable success which some of their
lecturers have had in inducing it!