On Sleep

From Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep-- In his preface, Dement refers to sleep as "the 'short death' we call sleep." What is he quoting? Is that just a colloquialism, or is it a full-blown quote?

"In Czarist Russia, the nobility usually went to bed with a small pillow called a doumka-- which means, the one you tell your thoughts to." -- from Sleep Positions, by Samuel Dunkell, M.D.

Thomas Hobbes "did much of his thinking in bed, and is reported to have scribbled his ideas and mathematical formulae on the bedsheets and even on his own thighs." -- Sleep Positions, Dunkell.

"Many tribal cultures have specific taboos about disturbing the sleeping mat of a person who is away on a hunt or at war, fearing that the spirit will not have a place to return to and that the hunter will therefore die." -- Sleep Positions, Dunkell, M.D.

According to Dr. Dunkell, Guy de Maupassant writes, "The bed, my friend, is our whole life. It is there that we are born, it is there that we love, it is there that we die." I don't recognize the quote. If the source is familiar to anyone who reads this, please let me know. I would try emailing Dr. Dunkell, but judging by when his book went to press, my guess is that he has already been dead for a few years. I'm laying odds of 50,000 to 1 on this one-- not on Dr. Dunkell's being alive, but instead, on the probability that somebody will both read this and know from where the good doctor gets his quote.

"In past centuries, the nobility often required a servant to get into bed before they did, acting as a human hors d'oeuvre long enough to satisfy the bedbugs' hunger, so that the noble could slip into bed and fall asleep undisturbed by the temporarily satiated tiny tormentors." -- Sleep Positions.

Says Dr. Dunkell-- laboratory tests have shown that sleep under glaring light conditions is neither as profound nor as refreshing. No cite given. This one may be worth researching . . .

"The good are those who content themselves with dreaming of what the wicked actually do." -- from Plato, by way of Self-Hypnosis (Melvin Powers); cite not given; also, I will give no excuse for reading this book.

"For those who are awake, only one world exists. During sleep, everyone returns to his own." -- from Heraclitus, by way of Self-Hypnosis.