Seven years of dreaming
Live to ninety and you will have slept for thirty years and dreamt for seven. Nobody knows exactly why.
On a children’s page from 2003 is the sum I had never done. You sleep about eight hours out of twenty-four. Reach ninety and you will have slept almost thirty years. A quarter of that time you were dreaming. Over seven years of dreams, it says — imagine everything that can happen in there.
I write here about food, about the market, about the conversation at the table. About the third part of a life I have never written a word, which is a strange omission for someone who claims that health consists of skills.
What I liked most about the piece was its honesty. It explains that a child sleeps longer because during sleep the brain makes a substance called growth hormone, that bones lengthen and muscles strengthen, and that this continues until you are eighteen. So sleeping really is very important, it says. And then, without ceremony: but it is still not clear why you get sleepy, and why it is absolutely impossible to stay awake. In other words, it is still a mystery.
That was written in 2003 and, with all the scans and models of the decades since, it is still not untrue. We now know a great deal more about what happens during sleep: the clearing of waste from the brain, the fixing of memories, the repair of tissue. We still do not really know why an animal that sleeps, and therefore lies defenceless for hours, won out in evolution over one that does not.
What I take from that is an attitude, not a piece of advice. In the health world sleep is now treated as a performance: a score on a ring, a percentage of deep sleep, a window within which you must go to bed. That is the same movement I resist in the kitchen, where measuring takes the place of doing.
The children’s page does it differently. Bedtime, eyes closed, a few yawns, easy breathing. You get drowsy of your own accord and drift off, while someone tucks you in.
Thirty years of your life, and the best description of it is in a piece for eight-year-olds.
Source: “Zeven jaar dromen”, NRC Handelsblad, Cultureel Supplement, Friday 24 January 2003, illustration Olivia Ettema.