As babies and toddlers, rays of sun seeping through a window wake us up in a matter of seconds. In high school, some of us are zombie-like teenagers that drag our feet to class. Later in life, our options narrow down to two: either you are an owl or a lark.

Ever had trouble sleeping? I do. Sleep always escapes my mind. But why?

Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff writer for The New Yorker, answered my two initial questions in “Up All Night,” an article about the science of sleeplessness.

Kolbert begins the article by developing a narrative about Nathaniel Kleitman, the father of modern sleep research. Details about his life as an errant child and experimentation connect readers to Kleitman.

He set himself apart from other researchers by undertaking the sleep enigma — an unexplored research field at that time — while working as a professor at the University of Chicago.

For decades, he experimented with himself and others to such an extent nobody knew why he was attracted so much to the marginal topic of sleep deprivation. The theme was the every-day bread and coffee of his life.

Kleitman’s endeavors truly became a scientific field when one of his students, Eugene Aserinsky, stumbled upon a detail that changed history: rapid eye movement or REM sleep.

From there, the gates to the “dawn of the golden age of golden research” opened.

In the same way Kleitman conducted extreme tests on his body and mind, Kolbert becomes the guinea pig of her own story. She teases readers by writing about her experience at Albany’s Sleep Disorders Centers.

I find this sui generis because journalists often consider an ethical dilemma whenever they might become involved in a story.

As the discourse says,

Journalists should not get caught in a story.

Anyway, Kolbert doesn’t care, and in a Bukowski-like narrative, though less acidic but still empirical, she details her experience:

At around 10 P.M., a technician came to fetch me. She measured my head from various directions—front to back, side to side—and began attaching electrodes: three on the back of my scalp, two on each temple, three more on my chin, two on each leg, and two on my chest.

At one point, I scratched one of them off; the technician, who was monitoring my many data streams, immediately showed up to plug it back in. I decided that, since I was doing this more out of curiosity than clinical need, I could take the tube out of my nose. The technician disagreed.

Empiricism details one’s knowledge comes from experience. Well, this is the style writers of old used, one which made Kerouac, Burroughs and many others famous in the last half-century.

They wrote about what they knew and expanded it through their imagination, demonstrating their talent as storytellers. If something was not known, they went to experience it.

Hopefully, this approach will never die as long as I’m alive.

Ultimately, Kolbert’s experience at the clinic left her with more questions than answers (Does it ring a bell?).

Meanwhile, as researches try to uncover that “strangeness that unnerves” us about sleep, I’ll keep some of the article’s findings in mind.

David K. Randall states that people “sleep better when given their own bed.”

Yet, as Neil Stanley, sleep researcher at the University of Surrey, often likes to say:

There’s only one good reason to share a mattress.

Photo credit: Tore My Heart Out