DORMIR - PERCHANCE TO DREAM

 

“To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub,” Hamlet tells us, with his usual gift for turning a simple human activity into a metaphysical problem. Sleep, it seems, is never just sleep.

How many hours should we sleep? Six? Seven? Eight? Nobody quite agrees. What does seem clear is that people like sleeping a lot—or at least, they like talking about it. Both Spanish and English offer a generous range of expressions to describe sleeping more than what is considered normal, whatever normal may be.

Spanish, for instance, is particularly imaginative. One can dormir a pierna suelta, or sleep como un lirón, una marmota, un santo, un bendito, un leño, un tronco, un ceporro, or simply profundamente. The sleeper is likened, variously, to animals, holy figures, and large, immobile objects—none of them especially alert.

English is no less resourceful. One may sleep like a log, sleep soundly, or sleep like a baby, a top, a rock, a princess, the dead, or a stone. Here, too, the imagery ranges from the tender to the inert, from fairy-tale royalty to geological matter.

Different metaphors, different cultural flavours—but the same underlying human desire: to sleep long, sleep well, and sleep without interruption. Perhaps that, rather than the precise number of hours, is the real rub.