Death’s brother
=================

* Gayle Greene

And there the children of dark Night have their dwellings, Sleep and Death, awful gods. The glowing Sun never looks upon them with his beams…. But Sleep roams peacefully over the earth and the sea’s broad back and is kindly to men; while Death has a heart of iron, and his spirit within him is pitiless as bronze: whomsoever of men he has once seized he holds fast: and he is hateful.

Hesiod, *Theogony* (*Origins of the Gods*), c 750-650 BC

![Figure1](http://www.cmaj.ca/https://www.cmaj.ca/content/cmaj/184/3/E203/F1.medium.gif)

[Figure1](http://www.cmaj.ca/content/184/3/E203/F1)

Image courtesy of © 2012 Thinkstock

> In the fables
> 
> they are twins,
> 
> *Hypnos* and *Thanatos,*
> 
> sons of Night.
> 
> She reigned
> 
> before light breathed
> 
> upon the waters,
> 
> before electricity,
> 
> that’s sure,
> 
> Darkness primordial,
> 
> a force to be reckoned with —
> 
> for besides
> 
> Sleep and Death,
> 
> Night brought
> 
> Doom into the world,
> 
> Strife and
> 
> Retribution:
> 
> What a brood!

> Sleep was the younger brother,
> 
> and as youngsters do,
> 
> he imitated his elder,
> 
> which is why
> 
> the sleeping and the dead
> 
> are look-alikes:
> 
> limbs slack,
> 
> mouths agape —
> 
> “sleeps like the dead,”
> 
> “dead to the world,”
> 
> we say of sleepers —
> 
> except that sleepers
> 
> wake back up.

> In the old paintings
> 
> *Hypnos* snoozes in a cave,
> 
> *Lethe*, the river of forgetfulness,
> 
> flows nearby,
> 
> while all about
> 
> nod poppies
> 
> (even then, humankind
> 
> knew about those poppies),
> 
> and I have seen him
> 
> depicted with wings
> 
> growing out of his head.
> 
> Why wings?
> 
> Perhaps because
> 
> he’s fleeting,
> 
> never deigns to stay
> 
> for long
> 
> (not with me, anyway),
> 
> whereas Death
> 
> holds you forever,
> 
> that iron grip of his.

> An altogether gentler deity
> 
> is *Hypnos*,
> 
> kinder to mortals,
> 
> yet no sacrificial altars
> 
> burn to him,
> 
> no voices rise in supplication,
> 
> no Orphic hymns,
> 
> as to his fierce twin —
> 
> and isn’t that always the way it goes?
> 
> The mower-down of men
> 
> gets cast in bronze,
> 
> the nice guy never gets
> 
> that kind of esteem.
> 
> I even hear it said,
> 
> “Sleep is for sissies,”
> 
> “You snooze, you lose” —
> 
> such disrespect!
> 
> (I guess
> 
> he does look a little silly,
> 
> those wings
> 
> sprouting out of his head.)

> But take care!
> 
> Sleep has powers
> 
> as mighty as his twin:
> 
> the way they
> 
> seize us,
> 
> spirit us away
> 
> to an underworld
> 
> that confounds all sense
> 
> of who we are —
> 
> for I can say, “I die,”
> 
> but if “I” am not there
> 
> to say it,
> 
> what “I” are we talking about?
> 
> And so it is with Sleep:
> 
> I am not “I” in sleep,
> 
> that “I”
> 
> I know myself to be,
> 
> conscious, cognizant, in control —
> 
> that self gets
> 
> checked at the mouth
> 
> of *Hypnos’* cave,
> 
> drowned in the waters of oblivion.

> But if death is an undiscovered
> 
> country
> 
> from which no traveller returns,
> 
> Sleep is a realm
> 
> from which we *do* return,
> 
> emerging dazed
> 
> into day’s light,
> 
> rubbing sleep from
> 
> crusted lids,
> 
> shuffling back into
> 
> our mortal coils,
> 
> knowing not
> 
> where we’ve been
> 
> nor how we were
> 
> transported
> 
> there or back,
> 
> nor *who* we were
> 
> in the time
> 
> we were away,
> 
> and the tales we return with
> 
> tell more about ourselves
> 
> than the regions we’ve traversed.

> And here’s the paradox:
> 
> that “I” —
> 
> that wakeful self
> 
> I pride myself on being,
> 
> *sapiens,* sentient, self-aware —
> 
> need this stupefaction:
> 
> without it,
> 
> I’m a tattered rag,
> 
> with Sleep,
> 
> I am myself again.

> Men of science
> 
> in these enlightened times
> 
> admit that they know
> 
> nothing,
> 
> neither the *how* of Sleep
> 
> nor the *why*.
> 
> They speculate it may be
> 
> gamma amino-butyric acid
> 
> in concert with
> 
> the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus
> 
> that >flips the switch,
> 
> their terms describe,
> 
> do not explain:

> They cannot tell us
> 
> what goes on
> 
> in *Hypnos*’ cave
> 
> that restores us
> 
> to ourselves
> 
> or say how Sleep
> 
> knits up
> 
> the ravelled sleeve of self —
> 
> They say
> 
> Sleep is a mystery.

> And so
> 
> Sleep is a province
> 
> as fit
> 
> for philosophers
> 
> with their imponderables,
> 
> and for poets
> 
> with their paradoxes,
> 
> as it is for scientists,
> 
> whose scrutiny
> 
> Sleep gives the slip:

> This twin of Death who
> 
> gives the kiss of life.

## Footnotes

*   Author of *Insomniac*, a first-person narrative about living with insomnia and an exploration of the world of sleep science.