#65 Th (8/25/22) - Hypnos by H.P. Lovecraft - "Apropos of sleep, that sinister adventure of all our nights..."

 “Apropos of sleep, that sinister adventure of all our nights, we may say that men go to bed daily with an audacity that would be incomprehensible if we did not know that it is the result of ignorance of the danger.” — Charles Baudelaire, Fusées [Rockets], IX.

Epigraph of H.P. Lovecraft's Hypnos.

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I have not yet read much farther than the epigraph, attributed to Baudelaire, but I had to stop and find the citation, which is from Fusees {Rockets}. 

I wonder if in collecting Notes Toward a Philosophy of Sleep what sources one might turn to.  Years ago, I posed this question, (or rather it was posed to me) and I failed.

Now I feel that I could make an attempt.

One might start by seeing what Sir Thomas Browne had to say on the matter, in conjunction with folktales of sleep in Pseudodoxia, or perhaps his essay on the Deipnosophistae of Athnaeus.  Surely, he touched on sleep metaphorically in the Urne Buriall.

From there perhaps to Montaigne, or De Quincey. Someone would have considered the role of sleep in Shakespeare's Midsummer Nights Dream. Hamlet's "little life is rounded with a sleep"  Baudelaire offers his thoughts on the perils of sleep. Maybe Rimbaud does as well.

Did Addison or Steele remark upon sleep or insomnia in the pages of The Spectator.  Dr. Johnson must have offered a definition.

It seems likely that before having to travel to Plato and Aristotle, one may consult the dream of Samuel Taylor Coleridge that produced Xanadu, or Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.  Even the pages of the Arabian Nights are laden with tales of sleep and dreams.

Hypnos, twin brother of Thanatos, also known as Somnus, son of Nyx, kin to Morpheus, god of dreams, may all be consulted. A myth of Hypnos is found in the Deipnosophistae. Homer places him in the Illiad.

From these one could weave quite a tale... 

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https://www.bartleby.com/209/367.html

On Sleep

By Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682)
 
From the Garden of Cyrus

  BUT the quincunx of heaven runs low, and ’tis time to close the five ports of knowledge. We are unwilling to spin out our awaking thoughts into the phantasms of sleep, which often continueth precogitations; making cables of cobwebs, and wildernesses of handsome groves. Beside Hippocrates hath spoke so little, and the oneirocritical 1 masters have left such frigid interpretations from plants, that there is little encouragement to dream of paradise itself. Nor will the sweetest delight of gardens afford much comfort in sleep; wherein the dulness of that sense shakes hands with delectable odours; and though in the bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a rose.      1
  Night, which Pagan theology could make the daughter of Chaos, affords no advantage to the description of order; although no lower than that mass can we derive its genealogy. All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical mathematicks of the city of heaven.      2
  Though Somnus in Homer be sent to rouse up Agamemnon, I find no such effects in these drowsy approaches of sleep. To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our antipodes. The huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. But who can be drowsy at that hour which freed us from everlasting sleep? or have slumbering thoughts at that time, when sleep itself must end, and as some conjecture all shall awake again.      3
 
Note 1. oneirocritical = skilled in the phenomena of dreams.

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