Sleep Open


No small art is it to sleep: it is necessary for that purpose to keep awake all day.


	-Friedrich Nietzsche


I encountered The Sandman in an old bookshop, but he didnÕt help me sleep. It was February 27th 2007, my third day in Amsterdam, my eyes were constantly itchy and I was starting to feel a bit delirious. I was staying in the uninsulated attic of an old, rundown, canal-side brick house that a friend was squatting in. My friend, who lived on the main floor, was working for a renovation company, and his boss, knowing how long the permitting process could take, gave him the keys to mind the house until construction could begin. The mustiness of the room I was in, combined with residual jetlag and the piercing cold, meant that I had barely slept since I arrived. The place was on Prinsengracht though, a perfect location to explore from in the centre of the city, so I tried not to let the discomfort get to me.

That morning I left early before my friend was awake. After wandering the canals for about an hour I turned down an alley and encountered De Boekenboom (The Book Tree). It was the kind of place that could only be happened upon. Compared to the many other used bookstores in and around AmsterdamÕs Spui Square, this place faded into the background. From the outside, the store exuded what could only be described as apathy.

Its windows were half covered over with outdated flyers and other faded ephemera. Even the red neon ŌopenÕ sign weakly glowed like a banal zealot, half-cocked between a taped up William S. Burroughs poster and a Wilson Pickett album sleeve. Upon opening the door, the aroma of cigarette smoke mingling with mildew struck first, followed by the gaze of a strange ceramic cat positioned so that its wide eyes faced the entrance. Browsing around the general disorderliness, I was distracted by everything but fixated on the shopÕs name. What kind of tree is this? Branches grafted onto branches, leaves curling, yellowed, but no living trees or even plants, just dyed, bleached, and inky pages.

It was a small, seemingly unspecialised shop, but it contained a disproportionate selection of psychology and philosophy books, an indiscriminate selection of record albums, and a large shelf full of old German books. Here I was drawn to the dusty embossed covers of navy blue, maroon, and hunter green. Scanning the spines, my eyes came to rest on what appeared to be an English title: ŅHoffmannÕs Strange StoriesÓ. It was an early translation of E.T.A. HoffmannÕs work into English, and the pages were so browned that they were almost unreadable. Pencilled in the top corner of the first page was 15Ū, which seemed exorbitant, but I decided quickly that it had to be mine. The bookseller hardly looked at me as I handed him twenty and waited for change.

A man holding a banjo walked into the store behind me, and then turned around and walked out again. I followed, book under my arm, looking for a quiet cafˇ. Wandering in a daze past countless window displays, I finally found something suitable. I sat down on a long hard bench facing the window, ordered a coffee and opened the book.

The pages fell open to HoffmannÕs version of The Sandman. I began reading, and I didnÕt look up again until the story was finished. As I peered out the window I was shocked to see that snow was falling outside, and the flakes were the size of coins. Figures riding past on upright bicycles were made monochromatic by the swirling white crystals. They passed with an almost mechanical rhythm, which slowly eased my mind back into the text. Most of what I had read seemed to have washed over me, absorbed but not retained. However, my thoughts lingered uneasily in certain elements of HoffmannÕs uncanny world.  I was particularly struck by the protagonist NathanialÕs seeming inability to discern the nature of beings and thingsŃhis childhood association of this dark Sandman with the demonic humanity of one of his fatherÕs associates, and his later passionate conflation of person and automatonŃbut most of all I was fixated on the presence that this book must have had on peoples lives. I couldnÕt stop thinking about the fact that this story had been read again and again by children, many of whom already had every reason not to sleep at night.

Traditionally, The Sandman sprinkles magical specks into childrenÕs eyes to help them sleep, and in Hans Christian AndersenÕs printed version he also placed a special umbrella over well-behaved children with lovely pictures inside of it to create pleasant dreams. He placed an umbrella over naughty children too, but on the underside of this umbrella was nothing at all. In AndersenÕs world pleasant dreams come as a reward, and nightmares are left unspoken. HoffmannÕs version of The Sandman was a direct rebuttal to this embracing of a dream state. It wouldnÕt let you sleep at all.  As I recall, according to an old nanny in the book, the Sandman visits children who wonÕt sleep and throws sand into their eyes until they bleed and pop out of their heads. He then takes them to his children on the half moon who, with beaks like owls devour the eyes of the naughty children.

As a child, Walter Benjamin read E.T.A. Hoffmann on the sly: ŅÉI can still rememberŃI was standing right by the bookcase that was open just a crack, ready to throw the book into the case at the first noise. I stood there readingÉ so frozen with the twofold horror of the terrors of the book and the risk of getting caught that I failed to grasp a single word of what I was reading.Ói Benjamin, who later encountered his share of earthly horrors, also shared Hoffmann stories through his radio programs for children in the early 1930Õs. Unfortunately these stories must have paled next to the horrors that Benjamin and his listeners would have faced in the coming years. Most his audience would have been of military age by the Second World War, and Benjamin, who was detained at the Spanish border while trying to flee occupied France, took a lethal dose of morphine, fell into a deep sleep, and died.

If fairy tales are dream worlds created to help children understand the real world, itÕs hard to know which Sandman was the more effective (affective) tale. In his extended study of nineteenth century Europe, Benjamin suggested that with the rise of consumer capitalism, a dream state rooted in fetishistic excess and utopian desires debilitated the populous. On the other hand, the Hitler-Stalin pact showed that even revolutionary awakening could end in the dark. There could be no utopian dreams without dialectical horrors. So do we prepare children for dreams or nightmares, or is there even a difference?

ItÕs unclear exactly what kind of schooling HoffmanÕs disturbing tales provide today when our repressive states take their own lessons from literature, and name their own horrors as such. Operation Sandman is one of the CIAÕs interrogation practices, which involves sleep deprivation for sometimes up to fifty days. Due to the difficulty of measuring the nightmarish effects of this technique, whether or not it constitutes torture is still debated by law.

Soon the snow stopped and began to melt. I began to trudge back to the old Dutch canal-side home. The attic where I was staying was a strange place. It appeared to be a young girlÕs bedroom, the ceiling was leaking in places and judging from the dust and mildew, it hadnÕt been inhabited for years. On the walls were old browned pictures of wild horses running through water. These images, accompanied by the constant drip, drip, drip of water falling into strategically placed buckets, put me on edge.

This was only heightened when, still restless, I decided go downstairs to ask my friend if he knew anything about the buildingÕs previous occupants. When he saw me open the door he looked up apologetically from the book he was reading.

ŅItÕs a sad storyÓ, he said, Ņmaybe I should have told you before. According to my neighbour, the house was inhabited by an old man and his granddaughter, no one really knew how this unlikely pair came to live together, but they seemed happy.Ó He closed his book and put it on the table and continued. ŅIt didnÕt end well. One night, while the girl was sleeping, the man went out wearing his old military uniform and never came back. They found his body the next day floating in the canal just right out front. My neighbour was one of the people who helped hoist him out. He said that he saw the girl staring down at them from her window as they propped him up. It was the strangest thing he said, the old manÕs eyes were missing. According to my neighbour, the girlÕs aunt agreed to move in and take care of her, but no matter what she said or did the girl refused to sleep in the house ever again. In fact you are the first person to have slept in the attic since that fateful night.Ó


 -Jesse Birch




i Walter Benjamin, ŅDemonic BerlinÓ, Selected Writings Vol. 2 part 1 1927-1930 ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005 p.323).