The Elusive Logic of Sleep
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

Sleep and insomnia may be the closest things on earth heaven and hell.

Sound sleep, I suspect, is the ultimate goal of religion. Who knows spiritual suffering better than an insomniac? Whether you call it hell or purgatory, you pretty well feel like a ghost wandering the earth without joy or purpose, yearning only for blissful oblivion.

The power that governs us all has provided horrifying illustrations to drive home the absolute necessity of sleep.

About forty families in the world are known to carry the gene responsible for Fatal Familial Insomnia (FFI). Half of those who had a parent with FFI carry a defective gene (known as the PrPc gene) that will misfold certain proteins in the brain into prions, the same phenomenon that ravages the brains of mad cow disease victims. But in FFI the only part of the brain affected is the thalamus, the region responsible for distributing nerve impulses between the brain and the body. The proliferation of prions lead to the buildup of amyloid placque which eventually gums up the thalamus.

The onset of the disease comes at the average age of 52 when the afflicted develop a mild form of insomnia. During the ensuing seven to 28 months the symptoms progress through panic attacks, irrational phobias, hallucinations, severe insomnia, dementia, loss of speech, coma and death.

But even those who aren’t members of an FFI family can fall victim to another form of the disease called sporadic fatal insomnia. There is no defective gene, but the mechanism is the same: the spontaneous creation of prions followed by the awful symptoms of progressive insomnia leading inevitably to insanity and death, the ultimate sleep. Doctors tried giving these poor souls sleeping pills, but they only accelerated the gruesome progression toward coma.

I don’t know why some are afflicted so horribly, but I have learned that I can’t cheat the elusive laws of sleep any more than we can cheat the higher powers invoked by religion. Unlike religion sleep doesn’t follow a moral scheme. You could have spent the day serving food to the needy or denied yourself a riotous night on the town to sit with a sick grandmother and still end up lying awake for hours. Conversely, you could have spent the day breaking sacred vows or criminal laws and sleep like a baby. Sleep points are assigned by some internal meter whose programming defies moral or rational analysis.

Physical exertion apparently isn’t determinative either. I have spent 18-hour days climbing tall mountains and run marathons only to awaken permanently after three hours of sleep. Yet I have slept surprisingly well after a day mostly spent sitting around in airports and airplanes or working at my desk attending to difficult problems.

Though I haven’t deciphered the law of sleep, I have accumulated enough bits of sleep wisdom to feel encouraged that I may yet succeed in my quest for reliably sound sleep. More interestingly, the quest has led me to some useful insights about the life and its purpose.