The lids pull down with pounds of weight against their muscles. Keeping them open is like holding arms outstretched without support. After a minute or two of effort, I have to let them close … My mind clicks on and off, as though attached to an electric switch with which some outside force is tampering. I try letting one eyelid close at a time while I prop the other open with my will. But the effort’s too much. Sleep is winning. My whole body argues dully that nothing, nothing life can attain, is quite so desirable as sleep.
If sleepiness weighed so heavily upon him now, how could he get through the night, to say nothing of the dawn and another day and its night and possibly even the dawn after that? Lindbergh was ashamed. How could he let something as trifling as sleep ruin the record-breaking flight he had spent so many months planning? How could he face his sponsors and admit he had failed to reach Paris because he was sleepy? This must be how an exhausted sentry feels, he thought: unable to stay awake, yet knowing he will be shot if he is caught napping. He had no choice but to battle against his fatigue, minute by minute. In the end, it would all come down to sheer will power.
As the first traces of dawn began to appear on the second morning, Lindbergh felt the overwhelming desire to sleep falling over him like a quilt. Dawn was the time he had dreaded most:
Like salt in wounds, the light of day brings back my pains. Every cell of my being is on strike, sulking in protest, claiming that nothing, nothing in the world, could be worth such an effort; that man’s tissue was never made for such abuse. My back is stiff; my shoulders ache; my face burns; my eyes smart. It seems impossible to go on longer. All I want in life is to throw myself down flat, stretch out – and sleep.
Lindbergh searched for some way to stay alert. Shaking his body and stamping his feet no longer did any good. He had no coffee with him, but consoled himself with the thought that he had long since passed the stage when coffee could have helped. He pushed the stick forward and dived down into a ridge of cloud, pulling up sharply again after clipping through its summit. That woke him up a little, but not for long. He was thankful that The Spirit of St Louis had not been designed to be a stable aeroplane. The very instability that made it difficult to fly now guarded him against catastrophic errors. The slightest relaxation of pressure on stick or rudder would start a climbing or a diving turn, hauling him back from the borderland of sleep.
In the twentieth hour sleepiness temporarily gained the upper hand. Lindbergh suddenly awoke to find the plane diving and turning: he had been asleep with his eyes open. The realisation that he had lost control of himself and the plane was like an electric shock, and within seconds he was back in command. But as time passed, and no new emergencies occurred, he lapsed back into a dreamlike state, unsure whether he was dreaming through life or living through a dream. Over and over again he fell asleep with his eyes open, knowing he was falling asleep and unable to prevent it. Extreme measures were needed. He struck his face sharply with his hand, but felt hardly any sensation. He hit his face again, this time with all his strength. All he felt was numbness. Not even pain would come to his rescue. He broke open a capsule of ammonia and inhaled, but smelt nothing. Lindbergh realised how deadened his senses had become.
After 24 hours in the air and with more than a thousand miles still to go, Lindbergh seriously doubted whether he could stay awake long enough to avoid crashing into the Atlantic. But just as he felt death and failure staring him in the face, he began to turn the corner. The seriousness of his crisis had at last broken the spell of sleep and summoned up his last reserves of mental strength. He felt as though he was recuperating from a severe illness. And, as the history books relate, Charles A. Lindbergh made it to Paris and became an international hero. His remarkable last-minute rally was almost certainly a reflection of his circadian rhythm. His next peak of alertness came just in time. If his flight had continued much longer, he would inevitably have plunged back down into another circadian trough of fatigue from which he might never have ascended.
Lack of sleep has always been one of the least glamorous aspects of life at sea. In 1938 the 18-year-old Eric Newby signed on as an apprentice aboard one of the last square-rigger sailing ships. Newby’s autobiographical account of his voyage, The Last Grain Race, charts his experiences as he made the round trip from Belfast to Australia and back again via Cape Horn. The ship had a minimal crew, so each man worked hard and slept little. ‘I had never been so tired in my whole life,’ wrote Newby, ‘far too exhausted to appreciate the beautiful pyramids of sail towering above me.’ After coming off watch he would fall into a dreamless sleep, so deep that when he awoke and went up on deck again he felt like a sleepwalker. On the return voyage his ship was hit by an awe-inspiring storm that soon had the crew’s compartment awash in six inches of water. But the sailors who were not on duty snored through it all, so great was their appetite for sleep. Like soldiers preparing for the next battle, they lay ‘absorbing sleep greedily like medicine’.
The writer C. S. Forester charted the sleepiness of the long-distance mariner in his Hornblower novels, which relate the fictional Royal Navy career and Napoleonic War adventures of Horatio Hornblower, a character partly modelled on Admiral Horatio Nelson. In one story, the gallant Hornblower is exhausted from lack of sleep after a daring escape from France and a prolonged battle with pursuing enemy ships. Like Charles Lindbergh, Hornblower experiences the disturbing sensation that his mind has become disconnected from his body:
His voice sounded strange and distant in his own ears, like that of a stranger speaking from another room, as he issued his orders; the very hands with which he held the ropes seemed not to belong to him. It was as if there was a cleavage between the brain with which he was trying to think and the body which condescended to obey him.
Sleep deprivation was a fact of life for Hornblower’s real-life counterpart as well. When Horatio Nelson was commanding a Royal Navy warship he seldom had more than two hours of uninterrupted sleep and sometimes stayed on deck all night. However, like many leaders famed for coping with little sleep, Nelson had a well-developed ability to take catnaps during the day. He would nap in his cabin in a black leather armchair, his feet up on a chair. As we shall see later, a faculty for napping has enabled many high achievers to cope with meagre rations of night-time sleep.
Even in the twenty-first century, napping is a crucial skill for sailors – especially when sailing single-handed. In February 2001 the British yachtswoman Ellen MacArthur crossed the finishing line of the Vendée Globe boat race after 94 days alone at sea. She had travelled 24,000 miles across three oceans to become the fastest woman to sail single-handedly around the globe. For 13 weeks she had managed her 18-metre yacht in some of the world’s roughest seas by herself. The only way Ellen MacArthur could survive was to become a past master of napping, and divide her sleep into multiple brief naps. During the 94-day voyage she took 891 naps, each lasting on average 36 minutes, giving her a total of about five and a half hours of sleep a day. Even sleeping in such short bursts, MacArthur frequently had to rely on what she called her ‘sixth sense’ to wake her when something urgently required her attention.
He that sleeps feels not the toothache.
William Shakespeare, Cymbeline (1609–10)
Lack of sleep does far more than just make us feel sleepy, however: its tentacles reach out and twist our emotional, cognitive and physical states. One of the first casualties is mood. Tired people are emotionally less resilient and more prone to irritation or sadness. Tiredness also impairs our social and emotional skills, with potentially damaging consequences for personal relationships. A tired person can be physically present but psychologically and emotionally absent. In The Screw-tape Letters, C. S. Lewis imagines an experienced devil instructing his neophyte nephew on how to corrupt a young human. The best way, he advises, is through fatigue:
The paradoxical thing is that moderate fatigue is a better
