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that placing lesions on the brainstem makes a person sleepy. Three years later Bremer shows that lesions placed specifically on the lateral hypothalamus cause drowsiness by deactivating the “waking center”—the first directly named finding of a neurological insomniac cue, if caused passively, and by prodding. Sleep maintenance is linked to serotonin, the substance that later, as the century begins to close, will be taught to birth out of a pill. Forel studies systems of bees and talks about circadian rhythms’ effect in humans. Bedtime prayers involving latent fear are warned against for causing anxiety before bed, no more If I should die before I wake . . .
    In 1938, we get LSD. We get the ballpoint pen. Scholars perform experiments in isolation underground and in huge caves outside of light and speech and sound to show that there are periods innate to the person—that time is in our blood. Among children, it is cool, frontier-like, to stay up later. “Certainly one would never want to teach a child to be dependent on being held or rocked to sleep,” they say. 121 Antonin Artaud coins the term la réalité virtuelle , which in coming years will be used to sell video games. At least 15 million bodies become murdered based on words emerged from one man’s mouth.
    In 1945, we get the microwave oven, the Slinky, nuclear weapons. In 1946, we get mobile phones. Certain people are easier to find without their cooperation. Their bodies radiate the heat. We become targets, followed, complexly haunted. Carcinogens collect in pockets, at our cells. People start finding and naming even more sleep disorders, which beget more clinical diagnoses, which beget more and more and more medications. There are more books, more words within them, more ideas relegated to what a dream might mean. In 1950-something, Samuel Beckett writes: “Name, no, nothing is namable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don’t know, I shouldn’t have begun.” 122
    In 1951, Eugene Aserinsky records his eight-year-old son’s eyes through a whole night by EEG and EOG. He notices two phases of the eyes’ movement: twenty-minute periods when the eyes rapidly jerk around behind the lid, as if in seeing, and sixty- to ninety-minute stationary periods occurring regularly between. Based on this information, the basic model for sleep is renovated to include two major modes: when the eyes are still (non-rapid eye movement, NREM) and when our eyes move as they might in seeing while awake (rapid eye movement, REM). A single night’s sleep typically involves four to six periods of strobing between these two. Each lasts, on average, seventy minutes to two hours, with variation.
    Later, the NREM period is further subdivided into four stages: Stage 1, in which the shift between waking and sleeping begins—becoming drowsy, the brain’s alpha waves turn slow; stage 2, in which the alpha rhythms slow down further, into theta, punctuated by small bursts of electricity called “sleep spindles.” These first two stages are often brief, but may stretch longer for the busy-brained, and may seem to some not like sleep at all. Stages 3 and 4 are known as delta sleep, the brain slowing down to high-amplitude, low-activity delta waves; muscle tone turns lax; the heartbeat quiets, decreasing metabolism; these stages serve as a door into REM. REM is further found to differ from the NREM in that the brain becomes dramatically activated in electricity and metabolic rate—blood flow to the brain increases 62 to 173 percent; flesh holds a cold-blooded mode; vast jumps occur up and down in breathing and pulse; we experience vivid dreams. Through these facets, sleep now at last has some ground of operational understanding that will hold on as scientific fact, though for the most part we’ll proceed almost nowhere in the way of knowing why any of it happens, or what it means.
    In 1949, Egas Moniz wins the Nobel Prize for popularizing the lobotomy. We further customize