Sleep in Art [antikvár]

In The Tempest, Shakespeare's Prospero says: 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.' The physiological fact that we spend two-thirds of our lives awake and the other third asleep did not interest him in the least. Neither would he have been impressed by a concise definition such as the one coined by the well-known Freiburg neurologist Richárd Jung, who has described sleep as an 'active, biological, regulatory process controlled by the brain'. He was even less aware that there are different stages and gradations of sleep and that it is mainly during periods of paradoxicai, or REM sleep that we dream. Like Shakespeare, and Goethe, many poets and dramatists over the years have been fascinated by sleep, 'god of the night', 'brother of death', and have dealt with the phenomena of sleep and dreams in a wide variety of ways. Small wonder, then, that countless famous artists, representing almost every epoch and style, have alsó explored what is still, despite modern experimentál sleep research, the mysterious 'dark third' of our lives. Using pen, colour and brush, chisel and hammer, their aim has been to capture the many and varied faces of sleep. Why this fascination with sleep? Perhaps because the tranquil security of healthy, undisturbed slumber discloses our true selves to us and, like death, palliatively erases every trace of pain, exertion and passión from the humán face. Regine Pötzsch