A Midsummer Night's Dream begins in Athens with a legal crisis: Egeus demands that Hermia marry Demetrius, while Hermia loves Lysander and faces punishment under Theseus's law. The lovers flee into the wood, followed by Demetrius and Helena, and the play transfers civic conflict into a night world governed by Oberon, Titania, Puck, and the flower whose juice alters desire.
Medical tag
Sleep Insomnia
Sleeplessness, sleepwalking, sleep as cure or torment.
Works
Subtitled 'Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future', Beyond Good and Evil was Nietzsche's attempt to restate in plain argumentative prose, divided into 296 numbered sections and a closing poem, the ideas that Thus Spoke Zarathustra had put in prophetic form. The preface opens by supposing that truth is a woman and that dogmatic philosophers, with their clumsy seriousness, have never known how to win her.
Ceremony follows Tayo, a young man of mixed Laguna and white ancestry, who returns to the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico after the Second World War deeply ill in body and mind. In the Philippines he fought alongside his cousin Rocky, the family's favoured son, and endured the Bataan Death March; Rocky died of his wounds during the march, and Tayo could not save him.
Parker's Complete Poems gathers the light verse that made her one of the best-selling poets of the 1920s and 1930s. The core of the volume is her three collections, Enough Rope (1926), Sunset Gun (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931), which were combined in Not So Deep as a Well (1936), together with uncollected and early verse published in magazines from the 1910s onward.
Rousseau's Confessions is the founding text of modern autobiography. It promises to show 'a man in all the integrity of nature', the author himself, concealing nothing.
De Materia Medica is an ancient pharmacopoeia: a systematic guide to plants, animals, minerals, wines, oils and manufactured preparations used as medicines. Dioscorides does not write a narrative.
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. An impoverished hidalgo of about fifty, Alonso Quixano, reads chivalric romances until, from too little sleep and too much reading, his brain dries up and he loses his wits.
Dracula is told through journals, letters, phonograph diaries, telegrams and newspaper cuttings assembled by its characters. Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to Transylvania to arrange the purchase of a London property, Carfax, for Count Dracula.
Early Christian Lives gathers late antique biographies of saints, monks and holy figures, often including Athanasius’ Life of Antony and Jerome’s lives of Paul, Hilarion and Malchus. These works do not present biography as neutral chronology.
Montaigne called his pieces essais, 'trials' or 'attempts', and the word names both a method and a new literary genre. The book gathers 107 chapters in three books, ranging from one-page notes on thumbs, smells and names to the sprawling 'Apology for Raymond Sebond', which fills a sixth of the whole.
Heraclitus's book does not survive; what remains are roughly 130 short sayings preserved as quotations by later authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus and Diogenes Laertius. Modern editions number them according to Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz (DK), and the reference edition presents them in a fresh translation with commentary.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a frame narrative told through the letters of Robert Walton, an English explorer whose ship is trapped in Arctic ice. Walton rescues a dying stranger, Victor Frankenstein, who has been pursuing a gigantic figure across the frozen sea, and who tells his story as a warning to a man whose ambition resembles his own.
Letters and Papers from Prison was assembled after the war by Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer's closest friend, former student and nephew by marriage, and published in 1951 as Widerstand und Ergebung ('Resistance and Submission'). It gathers what Bonhoeffer wrote during two years of imprisonment by the Nazi state, together with the essay 'After Ten Years', composed at Christmas 1942 as a stocktaking for fellow conspirators.
Letters from a Stoic selects from Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, a sequence of philosophical letters that turn daily life into training for freedom. Seneca writes as an older adviser to a younger friend, but the letters are also exercises for himself.
Macbeth opens on a Scottish heath where three witches plan to meet Macbeth. Returning from victory over rebels and Norwegian invaders, Macbeth and his fellow general Banquo meet the witches, who hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and future king, and tell Banquo that his descendants will be kings.
The Meditations, which Marcus Aurelius may have titled simply 'To Himself', is a private notebook of philosophical reflections written in Greek, probably during his military campaigns on the Danube in the 170s CE. It was not intended for publication and consists of twelve books of entries ranging from single sentences to short essays, often repeated and varied as exercises to fix principles in the mind.
Natural History: A Selection introduces one of antiquity’s great encyclopedic minds. Pliny wants to collect nature and human use together: stars, lands, peoples, animals, plants, metals, pigments, stones, medicines, marvels and technologies all belong to one vast inventory.
The Novum Organum ('new instrument') is the second and only substantially completed part of Bacon's projected Instauratio Magna, a six-part plan to rebuild human knowledge from its foundations. Its title throws down a challenge to the Organon, the collection of Aristotle's logical works that had governed university teaching for centuries.
On the Road is narrated by Sal Paradise, a young writer living with his aunt in New Jersey, and records a series of journeys back and forth across the United States and into Mexico between 1947 and 1950. The engine of the book is Dean Moriarty, a fast-talking, car-stealing, endlessly restless young man from Denver who seems to Sal the embodiment of a wild, joyous American energy.
Maupassant's stories, written mostly between 1880 and 1890, are compact, ironic and often brutal studies of French life: Norman peasants, Parisian clerks, prostitutes, bourgeois families, soldiers and the provincial gentry. This selection gathers many of the best known, which typically include the following.
Sense and Sensibility follows two sisters whose temperaments represent the opposed values of its title. When Henry Dashwood dies, Norland Park in Sussex passes to John, his son by a first marriage, who promises to provide for his stepmother and half-sisters but is talked out of any real generosity by his grasping wife Fanny.
Siddhartha is a short, lyrical novel set in India in the time of the Buddha, following the spiritual journey of a young man who seeks enlightenment through experience rather than doctrine. Siddhartha is the handsome, gifted son of a Brahmin, admired by all and loved by his friend Govinda.
The Summa Theologiae, traditionally called the Summa Theologica, is Aquinas's unfinished synthesis of Christian theology, written, as its prologue says, for beginners who were confused by the disorder and repetition of existing textbooks. It contains some 512 questions divided into about 2,600 articles, each built on the same disciplined form inherited from university disputation.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a comic and nostalgic novel of boyhood set in the 1840s in St. Petersburg, a small Missouri town on the Mississippi modelled on Twain's Hannibal.
The Anatomy of Melancholy presents itself as a medical treatise, laid out in the scholastic manner of partitions, sections, members and subsections, on 'what it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of it'. It is also an encyclopedia of Renaissance learning, a compendium of quotation from more than a thousand authors, a satire on human folly, and a consolation for its author and readers.
The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue of seven hundred verses in eighteen chapters, forming part of the sixth book of the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic of the war between two branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It is set on the battlefield of Kurukshetra at the moment before battle begins.
The Conquest of Gaul is a common English title for Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, seven books narrating his campaigns of 58 to 52 BCE, completed by an eighth book written after his death by his officer Aulus Hirtius. Each book covers one campaigning year, and Caesar speaks of himself throughout in the third person, a device that makes political self-advertisement read like a dispatch.
The Consolation of Philosophy is a prison dialogue between the condemned Boethius and Lady Philosophy, who appears at his bedside when he is sick with grief and self-pity. The work alternates prose and metre.
The Gay Science, also translated as The Joyful Wisdom, is Nietzsche's book of convalescence, experiment, and dangerous cheerfulness. Its aphorisms and songs range across knowledge, art, women, morality, religion, science, friendship, self-creation, health, and style.
Die Traumdeutung appeared in November 1899 with the date 1900 on its title page, and Freud regarded it as his most important book. Its central claim is that dreams are meaningful psychic acts that can be interpreted, and that every dream, properly analysed, proves to be the fulfilment of a wish.
The Major Symptoms of Hysteria gathers Janet's Harvard lectures into a clear account of dissociation, narrowed consciousness, fixed ideas, amnesia, anesthesia, motor symptoms, crises, and suggestibility. Janet stands close to Charcot but less theatrical; he is interested in how psychological functions fall apart, become dissociated, or continue automatically outside ordinary awareness.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket begins as a sea adventure told by a young Nantucketer whose craving for forbidden experience repeatedly overrides judgment. Pym and his friend Augustus Barnard first make a disastrous drunken voyage in the Ariel, a small boat nearly destroyed before rescue.
The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus's long return from Troy to Ithaca and of the household that must survive his absence. The poem opens not with Odysseus but with disorder: his son Telemachus is growing up under the pressure of suitors who consume the estate and demand that Penelope choose a new husband.
The Persian Expedition, known in Greek as the Anabasis or 'march up-country', is Xenophon's account of the campaign of 401–399 BCE in which about ten thousand Greek mercenaries followed Cyrus the Younger into Mesopotamia and then fought their way home. Cyrus, younger son of Darius II, gathers an army in Sardis on the pretext of a war against Pisidian raiders, while his real aim is to unseat his brother, King Artaxerxes II.
The Rule of St Benedict is a concise manual for forming a stable monastic community. It opens by calling the monastery a school for the Lord’s service and asks what kind of person desires life.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is a philosophical prose-poem in four parts, written in the cadences of Luther's Bible. Its hero borrows the name of the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster, whom Nietzsche chose because the first moralist should be the one to overturn morality.
Troilus and Criseyde retells a story from the Trojan War tradition, but its real subject is erotic psychology under the pressure of fortune, language and time. Troilus, a Trojan prince and son of Priam, initially mocks lovers until he sees Criseyde in the temple and is struck by desire.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is a lyric sequence of erotic longing, memory, landscape and loss. The poems do not tell a plot, but they trace an emotional arc from sensual address to abandonment and despair.
White Nights is narrated by an unnamed young dreamer in St. Petersburg, a lonely man who lives more intensely in imagination than in social life.
Passages
- A Midsummer Night's Dream, The wedding play
A Midsummer Night's Dream gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens is early modern psychology: love-melancholy, altered perception, sleep, dreams, and the boundary between enchantment and madness
- Beyond Good and Evil, Part Four, §§68, 154, 156, 157
Memory yielding to pride; health versus pathology of thought; collective insanity; the thought of suicide as consolation through bad nights.
- Ceremony, Opening section
Tayo's sleeplessness, nausea and flood of memories; his recollection of the VA hospital ward where he felt himself invisible.
- Complete Poems, 'Symptom Recital' (Sunset Gun or Death and Taxes)
A list of complaints of mood, sleep and temper presented as symptoms, revealed as signs of falling in love.
- Complete Poems, Various poems across the collections
Drinking, hangovers and night-time wakefulness as part of the speaker's romantic misery.
- Confessions, Book VI
The attack of pounding arteries and tinnitus with permanent partial deafness; insomnia; 'the vapors'; reading anatomy and imagining a polyp of the heart; the journey to the physicians of Montpellier and their waters and whey.
- De Materia Medica, Book 4, poppy/opium entries
Poppy juice and opium preparations are described as powerful pain-relieving and sleep-inducing substances with lethal risk.
- Don Quixote, Part I, Ch. 1
Little sleep and much reading dry Alonso Quixano's brain until he loses his wits.
- Dracula, Ch. 8 (Seward's diary)
Sleepless and dejected, Seward considers taking chloral hydrate and resolves not to let it become a habit.
- Dracula, Ch. 6–8 (Mina's journal)
Lucy's sleepwalking in Whitby and the night Mina finds her on the churchyard bench.
- Essays, Book III, Ch. XIII, 'Of Experience'
Detailed personal regimen (sleep, diet, habits) and colic attacks, with the argument that long experience of one's own body outranks medical rules.
- Fragments, DK 21, 26, 75, 89
Fragments on sleep, death and waking; sleepers each turn into a private world.
- Frankenstein, Vol. I, Ch. III (1818) / Ch. 4 (1831)
Studies in anatomy and decay; gathering materials from charnel houses, dissecting rooms and slaughterhouses; secretive, sleepless labour that damages his health.
- Letters and Papers from Prison, Early letters to parents, April–May 1943
The first days of isolation in Tegel, physical conditions of the cell, and his deliberate adoption of routine.
- Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 1–2
The hallucinated dagger; the voice crying 'Sleep no more'; the drugged possets given to the grooms.
- Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1
Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking and hand-washing observed by the Doctor and Gentlewoman.
- Meditations, Book 5.1
Argument with himself about getting out of bed in the morning.
- Natural History: A Selection, Book 20, poppy traditions
Poppy preparations appear among sleep- and pain-related remedies, with danger implicit in potency.
- Novum Organum, Book II, Aphorism L
Medicines that condense the flesh or the spirits: mild soporifics (violet, dried roses, lettuce), rose-water for fainting fits, and opiates that expel the spirits from the brain's ventricles yet in moderation may aid cure and longevity.
- On the Road, Throughout
Marathon drives, all-night jazz clubs and continuous drinking, with sleep deprivation treated as a kind of ecstasy.
- Selected Short Stories, 'The Horla', early diary entries
Fever-like malaise, insomnia and nightmares of being strangled and drained in sleep.
- Sense and Sensibility, Vol. II, Ch. 7–9
Marianne's grief after Willoughby's letter: refusal of food, sleeplessness and hysterical weeping, while Elinor attends her.
- Siddhartha: An Indian Tale, Part Two, 'By the River'
Contemplating drowning, Siddhartha hears Om, falls into a long sleep and wakes renewed.
- Summa Theologica, I, Q. 84, Arts. 7–8
Understanding depends on phantasms; lesions in frenzy and lethargy impair it; sleep, vapours, fever-dreams and partly lucid dreams explained physiologically.
- Summa Theologica, I-II, Q. 38 (not in stored text)
Remedies of sorrow: pleasure, weeping, the sympathy of friends, contemplation of truth, and sleep and baths, which restore the body's natural movement.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 11
Tom's guilty conscience disturbs his sleep and he talks in his sleep, alarming Sid.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 1, Sect. 2, Memb. 2, Subs. 5–7
Bad air, immoderate exercise, solitariness and idleness, and disordered sleeping and waking as causes of melancholy.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 2, Sect. 5, Memb. 1, Subs. 2 and 6
Bloodletting for melancholy; correctors of insomnia and fearful dreams using poppy, mandrake, henbane, nightshade, hemp-seed and opiates.
- The Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 6.16–6.17
Yoga is not for one who eats or sleeps too much or too little; moderation in food, recreation, sleep and waking.
- The Conquest of Gaul, Book V.35–40
Cotta wounded in the face by a sling during the ambush; in Cicero's besieged camp even the sick and wounded get no rest, and the ill commander works through the nights.
- The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter I
Survey of external, internal sensory and organic stimuli as causes of dreams, including experiments on sleepers and the views of physicians and psychiatrists on dreams and insanity.
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Ch. 4-7
Pym's confinement in the Grampus hold combines darkness, foul air, hunger, thirst, fear and possible delirious misperception.
- The Persian Expedition, Book III, Chapter I
Xenophon's distress, insomnia and dream of lightning striking his father's house, which he interprets as both promise and warning before taking command.
- The Rule of St Benedict, Chapters 8–20
Night offices, prayer and sleep structure the body’s daily rhythm.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, §5
The last man: health-conscious, conflict-averse, managing his days with small doses of poison for pleasant dreams and a larger dose for a pleasant death; dissenters go voluntarily into the madhouse.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Discourse II: The Academic Chairs of Virtue
A sage's lecture on sleep hygiene as ethics: ten self-overcomings, reconciliations, truths and laughters a day as 'poppy to the soul'.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Introduction by Mrs Förster-Nietzsche (stored text, before the Prologue)
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche describes the Rapallo winter of influenza and her brother's effort in spring 1883 to stop taking chloral hydrate.
- Troilus and Criseyde, Book I
Troilus is struck by love and displays classic lovesickness: pallor, secrecy, sighing, sleeplessness and obsessive thought.
- Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Nocturnal poems
Night settings intensify solitude, sleepless reflection and the speaker's need to address an absent beloved.
Quotes
“nor has rhubarb always proved a purge, or opium a soporific to every one, who has taken these medicines”
“But is not a man drunk and sober the same person? why else is he punished for the fact he commits when drunk, though he be never afterwards conscious of it”
“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night”
“Till now, I had been a great sleeper, but a total privation of repose, with other alarming symptoms which have accompanied it, even to this time, persuaded me I had but a short time to live”
Frequently cited
“In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits”
“When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep”
“Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast”
Frequently cited
“Out, damned spot! out, I say”
“In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present—I am rising to the work of a human being.”
“But opiates, and the like, banish the spirits by their malignant and hostile quality”
“Jesus will be in agony even to the end of the world. We must not sleep during that time”
“Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby”
“If, however, the evaporation be somewhat less, phantasms appear, but distorted and without sequence; thus it happens in a case of fever”
“Waking, by reason of their continual cares, fears, sorrows, dry brains, is a symptom that much crucifies melancholy men, and must therefore be speedily helped, and sleep by all means procured”
“Cicero himself, though he was in very weak health, did not leave himself the night-time for repose, so that he was forced to spare himself by the spontaneous movement and entreaties of the soldiers”
Frequently cited
“The dream is the guardian of sleep, not the disturber of it”
“As soon as he was fully awake, the first clear thought which came into his head was, Why am I lying here”
“A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death”
“No small art is it to sleep: it is necessary for that purpose to keep awake all day”