Night: Night Life, Night Language, Sleep, and Dream

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 24, 1995 | by Colin Walters

Like the brain," writes A. Alvares in Night: Night Life, Night Language, Sleep, and Dream (Norton, 290 pp), "the city only seems to sleep." The link may seem tenuous, but it is the connection by which the writer weaves theme out of gossamer to juxtapose the very personal nightlife inside our heads with night life on the streets.

Other unexpected connections provide surprisingly strong bonding among the book's potpourri of nocturnal topics. In New York, Alvarez rode along with cops of the 10th Precinct in their squad car, meeting an officer with 30 years on the force and a brand new degree in English literature. "Coleridge had a drug problem," the literary lieutenant tells the author; who in an earlier chapter relates how the Romantics ate raw meat before going to bed to bring on nightmares.

Alvarez's interest in the subject of night, he explains, is "threefold." As a child, he was unreasonably afraid of the dark. He became addicted to sleep (lucky poet, it could have been opium) in middle age. But at the same time, he found himself staying up nights playing poker, thereby discovering the perverse appeal - there is something "not quite right about nightlife, something shadowy in every sense" - of cities during the dark hours.

Less compelling but not without their appeal are chapters on sleep research, the physiology of dreams, neurobiology and the mind both conscious and unconscious.