(FT232:56-57)

We spend about a third of our lives asleep, yet still have only the vaguest of ideas about why we do it, or of what happens to us during that time. A new exhibition at the revamped Wellcome Collection sets itself the ambitious task of exploring this vast and slippery subject through art, science and social history, and isn’t afraid to admit that, despite notable advances in our understanding of the biomedical and neurological processes involved, sleep remains a mysterious, wondrous and even fearsome state.

Housed in a dark space broken into discrete pockets (and designed by the German architect Nikolaus Hirsch), the flickering of the exhibits in and out of view itself invokes the fleeting secrets of sleep. It is organised more as a series of impressions than as a pedagogical chronology, divided into five themes: Dead Tired, Traces of Sleep, Dream Worlds, Elusive Sleep and World Without Sleep.

The first of these considers the perils of going without sleep. Sleep-deprivation torture has long been recognised as an effective means of breaking a prisoner, and there is an illuminating audio recording here of a journalist talking about being kidnapped and interrogated by East Germany’s Stasi in 1955. Approaching the subject from a different angle are exhibits about men who chose not to sleep: Peter Tripp, an American DJ who in 1959 went without sleep for eight days, and Randy Gardner who in 1964 broke his compatriot’s record by staying awake for 11 days. The experiments showed that attempting to go without sleep can have serious effects, including bad temper, irrationality, poor memory, hallucinating and incoherence. But it can also be fatal: there is a fascinating piece of video featuring Michael Corke, who in 1993 died of the rare, incurable and imperfectly understood condition Fatal Familial Insomnia (FFI). An inherited disease, it generally develops in middle age and, not being able to sleep despite being painfully tired, sufferers normally die a few months later.

We clearly need sleep, but why? A popular current theory is that during sleep our brain stores memory; another holds that it is a time for the brain to rest; one hypothesis is that the need for sleep developed in response to limited food supplies. But what really goes on during this liminal, paradoxical state, when we seem half in and half out of our lives? Aristotle, in his treatise On Sleep and Sleeplessness, contended that sleep is caused by the cooling of the heart; for many centuries, slumber was associated with other forms of unconsciousness, in particular death (illustrated here in various artworks). In the 1920s, however, the refinement of the electro-encephalogram (EEG) proved for the first time that the brain is always active, even when asleep. Nowadays, highly detailed profiles can be drawn up of individuals’ sleep patterns.

But proving that the brain is active is a long way from proving what it’s actually doing. Dreams, particularly – which are distinct from our rational lives yet somehow entwined with them – are a seemingly eternal source of puzzlement and fascination: where do they come from, what are they for, and what do they mean? Goya’s etching “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” illustrates the evil which appears at night in dreams; various pictures after Fuseli’s “The Nightmare” (see FT207:32–40) show the mingled fear and wonder such fevered imaginings inspire, though perhaps the most entertaining version to the modern visitor is a German public education poster from the 1930s, which inventively transforms Fuseli’s sexually suggestive vision of horror into an exhortation to hard work; it translates as “Unfinished tasks pursue you in your sleep. Don’t put things off until tomorrow, do them straight away”. Claiming to be a more scientific portrayal of dreams were the pictures taken by Louis Darget, a key figure in spiritualist circles, who sought to make thoughts and mental energy visible on photographic plates.

Dreams have also, of course, traditionally been thought of as a source of inspiration, freeing creativity from the shackles of reason. “Yesterday” apparently came to Paul McCartney in a dream; Robert Louis Stevenson often spoke of the “Brownies” who gave him ideas during the night; Giuseppe Tartini said that “The Devil’s Sonata” was an attempt to recreate the music played to him by the Evil One as he slept; the ring structure of the benzene molecule came to Friedrich August Kekulé when he awoke from a vision of a snake biting its own tail; and the origins of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan in an opium reverie are well known.

Sigmund Freud’s 1899 publication of The Interpretation of Dreams revolutionised the way we think of these nocturnal dramas, positing their analysis as a critical tool in understanding the subconscious. Later, he would write about the childhood nightmare suffered by the ‘Wolf Man’, in which his bedroom window had opened of its own accord to reveal six or seven white wolves sitting in a tree, wanting to eat him: Freud deduced, from associations drawn by the Wolf Man during his therapy, that the dream was the result of his having witnessed a ‘primal scene’ – Freud’s term for the infant seeing, or fantasising about, his parents having sex. The oil painting in which, years later, the Wolf Man depicted this famous dream is included in the exhibition. For Freud’s rebellious one-time follower, Carl Jung, dreams provided much more than just cryptic clues to past trauma – they were a key ingredient in psychic life, a window onto the strange, yet universal, landscape of the unconscious revealing information about the self that the waking ego couldn’t provide.

The neurosciences began research into dreams after the discovery of REM sleep in 1953, although it is now accepted that dreaming does not only occur during this period. In fact, despite the ongoing efforts of scientists, and the hopes of those who seek to bring rationality to this most intangible of subjects, it is the artists included in this exhibition who seem to come closest to some kind of truth about dreaming. Jane Gifford’s 144 postcard-sized paintings of her dreams are at once highly personal and, often, strangely familiar, hinting at some kind of shared dream world like the collective unconscious posited by Jung; Laura Ford’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream-referencing sculpture of a child-sized figure with a donkey’s head slumped in sleep speaks of heaviness and confusion; and Nils Klinger’s photo-graphs of bodies wrapped together in sleep, taken by leaving a camera shutter open for the time it takes the candle which lights them to burn out, paints them as soft, tangled and vulnerable.

Even our frequent failure to get a sound night’s sleep is only partially understood. While the persecution inflicted by fleas and bed bugs is obvious enough – and the magnified illustrations of the sadistic little critters are amongst the scariest of the exhibits here – scientists have only the roughest idea why many of the concoctions used through the ages to aid sleep actually work. Other sleep complaints – body rocking, sleep eating, narcolepsy, sleep apnœa – are represented here by videos of sufferers, but there is little in the accompanying text to suggest that we have any genuine, deep understanding of these complaints.

Despite understanding so little about sleep, we are increasingly cavalier in our approach to it. Cultural shifts, from the industrial revolution and the invention of artificial light to the use of stimulants and a 24-hour, globalised society, have changed the way we structure our days; we ignore our natural biorhythms and the rising and setting of the Sun, sleeping according to the dictates of work and hectic lifestyles. In a 1938 sleep experiment, documented in the exhibition, Nathaniel Kleitman and Bruce Richardson spent 33 days in a cave in Kentucky in an attempt to determine whether the human body-clock could be adjusted to a 28-hour cycle; the results were inconclusive. The Wellcome Collection has assembled a fantastical assortment of alarm clocks, from a clock that lights a candle to what must be an enraging device which runs away across the room with its alarm going off.

James Peto, the museum’s senior curator of temporary exhibitions, speaks of our increasing obsession with sleep, prompted by a realisation that it’s important and that we’re not getting enough of it; a fact evinced in the amount of space given to the subject by the media, and the growing number of sleep clinics in universities. The Japanese perhaps epitomise this obsession, being popularly characterised as a nation of workaholics with an almost fetishistic attitude to sleep: they have concerts specifically designed to lull to sleep those who struggle to doze off at home, napping accessories like the ‘boyfriend pillow’ and mini-skirted ‘lap pillow’, and practise inemuri – sleeping regardless of the occasion, whether it be on the pavement, in the office or in the Diet. Scientific research does seem to suggest that ‘power napping’ can improve performance (even Churchill, who possessed a heroic ability to go without sleep, is said to have had a few hours’ kip every afternoon); but, the exhibition asks: in our time-poor world, is sleep going to become a luxury?

Sleep, then, remains a most fortean enigma. It is something we all do and assume we understand until we start thinking about it more deeply. As this exhibition so revealingly shows through its imaginative exploration of the questions asked by artists, scientists and thinkers through the ages, our grasp of the truths about this most curious of states is as feeble as our attempts to cling on to our dreams as we awaken.

Sleeping and Dreaming is showing at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE until 10 March. Entry is free. The exhibition is accompanied by a programme of events - go to www.wellcomecollection.org for details.