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longer, late into evenings, in early mornings even, in the smallest, most unwindowed rooms. Bulbs on streets and in rising buildings will obscure the dark all through the hours, blurting the smaller stars out. Rooms inside of rooms will shine encombed. This development will be pointed to, by some, as years rise, as the number one cause of troubled sleep: all hours are the same.
    In 1882, Nietzsche declares god dead: “God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?” The same year, U.S. Patent 268693 describes a “Device For Life In Buried Persons,” a periscope-style tube allowing the interred to breathe from underground and signal they are there to those above.
    Around the turn into the twentieth century, we return to sleep’s cause being founded in ideological and spiritual ideas. Brown-Sequard and Heubel suggest that sleep is an inhibitory product, a space wherein the body cuts off its sensory stimulation, in the name of performing upkeep on the mechanisms of staying alert. Many minds, like Osborne, Gayet, and Mauthner, try to pinpoint to specific places inside the body responsible for the shift between sleeping and waking—Gayet pinpoints the brain stem; Mauthner notices the rapid movement of the eyes, but many don’t give credence to these findings—instead, we begin to tune in even nearer to our sleep-related behaviors. Mothers are advised of night-lights for fearful children, as well as taking care not to over-coddle every cry. Children are fenced in inside stationary cribs rather than cradles—new isolation.
    Meanwhile, great advances are made in the awarenesses of new kinds of anesthesia, various -ologies pinpointing refined informational systems related to the body’s ways. We are more vigilant now than ever over bacteria. We wipe surfaces. We avoid. People start looking for answers to sleep disruption through new medicine, mainly centered around hypnotics: bromide, paraldehyde, sulfonal. We simultaneously acknowledge the vital healing aspects of sleep as a function, and the rising wave of stress. We get radio transmission and the magnetic tape recorder. We get methamphetamine. Around now pictures come in color, our replications that much more like us.
    In 1898, we get the remote control, so we can stay in bed for longer and still see into rooms beyond the home. People sometimes press buttons they had not meant to press and see things they had not meant to see. Gelineau names “narcolepsy,” a relatively common condition wherein the body is overcome with sudden, extreme fatigue, often causing blackouts and public collapse. The name is based on two Greek words that mean “a benumbing” and “to overtake.” Another widespread condition, later termed sleep apnea, involves interruption to the sleeper by abnormal breathing interruptions, causing poor rest. The more aware we are of what is in us, the more difficult it might be, in ways, to disregard, and so therefore, to remain calm.
    Entering the twentieth century, we get the tank, the bra, the vacuum cleaner, vitamins. We begin taking pictures of the brain. Death during childbirth is at an all-time low. We get machines that cool the air inside our homes and machines that burn our skin so we look healthy. William L. Murphy invents a bed that can fold into the wall so you can walk around where the bed would be usually during the day, a new concealing in the name of more frequent open air. We get sonar, cellophane, the neon lamp, and helicopters. At last the self-starting automobile is perfected. People no longer have to stand still for hours to become pictures: it is more instant. It will become more instant someday still. Harry Houdini, having hardly escaped alive from a magic trick of his own devising, says, “The weight of the earth is killing.”
    Increasingly, doctors warn against the overstimulation of the child—the lingering attentions of the parent, the rising rigor of the public school