In writing class, I was taught there were nine basic plots that describe all stories, plots like Man vs. Man, Man vs. Nature, and Man vs. God. Add the other six in, and these conflicts cover most of known literature.
There is, however, one basic plot I have never seen on any list, despite the fact that an entire genre of story revolves around it. It’s a struggle fundamental to mankind and native to us since infancy and yet ignored by English professors everywhere.
Man vs. Sleep.
Pick up any book written for young children, and nine times out of ten it ends with the main character falling asleep. Whatever else the book is about, the fundamental conflict is “Will this child finally close his stubborn eyes or not?”
Classic example: Good Night Moon. What drives this story? The deep desire of the old lady whispering hush to get her too-awake bunny to finally nod off. Sure, the conflict’s implied, but the poor parent reading the book for the umpteeth time feels it deep in her tired, tired bones.
From Guess How Much I Love You to The Sleep Book to The Napping House, the first lesson we want to teach our children in the books they read is to close their eyes and keep them closed, for goodness’ sake.
This is not a lesson well-learned, though. Young adult novels should be written with this crucial conflict at the center. We, as a people, do not know how to sleep. Never mind that we manage do other things necessary to our survival, like eat and drink and eliminate waste without anyone telling us. A healthy person does not look at dinner and think, “Well, if I don’t eat for another four hours, I’ll squeeze just a bit more life into the day.” He may scarf down a Gordita while watching Stranger Things, but he’ll get something in his stomach; and even the most dedicated MMORPGer will find a few minutes to slip to the bathroom between fetch quests.
But sleep! We meet again, my mortal enemy (and dearest friend)! We display, I believe, our innate fallenness in our relation to sleep. To lose a third of our lives is a tragedy, we think. To stay up late and drink deep of amusements (and energy drinks), to sleep in and hide vainly from the reality of day, these are things parents try to disabuse their children of, from a very early age, and which we do anyway when we grow up. We want to control, limit, stretch, beat, and generally enslave that thing called sleep.
In college, a friend was always exhausted from staying up late studying and hanging out and reading his Bible and whatnot. I shared a verse with him, a bit light-hearted, which he took seriously and with relief.
“In vain you rise early
and stay up late,
toiling for food to eat—
for he (God) grants sleep to those he loves” (Psalms 127:2).
His struggled with sleep because it had become his enemy, as it seems to be too all of us from the first. But if it is a gift…. If we could only be as trusting as all the little children and rabbits and bears and other woodland creatures in all those board books and fall asleep peacefully in our Father’s arms, we’d be much happier, I think.
Tired parents, of course, already know that. We want to sleep more than our children do. And that’s why, I think, God adds, almost with a wink, the next verse: “Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him.”
And so it’s off to the quarter-past-why-does-this-time-exist, where we join our own story to the Man vs. Sleep struggle.
Great blog. I say you submit that to Dr. Hensley, who pounded those 9 plots into our heads for four years at TUFW. 😛
I had a thought related to this about a year or so ago. I think God designs the human body to require sleep as a means of keeping us humble. If we could function with little or no sleep, I think we would be in another Tower of Babel sort of situation because we would have another third of the day to accomplish things. We might think ourselves gods even more than some do now. (There was an episode of Doctor Who on this, remember?) 😛