Sleep and dreams

Before having a daughter, I bought into the myth of "sleeping like a baby," but it seems that ll babies have trouble getting to sleep, or at least that's what other parents tell me when I complain (or just mention?) how difficult it is to get Helena Iara to bed.  The world around her is so interesting that she prefers being able to pay attention to everything around her, even when she knows she is tired and grumpy.

For quote a few months, Helena only slept with rocked aggressively in arms or swung in a bassinet (hung by a rope from the ceiling was particularly effective), but recently, Rita has done a wonderful job of helping Helena to sleep without so much external support.  I haven't been as successful, but I have helped her (helped?) by talking a little about the philosophy of sleep.

Though it appears that Helena fully embraces Nietzsche's dictum that "man is not made for sleep," I tried to explain to her that though one should not live for sleep, one can affirm life and still recognize that it is important to rest, so that one can learn and enjoy and drink deeply from the cup... or the breast.  That argument didn't seem to convince her much, but she hasn't really shown much enthusiasm for Nietzsche.  I suppose that's not surprising: Nietzsche has always been a favorite of teenagers, not so much of little babies.

So I moved on to dream metaphors in the Spanish Baroque, especially Calderón de la Barca's idea that La Vida es Sueño, most often translated as "Life is a Dream", but which can also be understood as "Life is sleep."  Like some kinds of Buddhism, Calderón insisted that the phenomenal world around us is nothing more than an illusion, with no more consequence than a dream (which is not, of course, to say that dreams don't have consequences.  They do... just of a different kind that the material cause and effect we find more common).

I'm not sure whether my argument was successful or boring (or perhaps both), but unexpectedly, Helena slept.