I read recently about the renovation of a small Parisian flat into a single office for the writer, Simon Kuper (How I made my perfect office).  The furniture included a sofa by the window for his post-lunch 15-minute nap (20 minutes on a bad day).  There was a brief period when I regularly had a nap in my office in the middle of day.  Now, I regularly nap at the weekend in the afternoon, or a weekday in the early evening after dinner.  Research has found short daytime naps improve cognitive performance (Lovato & Lin, 2010) and may help to preserve brain health by slowing the rate at which the brain shrinks with age (Paz et al, 2023).  So, short naps are probably good for you, though longer naps have been associated with reductions in cognition, the ability to think and form memories (Li et al, 2016) as well as increased blood pressure (Vizmanos et al, 2023).  In his outstanding novel, ‘The Salt of the Earth‘, Jozef Wittlin describes sleep as releasing or giving freedom to the soul.  Perhaps it is the wandering of the soul that we sometime recall as dreams.  On a more sinister note, sleep is described as practice for death by Ernesto Sabato in his novel, ‘On Heroes and Tombs‘, when presumably our soul is released forever to drift to Nirvana as in Giovanni Segantini’s painting ‘The punishment of lust’ in which the souls of neglectful mothers are shown floating towards the mountains representing Nirvana, a Buddhist heaven.  In the light of the inevitability of death, I quite like the idea that we can practice for it; however, I prefer to think of naps preserving my aging brain and improving my cognition.

Image: photograph of ‘The punishment of lust’ by Giovanni Segantini in the Walker Gallery, Liverpool.