By Bradford J. Senning
Arizona Daily Wildcat
February 26, 1998

Sleep Deprivation, Pt. 3: Electric light - dynamite!

I have no doubt that my coffee maker runs on electricity. That's one thing the government can't hide from me. So I've deduced that the lamp which stands above my desk is also part of an electrical system and not a government conspiracy. I would almost feel safe, except that I think the coffee maker and the lamp are in on their own conspiracy. And that is to keep me awake tonight.

I'm not going to blame it on myself. It is my right as an American in this post-Watergate and Prozac-rich age to believe that everything is a conspiracy of either insidious group forces or chemical imbalances. I blame Thomas Edison as much as I blame Juan Valdez for the prevalence of sleep deprivation in this century.

I know many of you are also besieged by the same conspiracy. I saw those lights in the windows on my midnight ride home from the library; I smelled the newly brewed coffee. Midterms have begun and you've got a test in "Cranial-Rectal Inversion" tomorrow. You need to study, hard-core. So in order to stay awake you've employed artificial help.

Yes, I'm arguing that light contributes to sleep deprivation. And the heretic who put us under the lamp isn't someone we'd ordinarily describe as an evil industrialist. However, Edison's invention has put the Freud-conjured demons of our sleeping hours into the light.

I don't know if Thomas Edison had this in mind 120 years ago when he invented the electric light bulb. After all, the first recording on his phonograph invention was "Mary Had a Little Lamb." There's no way he could have foreseen from that innocent beginning such renegade recordings as "Antichrist Superstar," or "John Tesh: Live." So how could he have foreseen what artificial light has done to our sleep habits.

Artificial light had its innocent days. As Edison's invention of the motion picture had its innocent days before "Boogie Nights," so did artificial light first make work conditions more pleasant, brighter, cheerier. In buildings where windows provided much of the working light, bulbs could allow employees to continue work after the sun went down.

As light bulbs became more reliable, the architecture of buildings began to change. Employees were situated in offices at the centers of buildings where no windows to the outside existed. Cubicles soon came to partition each employee in her or his own windowless space.

How does this contribute to sleep deprivation? Hold on, I'm getting there.

Remember, the light bulb is in on a conspiracy. And that conspiracy had its backers. It became readily apparent to employers that humans could be productive in sunless working conditions. Why not have employees working around the clock in shifts? In dungeonous factories around the globe, Edison's light illuminates the tragic scene of workers staying awake unnaturally, because business never uses technology as a liberty for too long before that liberty becomes an injury to its employees.

Businesses which have witnessed a decline in the employee morale are switching to better lighting conditions. Studies have showed that humans can be tricked into a biological rhythm similar to natural rhythms when a light source of sufficient brightness is substituted for the sun. A manufacturer named ShiftWorks sells lighting systems to corporations that are designed to improve worker productivity. By faking the minds of employees into believing that they are working in daylight, these lights work as a palliative to abnormal sleep patterns.

We're becoming technically advanced at keeping ourselves awake. And business has created this environment for us.

It used to be thought that a lack of sleep meant you were a lunatic. But now the heroic images in movies are like Tom Cruise in "The Firm," whose ability to sleep two hours a night offers him an edge over all the corrupt lawyers. Then there's Alec Baldwin in "The Hunt for Red October" who spends the three-day span of the movie fighting sleep in order to catch the bad guy.

The heroes of cinema are modeled on the heroes of the business world who seem inhumanly free of passion for their wives or of biological necessities like sleep. And employers approve this ideal by setting up superhuman environments, expecting us to act like we are ambitious.

In a sense, our schooling at the UA prepares us for the real world in more ways than instruction. It's preparing us for a world of little sleep. So keep the lamps burning all night and train yourself in water-cooler etiquette by talking to the refrigerator about how evil your boss is while you get your coffee. Chances are you're going to be tired. But after this column ends nobody is going to mind your pains except you.

Bradford J. Senning is a senior majoring in creative writing and American literature. His column, "The Emperor of Ice Cream," appears every Thursday.