Go to Bed, Genius!

A loving scold for the sleep-deprived geniuses scrolling in the dark. Read this, then do what your mother told you: go to bed.

“Call me a genius! Do it! I’m a geeeniusss!”

Oh, geez, even writing the words down takes me back, to past shoes I’ve stood in over the years, captive audience to men who insisted they had a cunning plan…a plan so cunning you could pin a tail on it and call it a weasel!

They’re words I’ve heard from men, quite a few, who claimed they were smart beyond my comprehension, had a direct line to a mystical muse of intellect who would never deign to share the sacred ‘big brain goods’ with me, a mere woman.

In fact one claimed he’d been tested at Stanford University to have an IQ over 200. I’m 100% not shitting you, he actually said that. Repeatedly. For decades.

That particular ‘genius’ bragged to anyone slow enough to get pinned down or humble enough to think bragging meant brilliance. I noticed over the years he was often met with quick departures when he entered rooms, a natural consequence of his unsurpassed intelligence, I suppose.

And not only that, as proof? The one common factor between these self proclaimed geniuses? They all claimed they didn’t need sleep like mere mortals. Oh goodness, noes!

Why, their brains were of such stellar quality that they only needed 3 hours of sleep per night, maybe 4 if they had some especially sharp thoughts to generate!

Lol! I dunno about you, but I’ve come to automatically give side eye to anyone who claims they have been blessed with abnormally low sleep requirements. Insomniacs aside, there’s almost always an implication that comes with these claims that “I need less sleep than the average person”.

What do they want us to think? That they’re incredibly smart, of course! So smart their brains output 21/7, without fail. And always brilliantly!

One of those ‘smart’ men I knew stayed up so late every night, doing god knows what, that he habitually fell asleep while eating dinner. Dozed off in his soup, at risk of drowning. But that, of course, was because the rest of us were so boring, he needed REAL intellectual stimulation!

Wasn’t because he refused to go to bed at a normal hour, no no no…

“Sleep is for DUMMIES!”, he’d say.

I’ve heard these factoids for years: How Leonardo Da Vinci had a special sleep routine, 20 minutes every few hours for a total of 3–4 hours per day, and Napoleon Bonaparte averaged 4–6 hours habitually.

Edison claimed he only needed four hours of sleep, though I suspect it was the last tattered vestiges of his conscience keeping him up those extra hours, and perhaps he spent those sleepless nights trying to fight it to its final rest rather than coming up with new inventions.

Or working out ways to steal ideas from his competitors.

Edison did, after all, employ a vast team of innovators from whom he could pick and choose his “Eureka” moments to crow over.

And it’s not surprising to find a dismally low ethical bar from such a man, fueled by ego and so little sleep. I did, after all, read that people who sleep fewer hours than normal have a higher likelihood of psychopathy.

It seems if you want empathy, you need to dream.

And then there are the modern day counterparts. Trump who claims 4–6 hours, tweeting nonsense in the middle of the night. Musk, at 6 hours maximum, on a cocktail of ego and…*Cassandra mumbles something rumored into her sleeve*. Jay Leno, Indra Nooyi, Tom Ford and Martha Stewart all claim only 3–4 hours sleep per night.

I’m sure some of those folks are smart enough. Maybe some even edging into genius territory. But I doubt they’re the brightest of the bright, and perhaps their brightness edges more to PR brilliance than actual problem solving or innovation.

But the other side of the coin? Those geniuses who slept, who dreamed, who woke, at times, with revelation.

Beethoven, they say, slept 8 hours per night habitually, and often complained if his usual sleep was cut short. Einstein claimed 10 hour nights plus a nap: probably dreaming in technicolor of those damned spooky particles that kept messing with his equations.

And there is Paul McCartney, waking one morning from a dream with the melody for Yesterday so fully formed in his head that he thought he was merely remembering something he’d heard before. As he sat down at his piano trying to pin down which tune it was he noted down a classic that still lives with us.

And don’t forget Samuel Coleridge, who, in an opium induced dream, drugs taken to counteract dysentery, woke and scribbled down Kubla Khan, a masterful poem born of one of those dreams so slippery that you can’t catch it in full. Especially, it seems, if you’re interrupted mid-scribble by a ‘person on business from Porlock”.

In science there are many examples of great men dreaming of solutions to problems they struggled with during waking hours. These world changing dreams of revelation came to Elias Howe, who dreamed of cannibals, wielding spears in a way that solved the engineering problem of how to create a working needle in a sewing machine. And Kekulé, who saw the benzene ring in a dream of a snake biting its tail.

And, finally, Mendeleev, who famously struggled for years to group chemical elements by atomic weights into a meaningful system. One night he simply dreamed the solution, giving us the periodic table and a wonderful tale of the powers of dreaming.

Dreaming, love, can be the great incubator of great thought. It also freshens your face and is good for your skin :)

As T.S. Eliot wrote, “what one writes in this way may succeed in standing the examination of a more normal state of mind; it gives the impression of having undergone a long incubation.”
Perhaps all creation does.

Now, go get some rest you genius, you! Says mom, shutting out the light.

And taking a long hard look in the mirror here…. It’s a lazy Sunday, early evening and who am I fooling? I need a nap myself. Even non-genius’s benefit from those. I feel I have Einstein’s blessing here…

Goodnight Room

In my beloved yellow room,

full of hand-painted leaves,

There’s a line up of plans,

And a laptop full of schemes.

There’s a catalogue of research,

And a long list of themes.

Good night room.

Good night schemes.

Good night plans.

It’s time to drift in dreams.

Sleep tight! ❤