Golden Gate state puts snooze in the news

Shakespeare’s whining schoolboy creeping like a snail unwillingly to school might well be more full of beans were he to be around today in California. The Golden Gate state has passed a law barring middle schools from beginning classes earlier than 8 am, and high schools before 8.30 am, to give students more sleep time. California is the first state in the US to adopt a law that says ‘aye’ to more shut-eye, but it could become a trendsetter. Sleep therapists say that slumber unlumbers the mind of harmful stress and it’s beneficial for people of all ages to get in forty-one, or even forty-two, winks in preference to the conventionally recommended forty.

Indeed, sleeping on the job can sometimes prove to be the most efficient way of getting the job done. The German chemist Kekulé is said to have hit upon the structure of the carbon molecule while he was in the arms of Morpheus. Freud used his innovative interpretation of dreams as the keystone to the understanding of the psyche through the working of the subconscious. As the poet more succinctly put it, I sleep, and my soul awakens. When a playwright protégé of Bernard Shaw remonstrated that the Irish dramatist had been caught napping during a performance of the acolyte’s latest work to which he’d been invited to give his opinion on, the Shavian response was, “Sleep, sir, is an opinion.”