Fighting Sleep: The War for the Mind and the US Military

By Franny Nudelman

On April 21, 1971, hundreds of Vietnam veterans fell asleep on the National Mall, wondering whether they would be arrested by daybreak. Veterans had fought the courts for the right to sleep in public while demonstrating against the war. When the Supreme Court denied their petition, they decided to break the law and turned sleep into a form of direct action.

During and after the Second World War, military psychiatrists used sleep therapies to treat an epidemic of "combat fatigue." Inducing deep and twilight sleep in clinical settings, they studied the effects of war violence on the mind and developed the techniques of brainwashing that would weaponize both memory and sleep. In the Vietnam War era, radical veterans reclaimed the authority to interpret their own traumatic symptoms-nightmares, flashbacks, insomnia-and pioneered new methods of protest.

In Fighting Sleep, Franny Nudelman recounts the struggle over sleep in the postwar world, revealing that sleep was instrumental to the development of military science, professional psychiatry, and antiwar activism. Traversing the fields of military and mainstream psychiatry, popular and institutional film, documentary sound technology, brain warfare, and postwar social movements, she demonstrates that sleep-far from being passive, empty, or null-is a site of contention and a source of political agency.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso UK
• Release date: Oct 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781786637833

Franny Nudelman

Franny Nudelman is associate professor of English at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Book preview

Fighting Sleep

Fighting Sleep

The War for the Mind

and the US Military

Franny Nudelman

First published by Verso 2019

© Franny Nudelman 2019

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-781-9

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-784-0 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-783-3 (UK EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Nudelman, Franny, author.

Title: Fighting sleep : the war for the mind and the US military/Franny Nudelman.

Other titles: Militarism and dissent in the age of expansion

Description: Brooklyn : Verso, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019018123| ISBN 9781786637819 (hardback : alk. paper) |

ISBN 9781786637833 (United Kingdom)

Subjects: LCSH: Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Veterans—Political activity—Washington (D.C.) | Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Veterans—Mental health. | Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Protest movements—United States. | Sleep deprivation—United States. | Sleep—Social aspects. | Sleep disorders—United States. | Post-traumatic stress disorder—Treatment—United States. | Soldiers—Health and hygiene—United States.

Classification: LCC DS559.73.U6 N83 2019 | DDC 959.704/31—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018123

Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

Printed in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

For David and Leo

Contents

Introduction: Bad Sleep

Part I: Sleep Experiment

1. Deep Focus, Deep Sleep

2. Psychotherapy Under Sedation: The Amytal Interview

3. Sleep and the Historical Record

Interlude: Sleeper Agent

Part II: Experiments in Activism

4. Antiwar Rapping

5. Flashing Back

6. Sleeping In

Epilogue: Sound Sleep

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

INTRODUCTION

Bad Sleep

Credit: Author’s photo

Sleeping Bad and Popping Pills, Berlin street art.

I grew up an insomniac in a household of insomniacs, where each day began with a discussion of the night before: How did you sleep? What time did you wake? Sleeping pill or no? As an adult, I was surprised that not everyone wanted to engage in lengthy conversation about the duration and quality of their sleep. For some people, sleep was no big deal, and this seemed strange to me. I envied my friends who could take sound sleep for granted, but at the same time noticed that they didn’t seem to enjoy sleep the way I did. Indifferent to fine wine and gourmet meals, I am a sleep connoisseur; sensible to the finer aspects of my sleep while sleeping, there is little I enjoy more than a good night’s rest.

Bad sleep was just one of the maladies that occupied us. My parents barely missed being hippies—we lived in the Haight-Ashbury the summer before the Summer of Love—but still they cultivated the kind of anxious introspection that was one signature of the New Age. It was in San Francisco that my mom briefly tried her hand at abstract painting, and I recall in particular one canvas with a white field poised above an orange one, the two divided by a black line on which she wrote: The loneliness of the transplanted brain. I thought it was quite neat, not least because there was a tiny dollhouse mirror placed above the cryptic line. In the Bay Area, such malaise was bread and butter for a host of therapeutic professionals and spiritual guides, and my parents frequented counselors of every stripe, practiced transcendental meditation, attended weight-loss clinics, and on.

Their concerns over what we now call wellness extended, however, far beyond our home. During the 1970s, they became antinuclear activists and conversation in our house turned to apocalypse as often as it did to sleep. My dad, a doctor and early member of Physicians for Social Responsibility, gave lectures to antiwar groups about the dangers of nuclear arms, using photographs of Japanese victims in Nagasaki and Hiroshima to illustrate the effects of these weapons on the human body. My parents put their shoulders to the wheel, but at the same time they made it clear to me that their hopes for the planet were dim. In adolescence, my nightmares often involved the outbreak of nuclear war; in one such dream, as bombs detonated, a voice came over a loudspeaker to inform me that I was now losing all responsibility for self-awareness. For me, bad sleep is bound up with a moment in time—a moment that belongs to my parents—when the menace of war was unabashedly experienced by way of psychological complaint, and the struggle to end it allied with altering consciousness.

I return to that moment to recount a little-known, seldom-recalled episode that caught and held my attention, serving as a gateway into one of sleep’s many histories.¹ In the spring of 1971, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) fought the courts for the right to sleep on the National Mall as part of their weeklong demonstration, Dewey Canyon III. When the courts denied their petition, veterans decided to break the law by sleeping anyway. Turning good rest into a form of dissent, hundreds of veterans fell asleep, wondering whether or not they would be arrested by daybreak. Clearly, sleep played a part in the movement to stop the US war in Vietnam. Still, I wondered, why did the government see fit to let veterans stay overnight on the Mall—singing, talking, even lying down—while refusing to let them fall asleep there? Why did veterans decide to sleep and risk arrest? This book began as my effort to understand what was at stake in this contest, and, from there, my story grew, traversing the fields of military and mainstream psychiatry, popular and institutional film, documentary sound technology, methods of brain warfare, and the tactics of postwar social movements to arrive back at the scene of soldiers sleeping soundly in the public square.

The VVAW sleep-in speaks powerfully in no small part because it flies in the face of a clinical and cultural record of war trauma that is rife with scenes of troubled sleep: the sleepless soldier and the insomniac veteran are protagonists of an evolving narrative of trauma and its aftermath that spans the course of the twentieth century. The recurring nightmares of World War I veterans prompted Freud to rethink his ideas about how dreams work, and to establish aversive recollection, rather than repressed desire, as the fundamental feature of emotional life.² During World War II, psychiatrists who treated soldiers suffering from war trauma observed how frequently their patients experienced disturbed sleep. Roy Grinker and John Spiegel, who treated US soldiers in North Africa, reported, Either our patients have difficulty going to sleep because of hypnogogic hallucinations repetitive of battle experiences, or they are awakened from sleep by severe catastrophic nightmares.³ The disturbed sleep of Vietnam-era veterans provided an important source for the development of the diagnostic category post-traumatic stress disorder, first codified in 1980, which lists difficulty falling or staying asleep and recurrent nightmares as two of the syndrome’s symptoms.⁴ Troubled sleep emerges as a refrain in the psychiatric literature of war and functions as a metonym for postwar trauma in popular representations of soldiers and veterans.

Veterans’ radicalism engaged a history of military experimentation that used the sleep of soldiers—dreams, insomnia, twilight sleep, nightmares, and flashbacks—to explore and define the nature of trauma. In particular, during World War II, an epidemic of mental illness in the military helped to focus the fledgling field of psychology on the experiences of soldiers and made their sleep a special source of information. Drug-induced sleep served as a routine form of treatment and a means of inquiry and experimentation. Inducing deep and twilight sleep in clinical settings, military psychiatrists studied the effects of war violence on the soldier’s mind. In the process, they redefined the nature of memory in ways that would have far-reaching influence, and pioneered techniques of brainwashing that would weaponize both memory and sleep.

Clinicians used sleeping soldiers to generate new knowledge not only about subjectivity but also about interrelationship. Patients underwent talk therapy while sedated in scenes of coercion and, strangely, co-creation that at times confounded the very boundaries of identity. Such experiments alert us to the role of interviews, dialogue, and conversation in producing ideas about how we remember and assimilate extreme events and experiences; questions posed by therapists and documentarians, commanders and comrades to soldiers who are asleep or half asleep, or in the grip of sedatives or recurring memories so lifelike they seem real, reverberate through postwar representations of war trauma. Eventually, veterans, who had long served as objects of psychiatric investigation, became active opponents of war, using their analysis of war’s emotional effects to pioneer new methods of war resistance. Claiming the right to query, discuss, and interpret their own traumatic symptoms, they adapted therapeutic concepts and practices and, in doing so, built on and radically redefined both military and mainstream psychiatry.

As I tended my small plot of activist history, the topic of sleep caught on. I observed the boom in scientific studies on sleep, reporting about sleep, and sleep scholarship. In recent years, self-help books touting the importance of a good night’s rest have competed with dystopian fictions about a future in which we will no longer sleep, while reports on the hazards of not sleeping enough are the subject of podcasts and news articles. A Berlin street artist offers bad sleep (and popping pills) as a figure for our age. It makes sense, then, that interest in sleep among scholars in the humanities and social sciences has grown as researchers work to recover the history of sleep and sleep science, interpret representations of sleep in the arts, and polemicize the value of sleep in the digital age. Long neglected and even derided, sleep is now in vogue.

In 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary suggests that our current interest in sleep is inseparable from the threat that late capitalism poses to it. He begins by describing military efforts to design a sleepless soldier who can remain awake for many days at a stretch without adverse effects, and predicts that, if these experiments succeed, the sleepless soldier will be a forerunner of the sleepless worker or consumer.⁵ In the tradition of the jeremiad, Crary argues that sleep is under siege and mounts an impassioned defense of its value. Observing that sleep is the only regular activity that cannot be easily commodified in a world in which we produce, consume, and interact round the clock, he argues that sleep represents a formidable obstacle … to the full realization of 24/7 capitalism.⁶

Crary’s book is harrowing, as Benjamin Reiss puts it, not least because it is so easy to recognize our own daily habits in this dystopian portrait of contemporary life.⁷ It is harrowing, moreover, because in these habits Crary sees not only the erosion of individual well-being as we network, purchase, and follow without pause, but also the demise of our planet, which cannot sustain unchecked consumption. In this light, sleep is necessary to our collective survival. Sleep interrupts the homogeneous time of late capitalism. During this pause, or time of waiting, we are free to imagine a shared world whose fate is not terminal.⁸ Crary hopes that in sleep we will recover our ability to imagine a future that is radically different from our present: The imaginings of a future without capitalism, he writes, begin as dreams of sleep.⁹

While Crary mounts a revelatory analysis of the contemporary assault on sleep, he consigns resistance to dream life. Indeed, much recent scholarship that explores the historical and social significance of sleep fails to consider the materiality of sleep—the spaces where we sleep, for example, or the laws that govern those spaces—and thus cannot account for the political agency of sleepers who, on significant occasion, have insisted on determining the conditions, as well as the meaning, of their own sleep states. Even scholars who study the politics of sleep have had a hard time granting agency to the sleeping subject. For example, in his book, The Politics of Sleep, sociologist Simon Williams concludes that sleep "defies explicit or full-blown politicization, given that it stubbornly remains a blank or void in