








































© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expositions 2.2 (2008) 147–151] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v2i2.147 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Adjusting the Body-Clock: Archaic Aspirations and Contem-
porary Chemicals1

WILLIAm R. LAFLEUR

Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations 
University of Pennsylvania

One of the attractions of contemporary biotechnology is that it holds out the 
promise to individuals, even if not yet to all of mankind, of a new level of 
time-management. Rapid and even accelerated development of a panoply of 
biological or medical interventions has given extended longevity—at least to 
those portions of humanity with access to such technologies and the wealth 
required to purchase them. It is through ever more effective medicine that we 
gain growing control over the time of the life-span, and the result is that some 
of us can expect to live far longer than we otherwise would. We have not yet 
made ourselves capable of living forever, but being able to live quantifiably 
longer lives is, at least in the popular imagination, a way in which we tempo-
rarily stave off the menacing hand of death.

To this method must now be added the promise of another. It lies in the 
possibility that, through enabling pharmaceuticals, we may be able to greatly 
reduce the amount of our life-times spent in sleep. A better and more voli-
tional control of our sleep is assumed to be another way in which we, aided 
by biochemistry, will be better able to control time—at least, the time of 
our lives. This is especially so if it is assumed that we are most alive, at least 
as humans, when we are conscious. If this is assumed, then it can logically 
follow that any reduction of the time we spend in a state of unconsciousness 
will give us more living-as-human time. And, since sleep is that state in which 
we are periodically unconscious (even if capable of easily regained conscious-
ness), any significant reduction in sleep-time, if that can be achieved without 
bodily harm or other kinds of unintended consequence, will be a great boon. 
It will be another way of gaining time. Just as death robs us of life ultimately, 
so sleep steals our life-time virtually on a daily basis and from within.

This is a domain in which emerging biochemistry has great interest and has 
begun to make intriguing promises. A new chemical breakthrough has come 
in the development of modafinil, marketed in the United States as “Provigil.” 
modafinil is only the first of what is assumed to be a line of ever better sleep 



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management pharmaceuticals. As is usually the case, the legalized manufac-
ture and sale of something as new as modafinil is for a specific medical treat-
ment. In this case, its first use will be as therapy for persons suffering from 
narcolepsy. But, as indicated by news reports of the U.S. military’s interest 
and now of “Professor’s Little Helper,” the uses of modafinil appear to extend 
well “beyond therapy.”

my intention here is to raise some questions about what kind of value,  
either positive or negative, we have tended to place on time spent asleep. I am 
greatly assisted by the fact that the Encyclopedia of Religion includes an superb 
entry on “sleep” by Jonathan Z. Smith.

One of the conclusions that can be drawn from Smith’s impressive array of 
data is that, although countered by a scattering of positive statements about 
sleep, persons writing from within the perspectives of most of the world’s 
religious traditions have described it in largely negative terms. Shakespeare, 
of course, could refer to sleep as “sweet” and to being able through it to “ravel 
up the tangled sleeve of care.” And Coleridge called sleep “a gentle thing,  
beloved from pole to pole.” Such statements would readily echo the senti-
ments of persons suffering from Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, commonly 
known as insomnia. But they fall within the minority of claims about it.

Far more numerous are the references—and across a wide variety of cul-
tures—to sleep as comparable to dying and, correspondingly, to awakening 
as having been given “time” or even “life” once again. Smith notes the fol-
lowing: In the Iliad, sleep and death are twin brothers. Sleep is something 
necessary for human beings and lesser gods, but superior or supreme dei-
ties, by contrast, are in a state of constant wakefulness. Psalm 121:4 tells the  
ancient Jews to trust the fact that their deity, YHWH, “will neither slum-
ber nor sleep”—surely an indication of a being far superior to deities who, 
by being weaker, have the undesirable habit of falling asleep. It is only the  
ambiguous or lesser gods that require and yield to sleep. Smith notes that 
Elijah taunts the priests of Baal as worshipping a god who “perhaps is asleep 
and needs to be awakened” (I Kings 18:27; Smith 1987, 361–364).

Inasmuch as sleep appears so often to have been associated with death, with 
night, with being unconscious, and with weakness found in lesser beings, we 
probably should not be surprised to find among ourselves a certain eagerness 
to bring it under greater control and rational management. moreover, the 
desire to “conquer” the need for sleep fully some day, while probably only a 
utopian dream, may be connected to this long human history of associating 
sleep with night, with death, and with negativity.

In Buddhism, we find a similar kind of valorization: the Buddhist engaged 



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in deep meditation is said to be more, not less, fully awake. “Awakened One” 
becomes the most fundamental way of referring to the Buddha and, by  
extension, to anyone who is self-mastered to the point of being “awakened.” 
Language about “being awakened” is probably as central to Buddhism as is 
that about “being saved” to Christianity. many of the epistemological dem-
onstrations carried out within the major Buddhist texts of Asia—whether 
in Sankrit, Pali, Tibetan, or Chinese—attempt to show that ordinary daily 
wakefulness is really only another mode of being asleep, but usually unrec-
ognized as such.

There is, however, one major figure who enables us to think against the 
stream. Dôgen (1200–1253) is a Zen teacher of medieval Japan who, in the 
twentieth century, was re-discovered and declared to have produced writ-
ings that easily rank alongside those of some of the world’s most honored 
philosophical minds. One of his essays, “Uji” (有時), can be translated “Be-
ing/Time” and has proven particularly fascinating, in part though not only  
because its title and theme seem to have anticipated a famous European work 
of philosophy, Sein und Zeit, by seven hundred years.

What, then, is time to an “awakened” philosopher? What does Dôgen say in 
“Being/Time”? The core section is probably what follows in my translation:

People say “time flies,” but it is a mistake to focus your thoughts on 
time flying away. Do not conceive of time as something which, by  
being something that flies, gets away from you. When you do that, 
you have opened up a gap between yourself and time. As long as you 
fail to understand the complete identity of being and time, you will 
be reduced to thinking of time merely as something separate from you 
and always getting away from you. The crucially important thing is 
to see the entire universe and all its entity/beings as a sequence: time-
being followed by time-being…on and on. (Dôgen 1970, 258)

Where does this take our discussion?
Dôgen, I propose, rejects the trans-cultural but clichéd metaphor “time 

flies” (時は飛去) because it introduces an unfortunate gap (間隙), the  
exact content of which is not specified in the text but would appear from the 
larger context to be between the self and time. That is, he is trying to undo 
the notion, apparently as common to his time and culture as it is to ours, that 
the “being” of a human or anything comes and goes within a separate some-
thing which can be designated “time.” For Dôgen to be “awakened” involves 
a recognition of what is faulty and illusory in common, but bad, metaphors 
and concepts.



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This, I suggest, is why Dôgen turns his philosophical understanding of time 
into personal advice: “It is a mistake to focus your thoughts on time flying 
away. Do not conceive of time as something which, by being something that 
flies, gets away from you.” Time conceived of as flying away from me is time 
portrayed as separate from and even indifferent to me. It is time objecti-
fied so fully that its basic relationship to me becomes one of confrontation,  
antagonism. Time, in a word, is my enemy. This point of view, Dôgen  
implies, is that of a diurnal consciousness that, upon analysis, is only really a 
different and easily concealed way of being existentially asleep. His is a wake-
up call of a different order altogether.

How might it be possible to go from these considerations back to the dis-
cussion of modafinil? It seems like itself a huge leap in materials, disciplines, 
and time. But a few observations can probably be drawn.

In Yoga and other works, mircea Eliade wrote so approvingly of projects 
through which humans can taste immortality, “overcome” time, and un-
dertake religious regimens that aim at transcending “the natural,” that it is 
easy to overlook something far more cautionary in his Autobiography. There,  
reflecting in later years on the sleep deprivations of his youth and on the yogic 
quest of his early maturity, he wrote: “But it is quite probable that my interest 
in yoga…stemmed from my faith in the unlimited possibilities of man. I did 
not realize at the time the consequences of this Faustian ambition” (Eliade 
1981, 110).

Faustian? This term so used may have been largely irrelevant until now. 
That is, during human history until now the capacity to transcend sleep 
and time was primarily a dream or something attainable only in an afterlife  
beyond this world. And, even when translated into a religious regimen within 
this world, it remained limited to a relatively small number of individuals, 
those whom Eliade referred to as the “religious virtuosi,” within the mass of 
humankind. In such contexts it was statistically almost irrelevant.

But all that can change when, through the means of relatively available 
chemicals, being relatively “free” of sleep becomes not only physiologically 
possible but something as ready-to-hand as any other approved pharmaceu-
tical. How far do we wish to alter our brain chemistry in order to realize 
our dreams of having more life-time by not wasting so much of it in sleep?  
Dôgen’s reflections suggest that, by realizing such dreams, we might make our 
lives nightmares: we might only exacerbate our “confrontation” with time.



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Note

1. The author and the editors of Expositions are grateful for permission to republish this 
essay in an abridged version. The original appeared in Walter Schweidler, ed., Zeit: 
Anfang und Ende (Sankt Augustin, Germany: Academia Verlag, 2004) and was pre-
sented at a conference sponsored by the Hermann und marianne Straniak Stiftung.

References

Dôgen
1970 Nihon shisô taikei: Dôgen. Ed. Terada Tôru, vol. 1. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.

Eliade, mircea
1981  Autobiography: Journey East, Journey West. New York: Harper and Row.

Smith, Jonathan Z.
1987 Sleep. In The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. mircea Eliade, vol. 13, 361–364. 

New York: macmillan.




