Wising Up at 4 a.m.

The National Sleep Foundation’s annual survey, released last week, discovered that Americans spend less than the recommended eight hours in the sack, so much less that we’re falling asleep at the wheel, yawning through our workdays and too pooped for an evening out or even for sex. People who are married with kids got the least amount of sleep--just 6.7 hours nightly.

We needed a poll to know this?

By most accounts, the foundation’s survey is an occasion for hand-wringing and lots of soporific advice--a glass of warm milk before retiring, a quiet, dark bedroom, the usual.

Call it middle age or overcommitment or chronic insomnia, but there are many of us for whom neither warm milk nor soothing ocean sounds on tape seems to summon the sandman. And while we’d give anything to pass 6.7 hours, let alone eight, in blessed oblivion, we’ve come to know those wee, dark hours as “a region of profound revelations,” as Joyce Carol Oates wrote.

Yes, there’s the to-do list that stretches into nocturnal eternity: clothes forgotten at the cleaners floating into view during the hours before dawn; that still-unfinished report at work. Old disappointments fuse with the new worries into endless restlessness. But there are, as Oates suggests, compensations for a life unslept.

Into that “dark unbounded room,” observed the poet John Hollander, the mind is “hung brilliantly upon filaments stung by some untongued brightness. . . . A snapped-off dream disperses into darkness like gold becoming mere motes becoming light.”

Insights can come fast, along with new resolutions and solutions to old dilemmas.

“Still, if you are in luck,” as Richard Wilbur wrote, “you may be granted, / As, inland, one can sometimes smell the sea, / A moment’s perfect carelessness, in which / To stumble a few steps and sink to sleep.”