[Sleep and sleepers in literature]

Sleep sets specific limits to self-control or self-disposal of man. Freud's statement that one third of our own self is still unborn points to a certain amount of uncertainty, linked permanently to our existence during sleep and associated with our loss of control over our rational thinking. Therefore, in the literature, sleep is quite often correlated with mythic, magic and religious conceptions. In particular, the experience of innocence is compellingly linked to sleep, necessarily followed by the question of guilt and evil. Goethe describes sleep as a process of working up and surmounting guilt as a basic event of spiritual and physical healing. Shakespeare's Macbeth, however, shows from an archaic-mystical as well as a modern psychological view how sleep is destroyed by crime.