Before the Industrial Revolution, people slept in two intervals of about four hours each, bridged by a period of "quiet wakefulness." According to historian Roger Ekirch of the University of Virginia, people spent those serene midnight hours meditating on their dreams and discussing them with others. Private bedrooms were rare, and most people shared a bed with one or two "bedfellows"—family members or even servants—making dreams a natural topic of conversation. People took dreams seriously as channels to make contact with dead relatives, prognostications of the future, or conduits to God.

But then everything changed. As wealth increased, more and more people moved into private bedrooms. Meanwhile, explains Roger Schmidt, an English professor at Idaho State University, the Western world was getting hooked on caffeine. The novel was born, and books became widely available. Pocket watches appeared, and people began measuring time by the hour and the minute rather than by the sun's course in the sky. Demand for nocturnal lighting spiked. People began staying up later and later, and the Protestant work ethic took hold.

Sleep, once considered a profound, almost spiritual state—a "nightly shaking hands with God," as John Donne put it—was equated with sloth. And sleeplessness, previously a sign of ill health, became an emblem of virtue, industry, and self-discipline.

At the same time, the Enlightenment's rational ethos led to the disparaging of dreams as superstition. "With the death of sleep comes the necessary trivialization of dreaming," avows Schmidt.

"A vital link to the spiritual world is severed." Today, we seldom linger to reflect on our dreams or pause to recount them to our bedmates. "Life has been demystified," says Ekirch, "and dreams are one of the casualties."

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