The ABC show Once Upon A Time is exploring shared dream experiences
from when certain characters were under a sleeping curse.
Sleep. Sleep Curse. The most popular sleep-related fairy tales are Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. There’s the Rip Van Winkle story and a score of even lesser known sleeping hero/heroine stories.
How many times are children exposed to the theme of “sleep as curse?” Snow White and Sleeping Beauty were 2 of my favorite stories when I was a little girl. They weren’t even the Disney versions, just generic picture books that I would look at over and over. (I don’t think I saw the Disney movies until I was an adult.)
How does this theme creep into our collective unconscious? Does this effect us? Why are there no fairy tales about insomnia? There is the sleep plague described in One Hundred Years of Solitude that I finished last month, where a whole town couldn’t sleep. But that’s not a childhood bedtime story that seeps into one’s dreams.
Sleeping Beauty and Snow White are shown in a death-like state, unable to be awakened. Why would I want to go to sleep?