“What’s keeping you awake?” James Bond’s battles with sleep

What if we reframed the whole of the Bond franchise as the story of a man just trying to get a good night’s rest? Lifelong insomniac David Lowbridge-Ellis gets under the covers with 007 to explore when he sleeps, if he’s really the early riser he claims to be and why we should be concerned about his dreams.

Perhaps because, as Hitchcock famously asserted, “drama is life with the dull bits cut out”, we rarely see Bond getting healthy, natural sleep on screen. Perhaps we’re supposed to assume Bond sleeps like a normal human being when we’re not looking, in between all the drama?

But this presupposes that sleep is one of life’s dull bits, a necessary bodily function on a dramaturgical par with respiration and excretion. To be frank, I’m glad that Bond filmmakers have thus far saved us from seeing 007 taking a number two. But I would like to see him getting a bit more shut eye because, based on what we’re presented with on screen, I’m a bit worried about him.

Many of us are very experienced at projecting too much of ourselves onto 007. And when we’re watching a Bond movie, whatever we’ve got going on in our own lives inevitably draws more of our attention. As a kid who regularly wrestled with getting to sleep in the first place, who was a very light sleeper and rarely made it through the night without waking up multiple times, I took some solace in my hero, James Bond, rarely being shown resting. I was unaware of the concept of hypervigilance until decades later but I now recognise that I was, by default, on edge as a child. While the threats I faced were more emotional than Bonds and less material, that didn’t make them feel any less real. Whether it’s a man coming at you with a knife or the fear that you’ll be ‘found out’ as gay, it’s the same flight or fight response your body goes through. Neither are particularly conducive to a good night’s rest.

Inevitably then, this somewhat sleep-deprived young Bond fan zoomed in on the sleep-related bits of 007 adventures and collectively they formed an impression that Bond is also perpetually in a state of ostensibly harmless sleep-deprivation. I found this reassuring: if Bond gets through life perfectly adequately despite never getting enough sleep then so can I!

It took me until I was well into adulthood to discover how wrong I was. The truth is, Bond needs as much sleep as the rest of us, even if he doesn’t always get it. 

In my defence, I was around seven years old when I formed the erroneous mental model of Bond as someone who doesn’t need sleep to function. I was blithely unaware, as a seven year old, of the dangers of forming a fallacious conclusion based on limited evidence. The academic I would later become would look back on my seven year old self and caution him about accidentally making ‘hasty generalisations’ or forming ‘anecdotal evidence fallacies’ by intentionally cherry-picking the bits of ‘anecdotal evidence’ which reinforced his pre-conceived idea.

As I said, I was only seven, so let’s cut past me a bit of slack, yeah?

But I do find it amusing - and occasionally alarming - that so many Bond fans (grown-up ones, who should know better), are all too happy to fall into this trap, finding the facts to fit their idea of who James Bond is and who he isn’t, excluding contrary evidence which might torpedo their argument. One of the few facts we can establish about Bond is he can’t be pinned down using simple adjectives - ‘masculine’, ‘stoic’, ‘cold’, ‘heroic’. Yes, he’s all of these things, but only up to a point. He’s also, at various points, ‘feminine’, ‘hedonistic’, ‘sentimental’ and ‘fearful’. This goes just as much for the pejorative adjectives which are regularly thrown around, usually by those who have taken the odd sentence from Fleming or short moments from the films out of context. Yes, you can argue that Bond (and the world he inhabits) is sometimes ‘sexist’, ‘racist’ and ‘homophobic’, but only if you acknowledge there are times where Bond is also ‘feminist’, ‘antiracist’ and ‘broadminded’. Most of the time - like most people - he’s just trying to get through life with as little friction as possible, working with whoever he needs to - and sometimes doing unpalatable things - in order to get the job done.

Extremes are anathema to the Bond character, particularly so when it comes to thinking about his experience of sleep. At one end of the sleep/sleepless spectrum, there is no evidence at all to support the notion that Bond is a hypersomniac, that is, someone who falls asleep too frequently, especially during the day. And at the other end, we cannot legitimately say Bond routinely experiences insomnia. As much as seven year old me wanted to believe this to be the case, a full examination of the available evidence doesn’t really support the argument. So why did this idea so strongly take hold?

“When do you sleep, 007?” 

- M to Bond in the film of Dr. No (1962)

On the infrequent occasions we do see Bond sleeping on screen, it’s more often than not because he’s been drugged, beaten unconscious or has passed out from pain. In Goldfinger, for instance, Bond is tranquilised and wakes up on a Pussy-piloted plane thinking he must still be dreaming. In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Bond is confronted with angelic visions of the Christmas-topper kind when he awakes on Blofeld’s sofa, having been bashed on the head. After being beaten by Godinba in Octopussy, Bond opens his eyes to find himself not in his hotel room, but in Kamal’s palace. A disorientating sequence in The Living Daylights has Bond groggily rousing after being drugged with Chloral Hydrate. 007 has a rude awakening in GoldenEye, recovering just in time from being tranquilised in order to eject him and Natalya from an soon-to-be ex-Tiger helicopter. Casino Royale shows us Bond at his most vulnerable, slipping in and out of balmy sleep over a period of weeks as he recovers from having his nethers almost negated. 

There are exceptions to this pattern, the most prominent one being the introduction of Roger Moore as Bond in Live and Let Die. When the new 007 was first revealed to 1973 audiences, he was shown getting some post-coital shut eye, with Italian agent Miss Caruso also asleep on his chest. Is this proof that James Bond is just like the rest of us mere humans after all and even he’s powerless to succumb to the well-documented soporific effects of sex? Perhaps not… in Moonraker, he loves Holly Goodhead and leaves her in the middle of the night in order to get a head start in getting to Rio. When Bond’s on the job, the mission comes before anything else.

And that’s the crucial difference: we don’t see 007 getting any down time on film, Bond is almost always in mission res. Even when he’s on leave, he’s chasing up a lead (in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service for instance). But at the beginning of Live and Let Die, Bond has already completed his mission, so he can sleep the sleep of the just. That he’s sleeping - literally and figuratively - with an agent from a rival secret service does not trouble his slumber, even if the prospect of M finding out does cause some consternation (and cause poor Miss Caruso to be unceremoniously shoved into a wardrobe).

In some ways, Moore’s introductory scene echoes Connery’s introduction in Dr. No: both show Bond off the clock before being answering the call of duty in the middle of the night. However, in Connery’s case, he’s wide awake and badinaging over baccarat. When 007 arrives in his boss’s office at 3AM, M asks him when he does sleep. Bond replies: “never on the firm’s time, sir”.

Like any civil servant - even one with a licence to kill - Bond would be expected to be at work relatively early each morning. So are we to infer from Connery’s introductory scene that he’s routinely in a state of being sleep-deprived? Anyone who has dragged themselves through a long day at work after a night spent largely - or completely - awake, knows how impairing a lack of sleep can be. Our physical and mental acuities are severely diminished, which would be bad enough for someone working in an office, far worse for someone whose job often comes down to killing or being killed.

While we never find out the working hours of the cinematic Bond, Fleming tells us - in the novel Moonraker - that Bond’s office hours are “elastic… from around ten to six”. If we take as typical Bond’s early hours antics at the start of the film Dr. No, this suggests he wouldn’t be too shy of the seven or so hours of sleep he would require to operate optimally in the workplace. But if we subtract from Bond’s sleepy time the distraction (for an hour or two) of Sylvia Trench who presumably keeps him, er, up past his already-delayed bed time, the lengthy flight to Jamaica (around 15 hours, with connections, in 1962) and the inevitable jet lag, it’s a wonder Bond doesn’t spend most of the ensuing mission napping, rather than finding out what happened to Strangways.

The film adaptation of Fleming’s Dr. No would appear to establish from the outset that the cinematic Bond is someone who doesn’t need as much sleep as the rest of us. But this false impression is a consequence  - perhaps unintended - of the books being adapted for the screen out of sequence.

The opening of Fleming’s Casino Royale famously begins with Bond already on a mission, circling around Le Chiffre to get the measure of his opponent. This explains why he’s still up at three in the morning; he wouldn’t be up this late if he was doing “ten to six” days in London. Fleming makes it clear, in no uncertain terms, that Bond being awake at this time is the exception, rather than the norm. Bond realises he is mentally and physically exhausted and the rest of the chapter is essentially a detailed account of his bedtime routine: as he mentally unwinds (helpfully, for the reader, he recaps the events that have led to this point), he returns to his hotel room where he reviews the “routine precautions” he takes to detect if anyone has been in his room. After making sure he feels as safe as possible in his environment, he undresses, showers and, finally, places a gun beneath his pillow before falling asleep. Nowadays, we would call this sleep hygiene: the habits we try to adhere to and the modifications we make to our environment in order to get better sleep. Bond’s routine isn’t half bad and we could do worse than take inspiration from his example, although I’m happy to report that I’ve only stayed in a small handful of hotel rooms where I’ve felt my psychological safety threatened to the point where I felt the need to sleep with a sawn-off Colt revolver (Bond’s gun of choice in this early mission) within easy reach.

Joking aside, it cannot be overstated how important feeling safe is for sleep, particularly for those of us who are more anxious. I marvel at people who can fall asleep almost anywhere, seemingly shutting off their fight or flight response entirely. I have never been one of those people, which is perhaps why I relate so much to Bond taking his “precautions”. Doubtless, some do take it as far as literally sleeping with a gun. Being British and of relatively sound mind, this isn’t really an option for me (thankfully). In hotels, I usually make do with a securely locked door and, if really necessary, an additional obstacle in the doorway such as a suitcase or a suitably-angled chair. I thought I was alone in taking such precautions, but many people have told me they have similar nighttime rituals, even if the precautions take many forms. Not so long ago, my husband of fifteen years revealed to me that, at home, he has always slept on the side of our bed furthest from the bedroom door because, if we were ever to have an attacker enter our house, I would have to fend them off first. This idea hadn’t hitherto entered my head and I credit Antony with making me lose a bit more sleep than usual for the nights that followed, until I made adaptations to my routine. Thank you, darling!

Perhaps Bond should also consider making some modifications to his nighttime routine; the predictability of him having a gun under the pillow has proven to be something of a liability. In Tomorrow Never Dies, Paris Carver is undone after she is overheard enquiring about Bond’s habitual need to take a firearm to bed. And in Die Another Day, Miranda Frost manages to unload his gun after ‘sleeping’ with him… I’ll let you unpack the metaphors around ‘unloading’ here; there’s enough to keep followers of Sigmund Freud in an analytical frame of mind for quite some time.

Perhaps most disarmingly of all, it’s the tonally diverse (some might say ‘bonkers’) Die Another Day which features the most serious exploration of the effects of sleep deprivation. Disgusting Gustav Graves boasts that a benefit of never sleeping is him being able to live his dreams. He goes so far as telling an interviewer that sleeping is a “waste” of life. Although this might sound ridiculous, Graves is only taking to extremes the precedent set by centuries of power-hungry people who have boasted that their success rests on them getting only four hours of sleep a night. I shan’t dignify such people by naming them (they include at least one former British Prime Minister, who has a cameo in a Bond film) as it’s a practice none of us should seek to emulate. But if you feel sufficiently motivated to Google the sort of politicians and entrepreneurs who claimed four hours of sleep every night was enough, you’ll soon be dissuaded from equating lack of sleep with healthy and sound decision-making.

While Graves could have taken inspiration from some of history’s most unhinged figures, what’s most intriguing is the other potential source of Graves’s “plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead” mentality: James Bond himself. When Graves’s true identity is revealed, he gloats to Bond that he took him as his model, in the details at least. He doesn’t list Bond’s attitude to sleep as one of those details (first articulated forty years before in Dr. No), but it could be another callback to Bond cinematic history in this anniversary film stuffed with self-referentiality.

Graves’s chronic insomnia is explained in the film as a side effect of his DNA transplant and, in order to stay sane, he must spend an hour a day on his dream machine. Based on Graves’s somewhat erratic behaviour and what modern sleep science has to say about the importance of dreams, we have very reasonable grounds for questioning the efficacy of this device! Although there is still a lot about the science of sleep we don’t know, we do know that we sleep in cycles, and it’s the last stage of each cycle, the Rapid Eye Movement stage, which is where we dream. If you ever see a character in a film close their eyes and the film cuts instantly to a dream sequence, it’s a distortion of what really happens. If your cycles are interrupted by continual waking, you might skip this REM/dreaming stage. And because dreaming REM/dreaming phases get longer through the night, if you have a limited amount of sleep you will dream less and you’ll be more agitated the next day. Dreams are vital for helping us regulate our emotions. Bizarre as it might sound, Gustav Graves is a cautionary tale: skipping real dreams is a bad idea. ‘Living’ your dreams is not enough.

“I’m an early riser myself.” 

- Bond (posing as James St. John-Smythe) to Jenny Flex, A View to a Kill (1985)

There exist, of course, more serious screen treatments of sleep difficulties than Die Another Day. It’s challenging to think of a Christopher Nolan film in which sleep doesn’t play a significant role: Memento, Insomnia and Inception are especially sleep-fixated. The whole of David Fincher’s angsty noir Fight Club is predicated on the deleterious effects of not getting healthy natural sleep, although this is more of a plot device than a thematic thread. On the flipside, staying awake long enough to stay alive has been a staple of the horror genre from the beginning, from 1920’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari - where a brainwashed but otherwise innocent sleepwalker is used to commit murders - to The Nightmare on Elm Street series and beyond.

Compare this with the 007 series, where lack of sleep has more typically been treated as a joke. This is perhaps best exemplified in the early parts of A View to a Kill taking place at Zorin’s chateau. Even if we take into consideration that James Bond is playing a role at this point, that of James St. John-Smythe, the distance between the one James and the other is so slight (except in terms of wealth and haughty demeanour) that we can safely conflate the two.

In response to Jenny Flex explaining her morning riding routine, Bond can’t resist referencing taking conversation in the direction of nocturnal penile tumescence (or, as it’s vernacularly known: ‘morning wood’): “I’m an early riser myself.”

This dialogue didn’t appear in early drafts. It may even have been adlibbed on set, so we should be cautious about imbuing it with too much significance. But if we take Bond literally about his propensity to be priapic first thing in the morning, this indicates that he probably is getting a decent amount of sleep. The longer you sleep, the less time you spend in fight or flight mode, instead spending more time in deep/REM sleep. It’s in these phases your parasympathetic nervous system is active. This system puts you in a state of relaxation - and sexual arousal. Additionally, testosterone is at its peak first thing in the morning and, if you need to pee, your bladder will press on the sacral nerve nerve, which causes erections. I think it’s best we resist taking cheap shots at the expense of men of a certain age, I.E. those who have to get up through the night for urinary reasons, just because Roger was 57 when A View to a Kill was released. Although, it must be said that later dialogue doesn’t exactly help us think of Bond as youthful. The morning after he’s been ‘taken care of’ by May Day, Zorin asks him if he slept well. Bond’s response is “A little restless, but I got off eventually”, suggesting - on a purely literal level - he has issues with both sleep and sexual performance. Again, this dialogue did not appear in early drafts. Bond’s original reply to Zorin was rather bland - “Never better” - so whoever decided to ‘sex up’ the script did us all a favour, even if they inadvertently made us associate Bond with delayed ejaculation.

Consistent with this rather unBond-like trait, we have Bond delaying conventional proceedings by only literally sleeping with the principal Bond Girl, rather than taking her to bed. In fact, Bond takes the chair when he stays the night at Stacey’s, protecting her from Zorin’s goons. So soundly does he sleep that Stacey’s cat, who we establish from its bowl is named ‘Pussy’, takes up residence in his lap. Once again, there’s enough Freud here to keep us all up at night.

“What’s keeping you awake?”
- Mathis to Bond, Quantum of Solace (2008)

“What’s keeping you awake?” Mathis asks Bond in Quantum of Solace’s pivotal scene. If drama is life with the dull bits cut out then Bond’s lack of sleep is, for the first time in the film series, the drama. Bond’s response to Mathis is disingenuous at best: “I was wondering why you came with me.” But we all know what Bond’s really ruminating about, and his dark nights of the soul are nothing to do with whatever Dominic Greene is up to. For all the film’s plotting about water monopolies, you could reframe the whole of Quantum of Solace as a quest for Bond just being able to find just enough comfort so he can get a good night’s rest. Perhaps re-title it Quantum of Somnolence?

I’ve written at length about the film’s restless quality, with the rapid editing reflecting a mind constantly in fight or flight mode. Bond’s mind. But he’s not the only character who is suffering from the effects of sleep deprivation. We get scenes from Camille’s point of view too and she is similarly exhausted. When she asks Bond if her dead family will be able to sleep after she has avenged them, she may as well be talking about herself. Even General Medrano is motivated to sign on Quantum’s dotted line only after Greene threatens him with losing sleep (and his testicles).

Quantum of Solace is far and away the most sleep-engaged film in the whole series. For all the discussion of the film’s production being affected by the writers’ strike, it is the only instalment to fold into the screenplay what I consider to be a very Fleming-like ingredient: an interest in the effects of sleep, or lack thereof.

To my knowledge, Fleming’s treatment of sleep in his fiction has thus far been almost entirely overlooked. In the absence of any existing study into this, I set about doing my own. I discovered that the 14 Bond books collectively contain more than 400 direct references to sleep, meaning an average of more than 30 per book. Taken by itself, it’s a meaningless figure. You would expect a certain number of sleep references in most novels, but what is that number? What equates to a ‘normal’ amount?

It’s estimated that there have been more than five million novels published in English over the last three hundred years and I don’t really have the time (or Q’s ability to do something absurdly clever with AI) to work out a definitive average. But let’s treat what’s widely credited as the first novel in English, 1719’s Robinson Crusoe, as our yardstick. Considering that Daniel Defoe’s ‘adventure novel’ largely concerns someone being stranded on an island for nearly three decades, you would expect a fair few references to sleep; he’s not exactly going to have a very active social life. But the word ‘sleep’ only appears 35 times in Robinson Crusoe. This is slightly higher than the average across Fleming’s oeuvre but Crusoe is much longer than any Bond book. In fact, it’s nearly twice as long as Casino Royale and The Man With The Golden Gun.

On the other end of our scale you have works like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice featuring only six references to sleep. Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, contains only seven. Rather than carrying on plucking books at random, perhaps we would be wise to compare the Bond books with those in the same genre. I selected some of the most renowned spy novels of all time (and personal favourites of mine) but none of them could compete with Bond: John le Carre’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (18 references), Graham Greene’s Our Man In Havana (22 references), and Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios (26 references). All of these novels have a higher word count than the average Bond novel too. The latter was a particular inspiration for Fleming and some of Ambler’s phrasing around sleep - particularly when the characters are struggling to get some - appears to have influenced Fleming’s own writing; both men had a penchant for describing sleep as “troubled” or ‘untroubled”, depending on their characters’ states of mind.

It’s important to note that I’m not accounting for synonyms here (e.g. using words or ‘doze’ or ‘snooze’ instead of ‘sleep’) and I’m sure there’s more to explore with Fleming’s uses of such words. I’m also not discounting the occasions where ‘sleep’ is used euphemistically for ‘have sex with’, because post-copulation repose is usually assumed. Although considering the Bond novels have sometimes been branded ‘pornography’, these references are not as plentiful as you might think. 

But even if we just focus on Fleming’s use of the word ‘sleep’ (and forms such as ‘sleepy’ ‘sleeping’), it becomes readily apparent that Fleming wanted his hero to occupy a world where a good night’s rest is never guaranteed.

“Dance into the fire / To fatal sounds of broken dreams”
- Lyric to A View To A Kill performed by Duran Duran (1985)

Anyone who has read the Fleming books in sequence is familiar with the steady deterioration in Bond’s physical and mental wellbeing across the series, reflective of his creator’s own declining health in real life. Perhaps Bond’s increasing sleep difficulties are a contributing factor.

In the earlier books, Bond would appear to have a pretty stable circadian rhythm, the body clock which determines when we fall asleep and when we wake. This rhythm is largely genetic although environment plays a role and our rhythm can change as we get older. Many of us feel a disruption to our rhythm when we fly long distances, because our rhythm is set to ‘home’ rather than our new location. Jet lag is not something Bond appears to suffer from a great deal, despite his jetting around the world. When at home, we are told he wakes punctually at seven every morning, without the need for an alarm clock. In Moonraker, for instance:

“He forced sleep to come into his teeming mind, Bond visualised the figure seven on the dial of a clock and left it to the hidden cells of his memory to wake him. … The extra-sensory alarm clock did not fail him. Punctually at seven, his mouth dry with too many cigarettes the night before, he forced himself out of bed and into a cold bath.”

Thanks to our circadian rhythms, many of us get sleepy not long after lunchtime, and Bond is no exception. Countries with warm climates take siestas around this time - the rest of us just have to attempt to power through. I am well aware of how my productivity declines in an afternoon and, in an ideal world, I’d do what Bond does in Casino Royale: take a nap. He does so very consciously, knowing he needs to be fresh for the night of gambling ahead.

In the second Bond novel, Live and Let Die, Bond is very aware of the need to get plenty of sleep so he can function effectively. He very responsibly orders decaffeinated coffee on the train so he and Solitaire can sleep. He falls asleep “lulled by the pounding gallop of the train” and advises Solitaire of the importance of getting her head down. Felix provides a contrast with Bond, telling Bond that they will “get plenty of sleep in the grave”. This proves to be unnervingly prescient when Felix, who doesn’t sleep as well as Bond, gets up at 5am to investigate the worm-and-bait store and ends up being almost eaten by a shark.

Bond finally experiences sleep difficulties when he starts getting anxious about his impending nighttime swim to Mr Big’s lair: “That night Bond's dreams were full of terrifying encounters with giant squids and stingrays, hammerheads and the sawteeth of barracuda, so that he whimpered and sweated in his sleep.”

This sets the pattern that reoccurs across the first cluster of the Fleming novels: Bond tends to begin a mission by getting plenty of “untroubled” sleep but this becomes increasingly “troubled” as gets drawn into the villain’s machinations. The finale of From Russia, With Love becomes a battle of wills not just against Grant, but also to stay awake. As in Live and Let Die, Bond has no trouble falling asleep on a train. But as it becomes apparent he is in real danger, Bond finds sleep more difficult to come by. Eventually, an exhausted Bond gets some sleep when Tatiana’s insists on it and he rests his head in her lap, a moment of touching vulnerability.

Sleep makes all of us feel vulnerable, which makes it hard to come by for some of us. This is disquietingly rendered in Dr. No when the villain examines a prone, sleeping Bond after he’s drugged him. The bad doctor could easily kill 007 in his sleep, but chooses not to. It’s Bond’s powerlessness - and Dr. No’s control over Bond - that we find unnerving.

Bond’s sleep follows a similar trajectory in this sixth book. Here, Bond has little trouble sleeping until he nears the titular villain’s lair. By this point, his fight or flight has already been activated by the sleep-disturbing incident with the giant centipede crawling around his crotch (a spider interrupts Sean’s sleep in the film’s version of this sequence). 

But by the seventh book, something is beginning to change: Bond no longer sleeps as soundly. Goldfinger opens with Bond ruminating on death while still awake. Unlike Shakespeare’s Macbeth, murder is not keeping James Bond up at night. But something is. We soon find Bond has volunteered for night duty. While London sleeps he uses the time to write a handbook on hand to hand combat. Sleep is the enemy in Goldfinger, quite literally, as Goldfinger’s plot involves putting to sleep the townspeople around Fort Knox, although in reality he will be poisoning them. Not for the first time in Fleming - or the last - is sleep intermingled with death.

“To sleep, perchance to die!”
- Title for Chapter 12, Fleming’s The Spy Who Loved Me

Chapter 19 of Casino Royale opens with the line: 

“You are about to awake when you dream that you are dreaming.” 

The previous chapter ended with Bond’s life hanging by a thread, his fate uncertain… 

Sitting alone, in its own paragraph, this sentence does more than create suspense by delaying our finding out what has happened to 007; it invites us to pause and reflect on how sleep can be like a transitory state between life and death. Fleming plays with the same idea throughout the Bond novels, very obviously in The Spy Who Loved Me. In his heading for Chapter 12 “To sleep, perchance to die!” Fleming does what he does best, taking an idiomatic phrase and giving it an idiomatic twist, in this case, echoing Shakespeare famous lines from Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ speech: “To sleep, perchance to dream - ay, there's the rub, for in this sleep of death what dreams may come”. 

Like Hamlet, Bond finds his happiness increasingly circumscribed by his bad dreams. By Thunderball, Bond is dreaming of “Domino being pursued by a shark with dazzling white teeth that suddenly became Largo, Largo who turned on him with those huge hands. They were coming closer, they reached slowly for him, they had him by the shoulder…” By the climax of the story, Bond is too worn out by his sleeping and waking nightmares to have sex with Domino, who watches him while he finally gets some rest.

Tracy’s death at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service takes a wrecking ball to Bond’s wellbeing. At the start of You Only Live Twice, he opens up to various doctors and specialists: "I feel like hell. I sleep badly. I eat practically nothing. I drink too much, and my work has gone to blazes. I'm shot to pieces.” His make-or-break mission to Japan entails him having to adjust his circadian rhythm to fit in with the local Ama community: Tiger makes him go to bed no later than eight o’clock in the evening. Not that this does him much good. His “shallow sleep” is ‘full of ghosts and demons and screams” and “peopled by things and creatures out of nightmareland.”

We get little insight into Bond having pleasant dreams, which may be cause for concern. We now know that a dream-filled sleep is usually a sign of having had a good night’s rest. Dreams help to sort out how we feel about things and make emotions easier to regulate the following day.

There are only three times in the whole of Fleming where he is described as having a period of completely “dreamless” sleep. One occasion is in the short story Risico, where Fleming tells us this is inevitable after the “euphoria” engendered by a first night’s stay in Venice. Another is in Casino Royale, when Bond takes a nap after being massaged from top to toe by a Swedish man who, we’re told, ‘melts’ all the tensions in Bond’s body. In all honesty, this sounds to me like a dream in itself, albeit probably not one that a presumed-to-be heterosexual secret agent would take as much pleasure from. The third time Bond has a “dreamless” period of sleep is in the final Bond novel, The Man with the Golden Gun. The difference here though is that this period of dreamlessness occurs only after Bond has already been awoken at 3:30am by another terrifying nightmare.

“I have pills for everything. Some make you taller... some make you forget.”
- Mathis to Bond in Quantum of Solace (2008)

Sleeping pills rarely get mentioned in the Bond film series. Mathis offering Bond something to help him sleep in Quantum of Solace is the notable exception. But in the books, there are pills all over the place. So commonplace are they, that in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the absence of sleeping pills in Tracy’s belongings causes Bond to question why this is the case. Perhaps Bond is thinking back to what happened to Vesper in Casino Royale, whose grave he visits at the beginning in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. While Eva Green’s Vesper takes her own life via drowning in the film version, sleeping pills are the method in the novel. Chapter 26 of Casino Royale is entitled ‘Sleep well, my darling’, once again conflating sleep with death.

Bond himself is far more likely to take tablets which prevent sleep than instigate it. At times, we start to wonder whether he might be hooked on amphetamines. In Moonraker, even Bond starts to question the wisdom of taking uppers (with vast quantities of alcohol!) in order to keep a clear head (?!). Bond realising this might have been a mistake prior to taking on Hugo Drax at the card table leads to my favourite self-recrimination in all of Fleming: “Champagne and Benzedrine! Never again.”

An arguably more legitimate use of Benzedrine (a brand of amphetamine that was actually banned in the early 1960s) is Bond taking it to fortify himself for his gruelling underwater swim to Mr Big’s island in Live and Let Die. Interestingly, it’s also Benzedrine which is inside Le Chiffre’s inhaler in the novel of Casino Royale, reflecting more widespread aphetamine-usage across society in 1953 and possibly suggesting the villains and heroes aren’t as diametrically opposed as they might first appear, a major thematic concern of the later chapters of Casino Royale. We presume it’s nothing more sinister than asthma medication being ingested by Mads Mikkelsen’s iteration of the character in the 2006 film.

“I can't resist waking you. Every time I do, you look at me as if you hadn't seen me in years. Makes me feel reborn.”
- Vesper to Bond, Casino Royale (2006)
”One life for yourself and one for your dreams.”
- Lyric to You Only Live Twice (1976) performed by Nancy Sinatra

As in the real world, sleep has a rejuvenating power in Bond’s world, something we can all relate to. Every time we close our eyes in repose there’s a chance we may not wake up again. Less likely than in Bond’s world, admittedly. But there’s also the chance to be reborn.

In the Bond book most concerned with rebirth, You Only Live Twice, Bond is captured by Blofeld and eventually decides to drop his disguise. He knows that by doing so he’s looking death in the face, and reflects that even his second life might have run its course.

“Bond decided: to hell with the Fukuoka miner! There was a writing-desk next to the bookshelves. He pulled out its chair and sat down. There were cigarettes and matches. He lit up and sat back, inhaling luxuriously. Might as well make oneself comfortable before one went for the Big Sleep!”

All available evidence indicates this phrase ‘the Big Sleep’, a euphemism for death, originates with a friend of Fleming, Raymond Chandler. His 1939 novel concludes in a reflective mode: “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that.”

Now is perhaps the ideal period, while the cinematic Bond is sleeping the Big Sleep, to do our own reflecting on the importance of sleep in the Bond stories. It might be tempting to add ‘not needing sleep’ to the list of Bond’s superheroic abilities, a list that already includes: being a crackshot with any weapon; being able to consume voluminous quantities of booze, largely consequence-free; looking immaculate in a tuxedo whatever the situation; possessing a penis with magical powers. But when we look across the Fleming books - and examine the films closely - we find Bond is just as needful of sleep as the rest of us.

I have lost count of the various books and articles about sleep I’ve consulted over the years in my mission to get more sleep. The best ‘one stop shop’ is Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep.

Alex Lamas and me discussed sleep in Episode 008 of ‘On Our Minds Only?’, which you can view here: