Whitman's "The Sleepers"

The "I" in the poem 'The Sleepers' was able to cross all boundaries of gender and race and could penetrate and invade the minds of people around the world. He feels that 'sleep' is one of the democratic experiences because we all sleep and at sometime or the other we have felt the "breakdown" of "sleep chasings'. We have all experienced that losing of control and have had different kinds of dreams and have wandered through worlds beyond our waking experiences. Whitman indicates that "sleep" permits us to move into deeper and deeper levels of common psychic territory, where we descend during the night to explore the depths of human emotion.