Insomnia, Blessing and Curse

The modern cure for insomnia is sleep restriction. The opposite of the rest cure, which feeds you up, the sleep diet keeps you hungry for sleep by keeping things lean. How lean, you might ask? Well, first you need to work out how much sleep you are entitled to by determining your “sleep efficiency quotient”—a magic number arrived at by dividing the number of hours you sleep by the number of hours you actually spend in bed, trying and failing to sleep. My sleep quotient is 63 percent, so my diet is strict. It obliges me to sleep for no more than the 5.6 hours a night that I averaged over a four-week run, diligently recorded in the sleep diary I’d been encouraged to keep at the sleep clinic. Only if I up my sleep efficiency quotient to 90 percent by observing proper sleep hygiene practices am I permitted to add 15 minutes of sleep to my nightly diet.

It is a torment to take an insomniac and then deprive them of sleep. The sleep therapists seem entirely blind to the fact that counting anything, but most of all counting sleep—calculating its efficiency, its depth, its span, while adding up every minute spent lying awake each night between all-too-shallow bouts of it—is the very thing that will stop an insomniac from sleeping. That, or they are sadists.

Nor do the sleep experts, who freely advise on cognitive matters (the C in CBT), appreciate the workings of the insomniac mind. Routinely, they offer the sleep-deprived a range of “blockers” to counter those insistent, intrusive thoughts that can keep us from sleeping. One of these blockers consists of silently chanting “the, the, the, the, the,” over and over, for unendurably long minutes. It is the mental equivalent of telling your brain to talk to the hand. And yet “the, the, the, the, the” is just the sort of senseless thought train that nourishes the insomniac mind: repetitive, rhythmic, dumbly enigmatic and therefore intrinsically engaging, it pivots between the familiar and alien, zooms in and out of the uncanny.

Besides, intrusive thinking is just one way the insomniac brain stokes itself. Harder to fathom (and to treat) is the freewheeling, seemingly autonomous tripping through utter banality, the nighttime regurgitation of daytime crud—of the stuff that doesn’t actually merit deliberation—that moves like an arm-linked chain of can-can dancers through a demi-wakefulness that exists beyond any conscious control, but (and this is the source of frustration) is conscious enough—kick, and kick, and kick—that you have to clock it.

Too often my insomniac mind is stuck in crud-chewing mode. It feeds me snippets of song, meshed with advertorial-type sloganizing that might, in turn, trigger a memory from childhood before pinging back to a thought-of desire (a want) or to something I saw on the Internet, or something someone told me—then on again, unpredictable, inconsequential, threading and worming inside my head. Nothing is more inimical to rest and yet I am powerless to stop it. It is like waterboarding the mind with meaningless overflow, a smothering drip, drip, drip of surplus thought.

It is a well-known fact that each of us contains an internal clock that regulates our circadian rhythms (in response to changing levels of temperature, light, and melatonin, among other things). These cellular clocks have just two modes, wakeful and sleepy, roughly corresponding to day and night, but in insomniacs they don’t work properly, the likely result of irregularities in melatonin production. When your circadian rhythms are out of sync with the diurnal round, you feel sleepy at odd, inconvenient times and awake at night: jet-lagged in your native time zone. Strictly speaking, these body clocks are not a timekeeping device but a sleepkeeping one, a guardian of the rest that each of us is permitted to accrue.

When I think of insomnia’s wayward rhythms what I picture is this: gaudy insomnia with its wide lapels and toothy grin is the last groover on the dance floor, still going at it after everyone else has collapsed in a heap or gone home. You are desperate to shut up the joint for the night but insomnia is on a roll, singing along to all the tunes, gyrating wildly, body popping and whooping, letting it rip. To crown it all, insomnia is a god-awful dancer. You are wilting with exhaustion. Bleary-eyed, your body leaden, you hanker for nothing more than to sleep, and yet you must endure this thing—this coked-up arriviste!—who on top of everything else (the clowning, the nagging insistence, the manic glare) has no freaking beats.

Neither do I, as it happens. In menopause I have grown accustomed to having no rhythms to speak of, neither hormonal nor lunar, and certainly not circadian.

Still, there are other rhythms that govern sleep, subject to such complex mechanisms of internal control that the best we can do is represent them graphically. I am referring to those characteristic patterns of electrical activity that the brain displays as it stealthily guides us into sleep, beta waves morphing into alpha waves then theta waves, and finally delta waves—those long-drawn-out pulses that scratch extended claw marks onto the graph paper and signify the arrival of deep sleep. Reading up on this process, a joyful thump pulses my chest as I learn that at the threshold of sleep, on the very brink of delta-wave insensibility, you get a blip or two on the graph, which on closer inspection turns out to be a series of shallow theta waves, all bunched up like yarn wound around a spindle. Without these “sleep spindles” forming, sleep will not come. So perhaps every sleep is enchanted after all.

Except for REM sleep. Which is not enchanted but paradoxical, because in REM sleep the body sleeps deeply while the brain is only half-sleeping. This explains why we can snap out of a bad dream, or spring awake in the middle of a too-good one, and why, once in a rare blue moon, we experience the strange power trip that is lucid dreaming. The paradoxes inherent in REM sleep, however, cannot even begin to account for how the brain is able to entertain itself with its own magic lantern shows, raiding the image banks of our unconscious minds, searching out characters and props and wholly repressed memories and motivations, and then knit them together into spontaneously evolving story lines and dissolving phantasmagoria.

In October 1964, Vladimir Nabokov decided to keep a dream diary. Every morning, immediately upon waking, he would write down whatever he could rescue from the night, and for the next couple of days he would be on active lookout for anything that seemed to do with the remembered dream. Nabokov was testing a theory which suggested that dreams might be prophetic; that rather than containing a jumble of reconstituted shards of daily experience, mingled with cut-and-paste plots borrowed from our memory stores and personal demons escaped from the inner closets of repression, our dreams might also offer a proleptic vision of what is to come, turning every one of us into clairvoyants.

Nabokov had fallen under the sway of the maverick British aeronautical engineer John W. Dunne, who, in the early decades of the last century, came up with a left-field theory of Time that he laid out in a series of cryptic books filled with runic runs of algebra and frenetic diagrams. Boiled down to its concentrate by one Nabokov scholar, the theory posits that “time’s progress is not unidirectional but recursive: the reason we do not notice the backflow is that we are not paying attention.” In 1964, Nabokov started paying attention, and he recorded several instances of identifying preamnesia—that is, unwittingly manufacturing a preceding dream that matched a later waking experience. For Nabokov, as for Dunne, dreams became a kind of portal through which chunks of personal experience could effectively be teleported across time.

In this topsy-turvy world in which time can multiply serially or run backwards inside hidden loops, dreams are to timekeeping what wormholes are to space. They are singularities into which all succession (with wormholes, its dimension) simply pours and is obliterated. The question is whether insomnia might also qualify as a singularity, and, if so, what gets sucked in and obliterated other than sleep. Peace of mind, rest, a coherent sense of one’s self? Or is it your dignity?

Roberto Bolaño wrote of the numberless ways in which those shapeless border zones between one place and another (Texas and Mexico, in his case, but it could be anywhere, and it could be day and night) mess with your head. The borderlands are neither here nor there, neither this nor that. They are a no-man’s-land patrolled by vigilantes and assassins. The soil under your feet in the borderlands is watered with blood and the horizons offer only “wind and dust”—a “minimal dream.” Such places (or psychic spaces), says Bolaño, lead to a condition that is much to be feared. He calls it an “eviction of the mind.”

Another dream theory: our dreams are social. Which is to say there exist dream templates we all share, born of mythic archetypes that reside in the collective unconscious (thank you, Jung) or arising out of shared traumatic experiences of the kind that Charlotte Beradt uncovered in the 1930s, when as a young Jewish journalist living in Vienna she suffered nightmares of being “hunted from pillar to post—shot at, tortured, scalped.” Convinced that her countrymen and women were, like her, busy funneling their anxieties into their dreams, she began to interview people about their nightmares and to write these down. Synergies and sympathies quickly emerged, leading Beradt to conclude that people who live in fear for their freedom under stridently authoritarian regimes end up inhabiting a shared dreamscape. “In the darkness of night they reproduced in distortion all they had experienced in that sinister daytime world.”

One woman dreamed that posters had been set up on every street corner listing the words people were no longer permitted to use. The first was Lord, the last, I. Neither god nor self could be acknowledged. Another person dreamed he was in his apartment relaxing with a book, when suddenly the walls around his room then his apartment disappear, and he hears over a loudspeaker that henceforth the Nazis are outlawing all walls. He told Beradt: “I looked around and discovered to my horror that as far as the eye could see, no apartment had walls anymore.” Beradt claims that this is the dream of someone who resists collectivization. It is rooted in a defiance that would lead to a sanity-saving dissociation: what people at the time began to call “Inner Emigration.”

In many of the dreams—Beradt smuggled them out of Austria after the Anschluss of 1938, scrawled in code on tiny bits of paper—the domestic space that ought to safeguard an individual’s privacy becomes a place of terror and surveillance. Lamps listen to you then tell you off, cushions balk, spying desk clocks testify against you. One of Beradt’s subjects dreamed that the Dutch oven in her living room “began to talk in a harsh and penetrating voice, repeating every word she and her husband said against the government.”

Coping with the mounting paranoia (a symptomatic shunting of the logic of insomnia into day) demanded urgent measures. Not so much an inner emigration but its opposite, an inner evacuation. This could take a sinister turn, making people blind—asleep!—to the atrocities being enacted all around them. Elsewise, it might befuddle and confound the authorities, as one woman envisioned when she dreamed that she was talking in her sleep and “to be on the safe side” was talking in Russian—a language she neither spoke nor understood. If she could not understand herself, she reasoned, then neither could the government. Unconsciously, the woman sought subterfuge from the fascists by making herself unintelligible. This is also an eviction of the mind.

In a coda to the English translation of Beradt’s dream collection, published in 1966, Bruno Bettelheim observes that the Nazi regime successfully forced its enemies to dream the kind of dreams it wanted them to dream. That resistance was impossible, that they were contaminated and inferior, that safety lay only in compliance. These were dreams that told people too much about themselves. They were dreams that told them what they did not want to know. On this account, writes Bettelheim, the Nazis, like Macbeth, “murdered sleep.”

I could murder some sleep. Even at the price of reckoning with my soul. Especially at that price, in fact, since everybody carries a part of the night within them, a small piece of impenetrable, unknowing darkness, akin to what Freud referred to as the “navel” of a dream, which was his term for that untranslatable nub of the thing that forever resists interpretation.

From : Insomnia. By Marina Benjamin. Catapult, 2018.

Adventures in Insomnia: Sleep Diets, Weird Dreams, and the Singularity. By Marina Benjamin. LitHub, November 14, 2018.

 Catapult

A bad night is not always a bad thing,” wrote the late science fiction author Brian Aldiss. A long-time insomniac, he appears to have been searching for the silver lining of a condition that, in chronic form, can suck the lifeblood from you.

One does not have to try hard to build the case against insomnia – the way its vampire clutch leaves just a hollow shell of you to ghost walk through your days; the way it trips you up and compromises your cognitive integrity. But Aldiss was after compensation. The “great attraction of insomnia”, he observed, is that “the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instinct and feelings; as with the dawn, a little honey is allowed to ooze between the lips of the sandwich, a little of the stuff of dreams to drip into the waking mind.”

Before I began writing a book about my own insomnia, I wouldn’t have paid Aldiss any heed, much less the id that seemed to hold sway over my darkened bedroom. Whatever wisps of a dream managed to seep into my conscious brain offered nothing in the way of solace. Instead I felt enervated and defeated. My bad nights came with no honeyed sweeteners.

Insomnia’s symptoms will be familiar to anyone who has been forced into an intimate acquaintance with the witching hours. Awake all night, I feel saturated with dread, with a gut-churning queasiness stemming from an all-pervading sense of doom. As the minutes and hours tick by, I squirm and thrash and toss, trying not to look at the clock, until, giving up on sleep altogether, I get up.

So it goes, night after endless night. Like Wordsworth, who complained of not being able to win sleep “by any stealth”, I have long been exasperated by sleep’s refusal to visit me, no matter how avidly I court it. My mind will not quieten, will not release my body and allow it to sink into sleep, obeying the gravitational pull of the unconscious.

Marcel Proust, one of literature’s great insomniacs, eerily captures how the sleepless mind misbehaves, tracing fretful loops, tying itself into epistemological knots, the way it grows confused and then suddenly certain. In the first book of In Search of Lost Time, he describes lying awake, convinced he has fallen into someone else’s waking dream. He imagines he has been reading about his own life in a book and that all his thoughts come second-hand from print. When eventually he realises that, in fact, he is in his own bed, he cannot distinguish his recollections from his illusions.

Mathias Énard’s extraordinary novel Compass, shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker international prize, is a conscious homage to Proust. The book is set during a single sleepless night, when Énard’s largely auto-fictional narrator, an Austrian academic and orientalist, pines for the unrequited love of his life – a one-time protege who overtook him. As he tosses and turns, frustrated by his enduring pent-up lust, he wallows in recollections of their many encounters at conferences, their late night tête-à-têtes in restaurants, their mutual passion for the literature and music of the Middle East.

Énard conjures very well the exquisite torture of having nowhere to hide from your failings in insomnia, of having to sit with those agitated, uncertain, spiritually naked thoughts for as long as it takes for them to leach away. At one point he bemoans jolting awake from fevered dreams without ever having slept, before trying to convince himself that “a man trying to fall asleep turns over and finds a new point of departure, a new beginning”.

The American novelist Blake Butler’s description of insomnia’s treacherous ways in his 2012 memoir, Nothing, is even more harrowing. Lying awake in bed, everything looms with menace. He feels the pressure of the words spilling from the philosophical books that crowd his shelves, and the coffin-like oppression of his bedroom: throughout his childhood he was haunted by a recurring dream that filled him with a choking terror, of a vast boulder slowly descending on to him through his bedroom ceiling.

The question for any artist or writer is whether the insomniac mind, forced to confront its deepest fears, groping here and there at the veiled world, might offer insights as well as torments. Famously, there are writers who have trained themselves into night-time productivity and considered their wakefulness a gift. Vladimir Nabokov, for example, likened insomnia to a “sunburst” – its blast of light standing as a symbol for inner illumination. Sleep, he said, was “the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals … [a] nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius”. Like other famous literary insomniacs, Elizabeth Bishop, Franz Kafka, Robert Frost, he wanted to be an all-seeing witness, a solitary watchman perpetually vigilant over the sleeping masses.

At one point in 1964, Nabokov, caught up in the maverick theories of the British aeronautical engineer John W Dunne – who argued that time was not linear but recursive – became convinced that his own dreams could intercept time’s backflow and prise open a portal to the future. Nabokov began recording his dreams, diligently describing their shifting locations; their elusive characters and scripts. He was looking out for scenes, however brief or prosaic, that somehow prefigured his later waking experiences, since on Dunne’s model they would qualify as pre-cognitive, oracular.

This kind of seeing in the dark has long been cherished in prophecy. The earliest Greek oracles were “shrines to night”. Ancient heroes who wished to grasp the truth of things had to pass through underworlds, or dwell in caves; sometimes, like Oedipus, they could see clearly only once they had been blinded. After Athena blinds Tiresias for spying on her when she is naked she gives him the gift of augury, while the seer Phineus chooses blindness over sight. In each instance, truth, not light, is the source of illumination for the darkened seer.

In ancient Egypt, seekers after spiritual guidance could spend a night in incubation, which was a special institutionalised sleep undertaken in the temples of the gods precisely in order to descry meaning in the dark. Not unlike poets, they saw themselves as human lightning rods, privileged recipients of divine revelation. The poet after all longs to be a seer – the one awake enough to see things for what they are amid a world given over to slumber, and name them or call them out.

This is the ambition that Emily Brontë voices in her poem “Stars”, when she begs the twinkling deities to hide her from the sun’s hostile light: “Let me sleep through his blinding reign, / And only wake with you!” Brontë is famed for having experienced visions at night. Greedily, she invoked sleeplessness as the source of her imagination. But even she eventually tired of night-waking. Ritually, she would walk around her bedroom each night, desperate to fall asleep.

Should we trust the poet’s apparent second sight, given that insomnia does not merely reverse day and night, but turns everything on its head, inverting the world and conflating its cardinal points “where left is always right”, as Bishop puts it in her poem “Insomnia”? Insomnia is guilty, too, of profound exaggeration. It floods its sufferers with a delusional sense of their own mental powers. I cannot be the only writer who, gripped by an idea in the small hours, reaches for her notebook and pours her thoughts on to the page, only to have to reckon by light of morning with the miserable banality of her night-time output.

And it is not just writers who overestimate their cognitive prowess when sleep deprived; numerous studies conducted on nightworkers – taxi drivers, junior doctors – reveal that in insomnia the mind cannot be trusted. Or can it?

In an interview she gave to the Paris Review in 2016, the poet Linda Pastan, now in her 80s, says: “while I’m lying in the dark, the solution to a problem I’ve been struggling with in a poem actually, and magically, comes to me”. For Pastan, insomnia is “a struggle with consciousness itself”.

I try to take solace from Pastan’s words – to warm to the ineffable romance of night’s essential mystery. I remember that on certain calm nights I think of as velvety, I feel as if I could reach out and touch the stars. Though I’m not religious, I experience an openness or porosity, a wash of wellbeing.

Perhaps, then, the creative impulse more closely resembles an inner awakening, rather than a keenness of sight. Or maybe there’s a bit of both in the mix – looking, as Keats says, “with eternal lids apart”, while also searching the soul’s inner darkness to unearth one’s deepest dreads, longings and revelations. Philip Larkin, in “Aubade”, writes of waking at four and, until dawn finally arrives, seeing only what is always there: “Unresting death”. But the Italian poet Umberto Saba in “Insomnia on a Summer Night” writes about being “sick with insomnia, / a religious pleasure”.

Franz Kafka who, like Nabokov and Proust, welcomed insomnia as an opportunity to explore the strange twilight realms between dreaming and waking, confided in his diary that if he couldn’t “pursue stories through the nights, they break away and disappear”. Colette called insomnia “an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge”. More recently, Stephen King revealed that the plot of Misery came to him in a dream, during a fitful bout of sleep snatched on a plane.

It seems undeniable that Aldiss was on to something when he wrote of the unconscious mind dripping its contents into consciousness. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz made a similar claim, referring to the “invisible bridges between sleep and waking”, when the murmur of ideas flows around our sleepy heads, whispering, intimating, connecting. Under conditions like this, a bad night might not, after all, lack compensation. The key, it seems, is being aware enough of the process – awake enough – to make sense of it.

Last year, as the months went by and I fell deeper into my book, I noticed that the tendrils of daytime clarity began to extend themselves into the night; if I focused enough in my insomnia, I found that, often, I was able to grab hold of them. And so, when I got up before dawn, I began to use those bone-white hours to write. It is hard to say how much of the resulting book owes its final form to insomnia, but since I was writing about the condition, it seems only fitting that night merged with day in the act of producing it.

We are so geared towards the day – towards the neon bright of consciousness – that we tend to neglect the dark: open your eyes in the depths of night and the initial feeling is often one of panic. But if you wait, and watch, your eyes slowly adapt and you begin to discern shadows. Hold your nerve, and the shadows might just resolve into definite shapes.

Can a sleepless night awaken creativity? By Marina Benjamin. The Guardian, December 15, 2018.

Insomnia usually begins with a lament: for the love (and loss) of sleep; over the red-eyed mornings and sludgelike days that tail the wakeful nights; for the rest you crave and cannot get and the cognitive snap that eludes you. Yet if we insist on viewing insomnia merely as a matter of negatives, a condition defined by lack, a nothing, a zero, a blank, then we risk missing what it can potentially reveal.

I’ve been an insomniac all my life. As a child, my wakefulness was a matter of personal pride, a badge of honor signifying a shrewd vigilance (should any ghoul dare intrude upon my bedroom by night, it would meet with a grisly fate). Yet my refusal of sleep had less to do with my fear of the dark and the monsters it bred than with everyday suspicion: I simply could not fathom where people went to in sleep. They seemed lost to the world.

Terrified of the nullity that sleep imposed, I’d dodge the bedtime curfew each night: at lights out, a minor rebellion. Like Vladimir Nabokov (whose kindred spirit I had yet to encounter), I figured that sleep offered only a dumb conformity. Had I not been a child, I, too, might have described it as a “nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.” I longed for the light of consciousness to burn throughout the dark nights.

These days, I’m less inclined to rejoice in the way my head is lit up at night, like an out-of-hours factory, when the whirring generators flip on, powering up the lights and the processing plants for a frenetic shift. Geared up this way, my mind trips ceaselessly from one mundane thought to the next, alighting upon a single word or meaningless riff or song snippet I happened to hear that day. Or it runs backward and forward over endless lists, stitching and unstitching. I compose strings of emails that could wait until morning, line up tasks in a shoulder-shoving queue. Mostly I just fret, worry-beading minor problems and irritations until they form a manacle of woe.

Since most people are sleeping when I’m awake — their circadian rhythms in happy synchrony with the diurnal clock — my insomnia is troubled by a sense of trespass, even contamination: the illicit importing of day into night. How can one not feel somewhat soiled by it?

The proponents of “sleep hygiene” have a lot to say about contamination, too. In this sense, the obsession with sleep hygiene has a kinship with the stylized fussiness of clean eating. Its rules dictate that rather than thrashing around in bed, not sleeping, the insomniac whose mind is polluted by looping dark thoughts and sudden lurching panics (the pesticides of wakefulness) should instead get up, switch rooms, attempt to read, make lists, make tea, listen to sleep tapes, meditate but not medicate, put on fresh sleepwear and experiment with soft lighting.

In a short essay titled “Sleep, Night,” published in 1955, the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot took a very different tack. Touching on the border-crossing wiliness of insomnia, he wrote: “To sleep with open eyes is an anomaly symbolically indicating something which the general consciousness does not approve of. People who sleep badly always appear more or less guilty. What do they do? They make night present.” Not for Blanchot the anodyne distractions of sleep hygiene, which conspire to evade night’s presence. His recommendation was that insomniacs leap into the night.

This is not always easy. Anyone who has woken from a nightmare knows that shapes and colors morph in the dark. Night has its own alphabet, too, a sensory lexicon that is manifestly “other.” Lean in to insomnia and you can discern the varied granular textures of the dark. Tune in and your ears can feast on a strange nocturnal orchestration: animal, atmospheric, hydraulic, electric.

All your senses are heightened at night; everything is amplified. When you hear rustling leaves, it is as if you can pick out each individual flutter. The scurrying of small mammals offers a complex, scratchboard choreography. Listen hard along an internal register, and you sometimes pick up the pounding thud of your heart, or a mysterious whooshing that swirls through your ears like a miniature mistral. The cognitive realms of insomnia frequently resemble the dippy altered states induced by psychotropic drugs. (And of course, like a bad trip, the night can be full of terror: hypnagogic hallucinations causing mysterious shadows to sway before your open eyes or inducing furniture to hulk and loom.)

Just as artists, writers and seekers have used drugs to expand their minds, so have many sleepless souls wondered at one time or other if the insomniac mind, pushed to its lateral limits, might not yield insights as well as torments. Might there be some small comfort amid the suffering?

After all, once in a while, an unexpectedly profound thought will suddenly coalesce out of the dying remnants of a dream — and then I chase it down, all my insomniac energy bent on its capture. Again, I am reminded of Nabokov, delighting in the way his insomnia would explode in a “sunburst,” filling his head with ideas and fancies to feed his creative soul. The challenge involved, as Walt Whitman saw it, is to “see the sparkles of starshine on the icy and pallid earth” and then “sweat the night into words,” as the poet Bernard Spencer more practically put it in his poem “Night-Time: Starting to Write.”

Maybe insomnia itself is a portal that encourages trafficking between the conscious and unconscious minds. On the one hand, as Alice Robb argues in her new book, “Why We Dream,” you can train yourself into lucid dreaming, exerting directorial control over the night brain’s filmic productions. Think of it, perhaps, as a form of scenario planning. Flip the direction of travel, though, and you become alert to the process Freud described when he wrote that during the day we “drive shafts” into our fresh chains of thought, and these shafts make contact with “dream thoughts.” This is how night and day  fertilize each other. This — I’ve come to believe — is how creativity is born.

As ever, Freud’s grasp of the mind’s quirks proved prescient. Sleep scientists now speak of states in which the brain is neither awake nor sleeping, but both. According to Rubin Naiman at the Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, parts of the brain can drift into sleep during the day, effectively making sleepwalkers of us all, or shut down entirely, producing a flash sleep that endures for milliseconds and is experienced merely as a fractional slip of attention or momentary blackout. Perhaps, after all, sleep, not wakefulness, constitutes the mind’s default mode. And if that is the case, then perhaps insomnia is consciousness’s determined revenge.

The Genius of Insomnia. By Marina Benjamin. The New York Times, January 5, 2019.

"Reality had taken on the texture of a dream," Marina Benjamin told me, recently, recounting what it was like for her during a prolonged bout of sleeplessness, a period that inspired her new book, the elegant, provocative Insomnia, in which she explores not only her own restless nights but also the ways in which an adherence to a strict day-night binary has promoted a system of patriarchy and capitalism. Benjamin references mythical sleepless women like The Odyssey's Penelope and Scheherazade to illustrate the ways in which women have long used a wakeful vigilance to seize power in a world that would rather have their heroines lie in repose. In Benjamin's writing, it becomes clear that the mysteriousness of the night, its blurred boundaries, its endlessly subtle tonal variations, is a precious space, particularly for those of us who do not naturally fare well in the harsh light of the sun. Better, then, to stay in the gentle glow of the moon, beneath the hot, infinite sparks of the stars above, and set our own schedules, make up our own rules, in accordance with who we want to be, not who we're told we must become.

Below, I speak with Benjamin about her inspiration for Insomnia, how capitalism has ruined our sleeping schedules, and why Sleeping Beauty is a truly disturbing fairy tale.

KI : Why was insomnia, as a phenomenon, something you wanted to explore?

MB : It's something I've had on and off all my life, but it was affecting me really badly over the last few years. It was partly a mid-life thing, you know, a kind of depleting of estrogen and stuff, and just partly being in a very anxious time. I can't put a finger on specific things, but I was just feeling like my days were very unwieldy and upside-down and without form, and then the not-sleeping made the days seem even more upside-down. And, you know, [it was] rather like... looking through a fog; reality had taken on the texture of a dream. Sense and nonsense were somehow intermingled, and there was this constant swell of anxiety through everything.

And I thought that I wanted to write about this condition that I was experiencing, because it seemed to me that insomnia... to just talk about it as though it were merely not being able to sleep at night was to totally minimize it into something that it's so much more than.

It affects every aspect of your existence, your sense of yourself, your sense of reality, the way you communicate with people, your cognitive well-being, and I thought, How do you put that in narrative form? And it seemed like a really exciting challenge. I wanted to write a book that kind of really inhabited that unstable state of being and was really all about emotional difficulty, intellectual uncertainty, and ambiguity. And then I thought, Well, that'll make a really interesting narrative, and I just started writing, and it was just coming, you know, a book was sort of stirring, and I just thought, Right, I'll listen to this voice, and I'll go with it, and I'll see what I have.

KI :

It really had me contemplating how ingrained the day-night binary is for us, and how structured our days are around it. It's fascinating because we're supposed to feel innately diurnal, but then when you think about the way in which those waking boundaries have only been solidified under capitalism, to promote a certain type of labor...

MB :

And largely, with capitalism, it's weird getting most people onto the same page as it were, except this time it's getting most people onto the same clock, for maximum productivity, I guess. And people who aren't on the clock are generally on the margins of societies: the mothers of newborns, elderly people, babies, the unemployed...

KI : ... artists.

MB :

They're not on that clock, and they're in the minority. And the other thing to bear in mind as well, about the power of this corralling of people, is if society wants to punish those who don't play by the rules, one of the things they do is they stop people sleeping. It's a classic torture method. You can literally drive people insane through depriving them of sleep.

The whole idea of day and night and the idea that you sleep in one stretch is a very modern invention. It coincided with the workday, with capitalism's demands, really, of our availability. But, if you look back to premodern times, you see that people actually slept often in little chunks of sleep, where they could lay their heads on journeys while they were traveling on long, bumpy coach rides. Or often, there was the first-sleep and the second-sleep; that was very much something that was written about in the Renaissance period and the Enlightenment period. People would go to sleep, of course, because there was only candlelight, so they'd go to sleep with dark, and they'd wake up with dawn. They busied themselves for a little bit, and then they might go to sleep again. So, this idea that we should kind of all somehow fit in with a single eight-hour stretch that takes place in the dark is a very bizarre, modern invention. But we don't notice its oddity, because everyone does it.

KI :

Well, everyone does it, but it doesn't seem like they're doing it well, anymore. I think the rise of the gig economy and the loss of anything resembling a nine-to-five job, and the implicit mandate to always be working and always be hustling, has also led to both a lack of sleep as well as a renewed interest in sleep. In New York, on the subway, every other ad is for, like, a mattress or bed linens or for CBD oil as a sleep aid. What do you think is going on in the world that's amplified this conversation about sleep and then also sleeplessness?

MB :

We have a culture of wakefulness, of eternal vigilance; we must always be available to our phones, to our social media, we must always be on. And if you're switched on, of course, you can't switch off, and it is the mind's relentless hold on the body, I think that stops us sleeping. Really the mind has to let go of the body so that the body can fall away, can fall into sleep, and sleep is a kind of letting go, a kind of gravitational surrender to the unconscious. So our culture, our work culture, and our social lives mitigate against this letting go and, consequently, if you can't, as I said in the book, get any sleep, you fall in love with it, so we fantasize about soft mattresses and memory foam, and we relish the idea of sleep. We just want nothing better than to curl up into a little ball. It is the last refuge of the workaholic, it's the only place you're unavailable.

It's just a wonder to me that we've got these two poles of our culture whereby we long for rest but we don't get it. We cherish sleep, but we cherish wakefulness more.

KI :

The language around those two dynamics is so powerful, and also so morally tinged; wakefulness is associated with things like lucidity and clarity and other qualities we're taught to strive for, and yet, for me, during all my personal periods of intense insomnia, there was nothing necessarily bad about it, nor could it even be reduced to one thing at all. There were aspects that were lovely and some that were terrifying, but mostly, it was just such an interesting distortion of perception of power, in a way that felt really feminine, because it sort of erased my ideas of what it means to be powerful in a traditional way. Like, you can accomplish things outside the bounds of traditional structures. And I think this kind of nocturnal power is referenced in your book when you recount the stories of both Penelope and of Scheherazade. They're iconic mythological women, and part of their importance is in their femininity, and they're incredibly powerful, but they're not powerful in the way that we're used to being told about...

MB :

They're both insomniac, and they both exert that power by night. We see their survival skills by night, the unraveling of the cloth [by Penelope], and with Scheherazade, it's the filling of the emptiness with the yarn-spinning, the storytelling. And I think for me, why I chose those figures, is because we think of those women as living on a knife's edge, you know... Scheherazade's life was in imminent danger, if she didn't find a solution in her sleepless nights to the predicament that she found herself in, she would be killed. And with Penelope, [she was] constantly under assault from people who wanted to take power from her, and she constantly needed to keep the flame of hope alive for the return of her husband, who represents the return of victory and normality and patriarchal kind of assurance, I suppose. Except we, the readers of The Odyssey, know better, because we know he's been cheating on her, but she doesn't know that.

But then I think it interested me, this whole idea, of the anxious woman as a strange kind of heroine. Because it struck me, there aren't very many outlets that aren't pathologized for women to experience or express the release of anxiety, and that it gets turned in on itself, and I think it's one of the main causes of insomnia.

And that's why this anxiety that women feel about their lives, about perhaps their speaking of their ambitions, but society doesn't give them the room they want, and so the anxieties tend to build and you have these, I think, very harrowing experiences at night, your disappointments kind of gnawing at you and your hopes and longings kind of eating at you.

It struck me as a really interesting thing to write about, and I hadn't really seen it expressed before in prose anywhere, and so I felt really clearly drawn to these ideas. And actually, at the other pole, I was also drawn to the idea of the slumbering woman, because that's the opposite of the anxious woman, and what did that represent? Well, oddly enough, it didn't represent beauty and repose and perfect restfulness. It actually represented merely the drugging of anxiety, the obliterating of anxiety, again by patriarchal cultures—so by doctors or by painters or by any man who thought that one way to silence a woman or to not acknowledge her anxiety was to literally put her to bed.

And that's why I wrote about the rest cure and I wrote about this image of Sleeping Beauty and the spell it casts on our own minds, which fools us to think what we're appreciating here is the idea of beauty in repose. Whereas actually, it's not.

KI :

There is just something so uniquely disturbing about the fetishization of Sleeping Beauty, who is forced into sleep once she hits sexual maturity by this patriarchal society and by the women working within it, as a measure of protection that serves to keep her asleep and ignorant.

MB :

And she becomes a repository of things that are unreal, you know, the idea that to be feminine, to be pure is superior and it's women supporting that—the spinners who keep the shuttle going or whatever, or the whole court that's also in a sympathetic sleep, all fallen under the same enchantment. I was very interested in this idea of kind of puncturing holes in this myth about Sleeping Beauty because I felt it was a fairy tale that was doing more harm than good. And, why not embrace ugly? I have this whole riff in the book about how life without ugly is every bit as vapid as enchanted sleep. We need ugly in our lives or we don't see good.

KI : Were there any directions that you went while writing this that you hadn't expected, or that wound up surprising you?

MB : There were, actually. The bit about the aggrandizing feelings that you get in insomnia. The first place I went to with this was [Awakenings], Oliver Sack's book about these people that were woken from their sleeping sickness, who had these kind of feelings of incredible grandeur—delusions of grandeur—when they were woken, and I started thinking about how some of those feelings of grandeur were things I recognized in insomnia. You have almost a deluded sense of your own agency and power, and I try to convey that in the book by introducing a cosmic element. It's almost like you feel you are in tune with the universe somehow, communing with the heavens. I know it sounds nuts, but there was this element of cosmicity to the book that I wanted to kind of get in. You know, this idea that somehow when you're sort of spiritually naked in the middle of the night awake, and you're stripped of any kinds of trappings of cultural expectation, or even social expectations, because no one tells you what to do when you're awake in the middle of the night and you are a force unto yourself. You've got this idea that you can commune with the heavens, so this cosmicity element, this kind of wanting some relationship with the heavenly or the cosmic, was something that I noticed was happening and then I kind of exploited it.

So, it wasn't something that I'd planned, it wasn't a dimension that I particularly planned to put in the book, but once I saw that it was emerging, I thought, Yes, this feels right! I'm going to play this up. And so I threaded it back through in various places, including my mother telling me that she'd slept under the stars as a child—nothing between her and the heavens—on the roof of her house, so nothing between her and the sky. I really like that idea. And then the poetic resonance is with Rumi, talking about touching the loving nowhere at night, and that really spoke to me.

A lot of sleep science I found very surprising, in that we know a lot about how to describe what the brain is doing, but we have no idea why it's doing what it's doing. But I guess that's pretty much true of most brain science, it's very hit-or-miss embryonic kind of art. There's a whole language of waves and Greek letters.. and we have lovely language for talking about nights and sleep, but we don't really know much about how it all works.

A Beautiful New Book Reveals The Dark Pleasures Of Insomnia. By Kristin Iversen. Nylon, November 13, 2018.

Marina Benjamin on Insomnia.

Marina Benjamin  discusses her latest book Insomnia, a beautifully written insight into the struggles of living with a sleeping disorder.

Shakespeare and Company Bookshop,  November 29, 2019. 

If you think you sleep badly it will soon become clear, on witnessing Marina Benjamin wrestle with the problem, her mind “on fire … messages flying, dendrites flowering, synapses whipping snaps of electricity across my brain”, that you really don’t. Never again will I refer to the kind of sleeplessness that can be tamed with Ovaltine and a few pages of Knausgaard as “insomnia”. Benjamin’s impassioned and elegant memoir is not just an intimate account of a disorder for which there is still no straightforward cure, but a defiant celebration of its paradoxical potential. For, as she suggests, insomnia is more than “just a state of sleeplessness, a matter of negatives. It involves the active pursuit of sleep. It is a state of longing.” In fact she pursues sleep so hard that an entire book is the result.

Fittingly for a meditation on a disrupted process, her method is fragmentary, hurtling from thought to thought. Its starting point is Lacan’s observation that desire is born out of lack. “On certain turbulent nights this longing is so great and deep and bald it swallows up the world,” she admits – and after that, anything goes. All literature is raw material for the pursuit, because if the “enervating mania” of insomnia involves “an excess of longing”, it also involves “an excess of thinking”. Benjamin never offers a medical explanation for her insomnia. Is it a side-effect of the menopause, she wonders? The result of chronic hip pain? Fallout from a melatonin deficiency? These questions are all red herrings. Her key idea, approached via detours into history, philosophy and art, is that the inability to sleep is not just a symptom of an underlying pathology, but an existential experience that can give us fresh insights into the nature of creativity and love. If there is an answer to why she can’t drift off we have to find it, as she does, in the stories of others.

Love first. Benjamin’s husband sleeps well. He is a “shadow-shaped mass across the bed” whose ability to nod off has become his defining feature, so that he’s simply referred to here as Zzz. Abandoned to wakefulness, Benjamin compares herself to Penelope, another long-suffering wife, who seeks “constantly to renew her hope that her missing husband will suddenly reappear”. Penelope is harassed by suitors. She stays up all night, unpicking a piece of cloth that she weaves during the day (she says she won’t consider remarriage until it’s finished, while making sure that it never will be). Odysseus, away at the Trojan wars, is the hero of Homer’s epic, but there’s more than a touch of exasperation in Benjamin’s intuition that Penelope, “battling the darkness of his absence with her insomnia”, has the harder task. In a neat aside, Benjamin, spinning away fretfully at her night thoughts, notes that “there are frets in weaving as well”.

But who is really absent? Zzz urges her to see a doctor again (her insomnia, we discover, is an old difficulty, and he wants her to take pills). He likes to reminisce about the “electric presence” they felt when they first met, a sense of “being there and being real”. Nowadays, Zzz complains that “I am present mostly in my writing, by which he means I am present only to myself.” Though she won’t say so out loud, Benjamin knows that insomnia is fundamentally about presence. Sleep is one of the rituals that take us out of ourselves, but writing is another. “What does help,” she says, “is when I try to leach insomnia’s power over me by siphoning off my looping night-time thoughts and straightening them out into ordered words on the page.” In a long marriage issues of separateness and sovereignty – over one’s time, one’s body, one’s very wakefulness – have to be constantly renegotiated. It’s weirdly disempowering, but very common, to be ordered to bed when your spouse calls it a night. Shared sleep is the badge of married togetherness. After 20 years of being left to her own night-time devices, did Penelope want to sleep once Odysseus was back in the marital bed? Benjamin doesn’t ask this question, but she does ask, with terrible frankness, “Why am I in this house, this bed, this marriage?” She has “honoured every emotional contract I was signatory to and yet I seem to have lost myself”.

For a writer, and perhaps especially a female writer, the problem of being present enough in daily and family life is a constant one. Benjamin addresses it obliquely, through literary anecdote. She recalls the writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who suffered from postpartum depression following the birth of her only child and was committed in 1887 by her husband to Silas Weir Mitchell’s Philadelphia clinic, to undergo his now infamous “rest cure”. In Gilman’s own words, she was “put to bed and kept there”. Women suffering the rest cure’s enforced passivity (including Virginia Woolf, whose savaging of Mitchell’s system appears in Mrs Dalloway) were not allowed “to sit up, or to sew or write or read, or to use the hands in any active way”. On being discharged, Gilman was forbidden to write again. Within months her depression had worsened, bringing her close to total collapse. The result was her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, in which a young wife is prescribed a rest cure by her doctor husband. As Benjamin tells us, Gilman’s heroine is “beset by florid hallucinations that play across the hideous wallpaper – all bulbous ‘eyes’ and suicidal swirls: ‘like a broken neck’ – of the attic room where she has been put to bed.” The story sets up a direct link between insomnia, the inability to write, and loss of self. At last the narrator sees bars emerge in the wallpaper, “and then behind these bars she spies a ghostly woman creeping, stopping every so often to shake her cage”. Unable to free herself, this ghostly double keeps up her creeping “until eventually the rest-cure patient joins her”. Gilman’s insomniac heroine loses her mind. In this story, rest is a feminist issue.

For Gilman, who survived her near breakdown to conduct a vigorous intellectual life, the only effective cure was divorce. Benjamin (like Penelope) is firmly married, but her fascination with female sleep as a form of subjugation, and insomnia as instinctive rebellion, ripples through the book. She visits Buscot Park, the Oxfordshire house of the pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, to look at his cycle of paintings of Little Briar Rose, or Sleeping Beauty. Benjamin reminds us that Burne-Jones worked in “the age not just of the rest cure, but also of chemical anaesthesia”, where “slumbering women of one kind or another came to symbolise the malaise of an entire society enslaved by material culture, closed off from imagination and living off its nerves”. If it sounds not so very far removed from our own, then it’s worth remembering that there is an awakening “curled up within every enchantment”. Everywhere in Burne-Jones’s canvases there are roses, “flicks and flecks of pink”, like those dendrites in the sleepless brain, “perpetually flowering, as a reminder of the world beyond” – and of irruptive female agency too, perhaps. “What of my own restlessness?” asks Benjamin at one point. “Where might it take me, and what kind of dedication will it demand?” This provocative, at times anguished book has by the end completely overthrown our expectations by repositioning insomnia as a form of resistance, linked to the author’s own freedom to create. We want her to get some sleep, but even more than that, we want her to go on writing. For now, separate bedrooms might be the answer.

Insomnia by Marina Benjamin review - sleeplessness as resistance. By Elizabeth Lowry. The Guardian, December 26, 2018.

The title of  Marina Benjamin’s lyrical new memoir, Insomnia, refers to many things. Most obviously, it identifies the physical condition of sleeplessness, which leaves the sufferer perpetually tired and afflicted with a feverish, prickly skin. But it also functions as a flexible metaphor, with Benjamin spinning out the figurative possibilities of her affliction to include issues both personal and world-historical. Finally, the title refers to an existential testing ground, an in-between state that leads the would-be sleeper to question her life choices, while at the same time opening herself up to new possibilities.

The book consists of a series of short paragraphs, some of which connect up to one another while others riff suggestively on new themes, teasing out the manifold implications of the author’s insomnia. Benjamin’s technique has a nocturnal cast, her night thoughts following their own strange logic, bleeding into one another. “Dreams are collage-like,” Benjamin writes, explaining her decision to adopt this particular style. “The way we grasp things is collage-like: the mind gathering in material from the outermost reaches of the senses and fusing it together into definite shapes. And writing, too, is a kind of collage.” This method allows her to range freely through her nighttime meditations, which include musings about books and paintings, as well as a portrait of life with her husband — who, due to his enviable ability to fall instantly asleep, is referred to throughout as Zzz.

As Benjamin depicts the experience, the insomniac exists in a liminal state, poised between sleep and waking, light and darkness. She vividly evokes this neither-here-nor-there situation, with its heightened sensitivity to ambient light and sounds. “At 4:15 a.m.,” she writes,

birds chirrup, foxes scream, and sometimes, when the rotating schedule for landing and takeoff from Heathrow Airport collides with my sleeplessness, planes rumble overhead. The quality of the dark is not as pure at this hour as it is earlier. It is porous around the edges. In my bed, I flap and thrash like a grouper caught in the net.

As maddening as this state can be, especially when the sufferer senses the onset of morning, dooming her to forced wakefulness, it is also one full of possibilities. Early on in Insomnia, Benjamin describes a vexing situation in which a courier had been unable to locate her to deliver a book. Now, stuck with insomnia, she composes a mental letter to the company, even though she had never before thought to contact them. Why only now, Benjamin wonders, when it is far too late, has she thought to write such a letter? “It occurred to me only later,” she writes, “that perhaps an additional question ought to be posed — one more pressing than why the book never arrived. The question is this: What if waking life is incapable of adequately attuning us to the needs of our unconscious minds?”

The undelivered book may be a relatively trivial affair, but the insight Benjamin offers has larger implications. Late in Insomnia, she tells of waking up in the middle of the night from a bad dream that “seeped out of [her] head and into the bedroom like a noxious gas, contaminating everything.” Under the spell of this nightmare, everything around her takes on a menacing aspect, including her husband. She is suddenly thrust into crisis:

It is at moments like these, when I sense the void migrate from the perimeter of my existence and begin to pervade its center, that I start to question what I am about. Why am I in this house, this bed, this marriage? Why, when I look back over a string of formative selves, all those era-defined embodiments of me pulling in different directions, do I find myself on this path and not on any other? […] At moments such as these, everything that is closest to my heart, that generates the impression of gravity in my world, gets rudely pitched across the universe.

After staring down the void so directly, she finds it impossible to sleep and has no other recourse than to tiptoe down to the basement and pass the rest of the night in the company of her dog.

The liminal states Benjamin evokes can be terrifying, a bold reckoning with nothingness, but they can also be productive. Toward the end of the book, she discusses her problems with the concept of mindfulness, which she compares to the process of tidying up a house. “It is focused and satisfying in concentrated spurts, but it lacks a direction of travel,” she writes. “It seeks to keep things as they are. It leaves the world unchanged.” By contrast, what she calls “mind wandering,” troubling as it can be, is also often invigorating and transgressive. It is the very province of the essayist, whose job it is to map those wayward thoughts on the page. “Mind wandering free-associates and innovates,” she writes. “It overreaches wildly and pulls you along, eager in its wake. […] [I]t roams: respecting no boundaries, it transgresses.”

This, then, is the crux of the book: how can the free association inherent in insomnia be put to positive use? If we can learn to be sensible to these liminal states in which thought refuses to follow a linear path, Benjamin suggests, then we can free ourselves from entrenched ways of thinking and open up new possibilities. As she puts it, “perhaps this [mind wandering] is something the conscious mind can take from insomnia.” Extending the metaphor, she looks to her family, noting the ways they have embraced figurative border crossings in their own lives: her husband Zzz, with his newfound zeal for international activism, and her daughter, with her embrace of a fluid gender identity. In the end, Benjamin concludes that, while she still yearns for sleep, it is important that she stay attuned to the insomniac state. “I don’t want to slip unknowingly from being into nothing,” she writes, “but to be party to the drift and transgression, and alive to the excitement and danger that it entails. It is a knife-edge business […] and it demands that I embrace uncertainty.”

In this way, Insomnia follows the same pattern as Benjamin’s previous memoir, The Middlepause: On Turning Fifty (2016). Although that book follows a more conventional structure, it also ranges freely, mixing personal experience with analyses of literature and social trends, as the author attempts to work out her feelings about menopause. For Benjamin, the onset of this condition was sudden, the result of a hysterectomy in her late 40s, and she finds herself, in the aftermath of the surgery, as much at sea as she is in her chronic sleeplessness. Wandering the streets, she feels abruptly defeminized, ignored by passersby, a ghostly gender-neutral presence. The effect is deeply unsettling, until she suddenly realizes that it gives her a certain power: rather than being the looked-at, she can now become the looker.

Like her treatment of insomnia, Benjamin ultimately posits menopause — at least in its early stages — as a liminal state. Shortly after her hysterectomy, Benjamin’s father died, the twin griefs bringing on a state of creative paralysis, leaving her unable to write for over a year. Looking back, she realizes that she was in a transitional phase, one that could — and for her, ultimately did — open up fresh avenues of thinking and living. “In moving through a liminal phase,” she writes, “the mind untethers itself from what it knows in order to drift and float towards new modes of being. The mind is in transit.” Finally realizing that she can’t go on as she has been, but also that her condition allows her a certain freedom, she resolves to shake up her life, seizing more control over her time and shedding some financial stability in order to force herself back into writing. “I felt emboldened,” she concludes. “If my persona was being dismantled come what may […] then I would embrace instability.”

Both The Middlepause and Insomnia are richly considered works that depict a wise and curious mind coming at two troubling states from a variety of perspectives. At times, perhaps, Benjamin ranges a bit too freely, as when, in Insomnia, she constructs an elaborate metaphorical system linking light and darkness with the slave trade, willful historical ignorance, and the sleep-depriving properties of coffee and sugar. But this sort of wandering speculation is precisely what Benjamin finds so productive in sleeplessness, and such straying is always preferable to a refusal to transgress. In her willingness to embrace the same sort of liminality in her work that she champions in the menopausal state and the insomniac condition, Benjamin boldly points the way toward new and productive ways of living.

A Mind in Transit: Marina Benjamin on Insomnia. By  Andrew Schenker. Los Angeles Review of Books, January 2, 2019. 

also of interest  :

Because The Night : How do representations of sleep reflect contemporary culture? 

By Erik Morse. Frieze, February 8, 2018. 

On the Sleepless Lives of Writers :  Insomnia: Source of Suffering or Creativity? By  Nick Ripatrazone. LitHub, June 26, 2018.

How Famous Artists Dealt with Insomnia. By Lydia Figes.  Artsy , July 17, 2019.