“Are you awake?” So runs the perpetual 3 A.M. question of the sleepless to the seemingly slumbering partner. “No!” the partner replies, turning over and away, indicating both the fact of being awake and the state of being still asleep, unavailable for conscious activities. The insistent insomniac, desperate for a chat, usually sighs, accepts the verdict, and slumps back into sleeplessness. (Carrying on with the conversation is a path toward divorce, not the desired diversion.) The exchange, muttered by countless couples in countless beds, reminds us that sleep is not a neat off-and-on switch but a fully human and fiendishly manifold activity: social, complex, and governed by as many psychological intricacies as any other natural act. We can be asleep and still sense that something is stirring around us, or be awake and still say “No!” and mean it.
“The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep,” E. M. Cioran once wrote. Sleep—which, when things go well, consumes a third of our lives—poses two opposed existential perplexities. The first is about consciousness: we know that we sleep, but cannot know that we are sleeping, since sleep is, in its nature, non-present. The second perplexity has to do with what we can, in fact, remember, and that is the experience of dreams. While engaged in the non-knowable act of sleeping, we also learn nightly that it is possible to know that we have had vivid, intense, unforgettable experiences that are, at the same time, delusions. Sleep tells us that there are black holes outside the possibility of narrative description; the dreams we have when we’re sleeping tell us that our entire existence might be a narrative fiction. “How do we know it’s not a dream?” is the perennial philosopher’s question, the red-pill dilemma. We’ve all felt that initial squeeze of relief—oh, it was just a dream!—turn into sadness: Oh, he’s not alive again. It was only a dream. And so the contradiction: we cannot narrate our experience of sleep, even though our dreams are so much our primary experience of narration that we use them as a metaphor for our most extreme actualities. “It was like a dream,” we say of something piercingly happy; “It was a nightmare,” for something piercingly sad.
Inevitably, we turn to the scientists, as medieval people to the stars, in the hope of finding truth and comfort about our unwaking states. In 'Why We Sleep' Matthew Walker, who runs the Center for Human Sleep Science, at Berkeley, offers a fine condensed account of what students of consciousness know about its absence. He is at pains to show that there’s a complex architecture of unconsciousness. It isn’t just that deep sleep is followed by REM sleep, or dreaming sleep; these two states firmly oscillate back and forth in the hours we are asleep. We learn not just about melatonin, as a marker of our circadian rhythm, but about adenosine, which accumulates during our waking hours and produces the “sleep pressure,” or homeostatic sleep drive, that makes us drowsy. Caffeine, we’re told, does its work by preventing adenosine from doing its work. (It’s a powerful drug! Walker reproduces terrifying drawings of webs woven by spiders under the influence of various substances: spiders do O.K. even on LSD but go completely crazy on the strength of a couple of lattes, spinning wildly incoherent webs that would never catch a fly.)
Veteran insomniacs seeking reassurance in these pages—it’s no big deal; people manage fine with minimal sleep; it gets better—will find none. Instead, we are warned that the consequences of not sleeping are even worse than we’d feared. Everything goes wrong when we don’t sleep. The damage to our immune system is astounding; Walker cites a study of healthy young men that showed how a four-hour night of sleep “swept away 70 percent of the natural killer cells circulating in the immune system.” Sleep-deprived mice—it seems cruel to keep even mice awake, but we do, possibly by showing them Election Night on MSNBC over and over—will have a two-hundred-per-cent increase in tumor growth. Nor is cancer the only risk. “You don’t need a full night of total sleep deprivation to inflict a measurable impact on your cardiovascular system,” Walker explains, delivering details with what sounds suspiciously like professional delight. “As your sleep-deprived heart beats faster, the volumetric rate of blood pumped through your vasculature increases, and with that comes the hypertensive state of your blood pressure,” he writes. “Adding insult to real injury, the hypertensive strain that sleep deprivation places on your vasculature means that you can no longer repair those fracturing vessels effectively. . . . Vessels will rupture. It is a powder keg of factors, with heart attack and stroke being the most common casualties in the explosive aftermath.” That’s the kind of reading that can keep you up at night.
Insomniacs tend to couple up neatly with good sleepers, but even those good sleepers are probably not sleeping as much as they should. Walker suggests that humans are made for “biphasic” sleep—that is, two sleep sessions per day. People in traditional communities where everyone naps live longer than people in modernized ones where they don’t. The siesta is lifesaving. Walker even conjectures that our peculiar sleep patterns may explain our evolutionary advance. We sleep less than other primates, but get relatively more REM sleep, and the dreams it brings, than our monkey and ape cousins. It is during REM sleep, Walker insists, that we engage in “emotional processing.” The mnemonic collisions during this phase forge new connections among our experiences, and we wake not merely refreshed but revived and enlightened by our re-wrought neural networks.
That’s if you sleep, of course. Insomnia seems to descend, alarmingly like schizophrenia, in the late teens, when self-consciousness of all types descends. I suffered my own first serious bout with sleeplessness around the age of eighteen, when, coming home from a family voyage to Europe, my eyes would not shut. The reason was obviously jet lag, but, instead of accepting the cause, I internalized the panic.
Decades later, I recall good sleeps the way other people recall good meals. (I have luckily had too many good meals to recall almost any.) The one morning when I slept past nine; that other when the kids had to wake me at eleven. Few phobias can be quite as psychologically painful as sleeplessness. The body simply won’t lose consciousness, and losing it is something that cannot be willed into existence, or, rather, into nonexistence. And so one begins to envy desperately not just the sleeping spouse but everyone in the world who is not awake, from children to the henchmen in old heist movies who are thumped on the head with the butt of a gun by Steve McQueen and immediately faint away. (Not something that can actually happen.)
The odyssey that the insomniac undergoes every night, passing from bedroom to living room and back again, is, in a curious way, a parody of sleep, as Walker depicts it, with a conscious architecture of its own. Not being able to sleep and being awake are two distinct settings. Insomniacs seldom just get up, work for an hour, enjoy the silence of the house. This implies a state of serenity that’s exactly what we don’t have; if we could be that calm, we’d be asleep. No, we are inclined to seek out sleep in the same oscillating stages that sleep itself presents, even if that means walking fretfully, or listening to podcasts on early Christian history, or watching late-night television, searching out things that will be sufficiently distracting to keep us from dwelling on the fact that we are not sleeping without being so agitating as to keep us up even more.
Indeed, when two insomniacs share a house or an apartment, they are often acutely conscious of each other’s affliction without seeking each other’s company. Hearing the other move around, flick the light switch on and off, pound the floor, the insomniac empathizes while recognizing that to commiserate would be to bar the door to oblivion for both. For we insomniacs are not living the waking life; we are seeking sleep. As much as the actual sleeper in the bed beside us, we have a nightly passage that we know too well—and one that does, eventually, yield to sleep, if never enough.
Star insomniacs, for there are such people, tend to feel free to externalize their own nightly odyssey. The basketball player Wilt Chamberlain was chronically sleep-deprived. He would talk about how little sleep he’d had, and crankily, not boastfully. The nineteen-seventies were “probably the best time of his life because he had people who could stay up all night with him,” a friend of his has said. “But he’d wear people out because all the rest of us had to sleep.” There were compensations: he couldn’t have slept with so many women—many, many thousands, he estimated—had he actually slept. (This double use of “sleep,” which occurs in many languages, is a significant substitution, sex being both an alternative before and a soporific after. Perhaps he slept with so many in order to sleep alone.)
What afflicts the great star of the court can equally afflict the great star of the quad. The eminent philosopher of personhood Derek Parfit served himself a nightly concoction of pills and vodka in an effort to knock himself out. According to his biographer, David Edmonds, the druggings were accompanied by another ritual, in the pre-AirPods era, when Parfit was a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford: “Each night, as other Fellows retired to bed, he would start playing Wagner—usually The Ring Cycle, Tristan and Isolde, or Parsifal—and the music would float across the North Quad for several hours.” Wagner would be a sleepless highbrow’s favorite; the long, lush, unbroken lines of music share with the white-noise hum of the air-conditioner or the thrum of the painstaking lecture the quality of being absorbing without offering undue eventfulness. It doesn’t seem to have helped Parfit any more than early Christian history has helped me.
The exasperated experts, right here, begin to fire off e-mails and D.M.s, tutting at the eminent philosopher’s obvious failures of sleep hygiene. Of course if you drink vodka you’ll awake at midnight! Walker, in fact, explains that one of the by-products of alcohol metabolism is a class of chemicals, known as aldehydes, that are especially prone to impede REM sleep. But trust us, doctor, we have tried it all. The Mayo Clinic has just published a brand-new guide to sleeping, which rehearses yet again the familiar remedies and warnings: no caffeine within nine hours of bedtime (done); no alcohol within four hours of bedtime (done); exercise, but at least two hours prior (done); no screens before bed (done). Meditation can help (it does, sort of), and calculation can comfort—see how much you’re really sleeping by keeping a record, and you’ll be vaguely encouraged that it’s more than you know. Melatonin, the cautious man’s Valium, may or may not work, and the gummies may contain much less or much more of the active ingredient than the label promises. The veteran insomniac may arrive at a neat little stack of health-food-store supplements—CBD gummies (with or without THC), L-theanine, kava, valerian root, and so on—and is perfectly aware that, more likely than not, it works, if it works, as a placebo. (One would think that placebos, to work, couldn’t be known as such, but it seems that, when we need something badly enough, we welcome anything.)
The inevitable reaction to the universalizing claims of natural science is the particularizing claims of cultural history: sleep, we can be certain, will be shown to have as many cultural styles over time as the pajamas we wear, or don’t wear, to enjoy it. Though food is biologically necessary, we accept that it has innumerable local styles—there may be a universal grammar of a pungent protein piled upon a neutral starch, but it encompasses everything from pizza to cassava with spiced ants. Can sleep have something like the same tribal variety? Is there a peculiarly Sri Lankan siesta, an especially Swedish kind of slumber party? Right on cue, we have Sebastian P. Klinger’s "Sleep Works : Experiments in Science and Literature 1899-1929''. It’s an attempt to cross the wires of experimental sleep science with those of literary production, set as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. A devout “culturalist,” Klinger quotes approvingly the statement that there is nothing natural about going to bed, and yet if anything is natural—that is, common to almost the entire animal kingdom—it’s sleep. Although beds in our modern sense of four-footed furniture with a springy surface may have a particular history, the familiar use of “bed” to mean something soft that animals choose to lie down on is obviously wide-reaching. Hibernating bears do not lie on jagged rocks.
The statement means, really, that the way we sleep is more inflected by our beliefs than we might think, as touched by our private yens as our public yawns. Klinger’s subsequent thesis, not a terribly surprising one, is that insomnia is the consequence of the mechanization of leisure by capitalism, and that we became sleepless in the fin de siècle because we were being forced to work and shop. Insomnia is the occupational disease of enslaved mind workers, with a predictable spillover into the aesthetes who mock it yet participate in it.
But surely insomnia was, as it remains, an outlier issue—Henry Clay Frick appeared to have slept fine, and Frederick Winslow Taylor, who slept poorly as an adolescent, doesn’t seem to have slept worse after he pioneered the methods of industrial efficiency. In ancient Rome, Juvenal complained about being kept up all night by the city’s noise. Perhaps the special connection between insomnia and modernity is something we want to be true.
Insomnia seems no more a generally modern complaint than it is a capitalist one. It is specifically a romantic complaint, which began to be heard in full right around the start of the nineteenth century and, like so many romantic complaints, became most intensified as it passed from country to city. If Shakespeare produced, in Lady Macbeth, the first great insomniac of English literature—albeit one who sees the condition as a punishment from God—it was Wordsworth who wrote our first real poem about insomnia. It’s disarming in its narrator’s search for some form of the white noise that sometimes helps the sleepless. He was trying to find pacifying country sounds even in the Lake District, the kind that are now synthesized on Spotify: “A clock of sheep that leisurely pass by, / One after one; the sound of rain, and bees / Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas, / Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky; / I’ve thought of all by turns, and still I lie / Sleepless.” What is essential is the taste to testify to the extremes of experience; Coleridge’s somnambulist and Wordsworth’s insomniac are two sides of a single phenomenon.
Klinger, to his credit, recognizes that the opposite side of the failure to sleep is the fetishization of sleep. Proust’s insomnia, though debilitating, was made, in classic wound-and-bow terms, into the engine of his art. And so with Kafka and Cioran: not being permitted to sleep by the lights of modernity, we make a melancholy playground out of the prohibition. Klinger also points out that this era marks the birth of the sleeping pill, the Communion wafer of the new century, with all its attendant miseries. Although sleeping draughts have an ancient history—evolving into the “stupefactives” of medieval medicine and then, starting in the sixteenth century, the much consumed tincture of opium known as laudanum—the twentieth century was a time of unexampled innovation in this area.
We are soon launched into the series of hypnotics—the barbiturates, the benzodiazepines, the “Z” drugs (such as zolpidem), and, most recently, the orexin blockers (notably, Belsomra). Like the rakes in a Jane Austen novel, they all began with great charm, and then soon afterward earned the most terrible reputations. You would think we’d avoid the next generation of pills after seeing the toll extracted by the previous one, but we don’t. The essayist Wilfrid Sheed wrote, in the nineteen-nineties, a funny, agonized book about his betrayal by benzo—in his case, Ativan, which promised much and ended up, in collaboration with alcohol, sending its otherwise well-balanced user off to a procession of rehabs.
Sheed called New York “the world’s insomnia capital.” This may be true, but what sane person would exchange the gleaming city at 3 a.m. for the farmhouse at 9 P.M., with all the exhausted hoers and threshers briefly asleep until the next dawn’s labor begins again? When our own country cousins come south from Canada, they emerge from the spare bedroom of our New York apartment hollow-eyed and sleepless, politely incapable of understanding how anyone can sleep amid the noise of ambulances and car alarms and honking cabs and city buses sweeping up the avenue right outside. Among the New Yorkers, both the good sleepers and the bad sleepers don’t notice it.
What of the dreams that sleep brings? If anything is universal, it is the belief, across cultures, that dreams are parables and portents—Freud became famous in Klinger’s fin-de-siècle modernity for seeking symbolic significance in dreams, but it is hard to find a single culture that does not include some version of this belief. The ancient Greeks thought that dreams held powers of prophecy; Hindus have apparently found encouragement in dreams of Lord Krishna. We want dreams to mean something, even though, yet another slumber paradox, they mainly puzzle us by their disjuncture of logic and meaning. Thus the dream relater (there is usually only one in a relationship) always begins, “I had the strangest dream last night . . .”
To find out what the new science of dreams suggests, we have "This Is Why You Dream" by Rahul Jandial, whose name on the dust jacket is suspiciously followed by both M.D. and Ph.D.—a good rule of reading being that the more credentials on the cover, the less convincing the claims inside. Yet Jandial’s book, though perhaps breezier and less cautious than that of the more typical sleep scientist, is filled with empirical information that may seem dreamy without ever feeling wholly hallucinated. And so we learn of the “Halle Berry neuron,” a discovery of the neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, who found that, in one experimental subject, a single neuron fired to the invocation, or even the mention, of Halle Berry. The larger point being made, very much in harmony with Matthew Walker’s theory of human nightly emotional processing, is that our dreams are what Jandial calls thought experiments. We focus with such neural narrowness on Halle Berry—or on Brad Pitt—because having fantasy figures play roles in the stock-theatre company of the night helps prepare us to ensnare the real thing in our waking hours.
If there seems less evidence than we might want for such a confident claim, Jandial does make a plausible case that our dreams work in tandem with our “theory of mind”—our ability to grasp that other people are thinking and feeling in the same way as ourselves. At night, we rehearse the day’s actions, and our imaginations, so to speak, ruminate through the activities of those others we have encountered as though they were our own and try to make lateral sense of them. Throughout, Jandial is arguing against the “continuity hypothesis” of dreaming—the idea that dreams are basically extensions of our daily life in coded form. Instead, he thinks that the purpose of dreams is closer to the vernacular meaning of the word: it’s what we want, not what we got—the outer edge of our imagination, not the fabric of our days rewoven.
Sometimes, to be sure, dreams are obviously rooted in anxiety. We dream repeatedly of having signed up for a course that we forgot to attend, with the exam now drawing near. This may be the mind’s simple Post-it reminder not to do this, or anything similar. Others are more plaintively compensatory: a standard dream of New Yorkers is to have found an extra room in their apartment—a dream often elaborated with a Narnia-like act of pushing back coats and clothes to find a secret door in the back of a closet. We awake, sadly, to the same space we had before. (To this dream, one might add another, also seemingly peculiar to this city: having acquired a bigger apartment, we dream of having been forced back to the smaller one.)
But most dreams are less shapely in their signalling, tending to be the jangle of mixed-up stories and abruptly abbreviated actions which puzzle us in the morning. And so Jandial arrives at a highly hypothetical but agreeably plausible explanation, modelled, as such explanations usually are, on the most recent available model of the mind. In our case, that model is provided by artificial intelligence: when a system of machine learning becomes overly tethered to the material it is dredging and, Jandial writes, grows “too rigid and formulaic in its analysis,” it proves useful to “inject ‘noise’ into the information used to teach the machine, deliberately corrupting the data and making the information more random.” Dreams, therefore, “are much like the noise injected into the machine’s data.” Freeing our minds, dreams force us into new channels of possibility, which might, in their apparently surreal inconsequence, lead to the type of thinking that “looks at a problem in a completely novel way” and help us “find adaptive solutions to unexpected threats.” The illogic of dreams is not a riddle to be solved but a noise that can reveal the meaningful signal. We are readied for the unexpected by the nightly experience of the inexplicable.
But there’s also something to the old saying that “dreams go by contraries.” Far from being continuous with our daily life, they are often compensatory. One abashed sleep scientist long ago, anticipating that the leaders of an expedition to Everest would have the most epic dreams, discovered that the meekest and most incompetent followers dreamed heroically of the summit, while others’ dreams tended to be far more anxious—a Walter Mitty effect that should have been predictable to any reader of fiction. Jandial urges us to take advantage of dream disjunctions by making a conscious effort to record our unconsciousness—writing down the previous night’s dreams, to which we are usually made amnesiac by the reëmergence of the “executive function” of the brain in wakefulness, so that “retreating into our dreams can expand our minds in ways impossible in lived experience.”
On the farther shore of sleep, Jandial writes encouragingly of the willed practice of lucid dreaming—that is, of shaping our minds so that our dreams are not merely orderly but intentionally helpful. We focus on “seeing the divine,” and we’re told that some version of the divine will be seen that night, though Hindus will see Krishna and Christians Christ. The practice of lucid dreaming—for what it’s worth, it apparently can be aided by a drug called galantamine—would seem to clash with Jandial’s earlier theory of useful randomness in dreaming, but then why should dreams be any more subject to a unitary principle than any other part of life? This particular non-lucid dreamer made an effort, after reading Jandial, to dream the divine, but I kept getting instead the missed exam and the extra room in the apartment—perhaps evidence that dreams will elude the strictures of lucidity, or perhaps evidence only that, for a New Yorker, the extra room is the image of the divine.
A skeptic might insist that dreams have no real content at all and are more like bits and pieces of film in the cutting room of the mind. The morning-after recitation might be the dream—that is, the moment when the clips are run through the projector and we patch together a narrative. The mind, then, might make purpose in dreams rather than find it there. How much are those purposes affected by our situation? According to the clinical literature, prisoners in Auschwitz dreamed of continued suffering, in which the misery and horror persisted—supporting a version of the continuity hypothesis—or had positive dreams of escape that they could share with other prisoners. One prisoner after the war described a dream in which he met his murdered brother on a stream—the deep river that represents the passage from sleep to death in countless mythologies—and his brother handed him a “fiery fish.” “I can’t carry it, I can’t carry it,” the dreamer remembers crying. “You’ll carry it, you’ll carry it,” his long-gone brother insisted. The dream, he said, gave him courage and helped him survive.
Those of us stuck on the wheel of sleeplessness eventually discover what the scientists concede: that nothing is gained, past a certain point, in trying to sleep, since the one sure thing is that none of us can will ourselves to sleep. The best remedy for insomnia, as with most things in life, is learning to live with it. In time, we come to understand that the psychological cost of stressing over sleeplessness is greater than the physical cost of not having slept, and so we adjust. The fact of not having slept turns out to be tolerable. Exhaustion gives way to normal energy, and adrenaline kicks in when we have to perform.
We cope. Is there a more dispiriting but mature reflection? Yet, on the whole, we do cope, and find comfort. Insomnia is a mark of the insubordinate imagination. On the thirteenth-century tomb of Eleanor of Aquitaine, she is shown wide awake and reading, while her dull and kingly husband sleeps for all eternity. Doubtless some medievalist will explain this as a conventional funerary trope, but one cannot help but feel, looking at it, that it is an allegory about the virtues of sleeplessness. Eleanor can read a book or, these days, scroll through her phone; her mind is secretly and subversively open.
“I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me.” So declared Nabokov, and though, as often with that great exile, there is a note of overcompensating defiance in the affirmation, still, he had a point. There is glory in this view of life which involves extending its conscious moments, fighting for every second of awareness that our mortality can afford us.
The one thing the insomniac does not envy is the unconscious dead. The universe, after all, is asleep. Trees and vegetation are always slumbering, helpless at the woodman’s axe or the casual munching of a ruminant. And the great mass of inanimate matter is flattered by even being called asleep; it has no potential for animation. To be awake is to be alive. Mind racing at 3 A.M., we are in tune with what may be the truly unique, only-once-in-the-universe gift of consciousness. That’s some comfort. We’ll sleep long enough soon enough.
What an Insomniac Knows : What’s
really going on when you can’t power down?
By Adam Gopnik. The New Yorker, January 20, 2025.
