What An Insomniac Knows

 

 

 Unable to secure a good night’s rest, poor sleepers can search for consolation in the creative and prolific souls—the Brontës, Baudelaire, Kafka, Proust, Nabokov—who shared their affliction.

“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.

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.