"Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with
posters advertising faraway places."
Charles Simic
Since adolescence, insomnia has been a dear friend to me. While questioning its utility in making me a successful member of our so-called world, it certainly makes for unexpected reveries and unlikely mental pairings.
I've often wondered how other people cope with their insomnia- those who don't take sleeping pills to medicate their way through it. Like Jon Stewart, I've often felt "insomnia is my greatest inspiration". But there are other voices to consider.
For Louis-Ferdinand Celine, insomnia plays the role of mentor:
"My trouble is insomnia. If I had always slept properly, I'd never have written a line."
David Benioff expresses the tinge of envy that insomniacs feel for those who find success in counting sheep:
"I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed."
The Sloping Midnight Line by Carson Ellis
Jonathan Lethem points towards the pathos and pathology of insomnia, the way it feels self-defeating:
"Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off."
Stephen Goodwin finds opportunities nestled within his sleepness nights:
"So I just live with my insomnia. I do crossword puzzles, or wander out to the music room and fool around on the piano, or read. Those late hours when the world is completely still, when the only sound is the rustle of the air in the vents and the wind visiting the trees outside, when the darkness is tucked tight around the house and you feel as life itself the movements of your own consciousness-these are wonderful hours to read. There is no interruption."
Leonard Cohen admits the unspoken elitism, the extent to which many of us feel we have been chosen for better things than mere sleep:
"The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world."
Insomnia by Jeff Wall
In Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov applies his usual elitism to his lifelong insomnia, deciding that sleeping is for the simple-minded:
“All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. People in trains, who lay their newspaper aside, fold their silly arms, and immediately, with an offensive familiarity of demeanour, start snoring, amaze me as much as the uninhibited chap who cozily defecates in the presence of a chatty tubber, or participates in huge demonstrations, or joins some union in order to dissolve in it. Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing. The strain and drain of composition often force me, alas, to swallow a strong pill that gives me an hour or two of frightful nightmares or even to accept the comic relief of a midday snooze, the way a senile rake might totter to the nearest euthanasium; but 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.”
Chuck Palahniuk's fictional description of insomnia carries a whiff of the autobiographical:
"With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy."
Cathy Ostlere fondles the extent to which insomina deprives us of the assumption of sanity:
"Women can go mad with insomnia.The sleep-deprived roam houses that have lost their familiarity. With tea mugs in hand, we wander rooms, looking on shelves for something we will recognize: a book title, a photograph, the teak-carved bird -- a souvenir from what place? A memory almost rises when our eyes rest on a painting's grey sweep of cloud, or the curve of a wooden leg in a corner. Fingertips faintly recall the raised pattern on a chair cushion, but we wonder how these things have come to be here, in this stranger's home.
Lost women drift in places where time has collapsed. We look into our thoughts and hearts for what has been forgotten, for what has gone missing. What did we once care about? Whom did we love? We are emptied. We are remote. Like night lilies, we open in the dark, breathe in the shadowy world. Our soliloquies are heard by no one."
Michaux and his wife on Mont Joly by Brassai
Emil Cioran ponders the extent to which insomnia may result in an entitlement complex of sorts, one which depends on tending and overlooking nonfunctional behaviors:
"Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself."
Perhaps Barbara Kingsolver is the one who describes it best. Her analogy encapsulates what insomnia does to my head, and how it carries within it the potential for a more destructive restlessness:
"Insomnia’s different,” I said. It was hard to explain this to people. “You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on."
Alas, the insomniac is guilty of unspeakable infidelities. How can I ever declare having lost sleep for love of a man when my sleeplessness is unrelated to events in the world? And how can I explain the wild thoughts that come to me at 2:45 am without implicating myself in the fact of having thought them?
Maybe this shared guilt- this sneaking suspicion of self- is what makes meeting a fellow insomniac such a soothing pleasure. "Do you medicate?" being the question that begs asking. Kindred spirits of the secret midnight cabal, we are guilty of things beyond blurred vision and bloodshot eyes. We are guilty of things you will never be so sleep-deprived as to imagine.
"Call me a sinner,
Mock me maliciously:
I was your insomnia,
I was your grief."
Anna AkhmatovaJon Cloud explores whether science
can prevent nightmares.Insomnia as a route to existential
meaning and early death.
