Insomnia

  About Insomnia

  Insomnia is on the rise. Villainous and unforgiving, it’s the enemy of energy and focus, the thief of our repose. But can insomnia be an ally, too, a validator of the present moment, of edginess and creativity? Marina Benjamin takes on her personal experience of the condition—her struggles with it, her insomniac highs, and her dawning awareness that states of sleeplessness grant us valuable insights into the workings of our unconscious minds. Although insomnia is rarely entirely welcome, Benjamin treats it less as an affliction than as an encounter she engages with and plumbs. She adds new dimensions to both our understanding of sleep (and going without it) and of night, and how we perceive darkness.

  Along the way, Insomnia trips through illuminating material from literature, art, philosophy, psychology, pop culture, and more. Benjamin pays particular attention to the relationship between women and sleep—Penelope up all night, unraveling her day’s weaving for Odysseus; the Pre-Raphaelite artists’ depictions of deeply sleeping women; and the worries that keep contemporary females awake. Insomnia is an intense, lyrical, witty, and humane exploration of a state we too often consider only superficially.

  INSOMNIA

  ALSO BY MARINA BENJAMIN

  The Middlepause

  Last Days in Babylon

  Rocket Dreams

  Living at the End of the World

  Copyright © 2018 by Marina Benjamin

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Scribe Publications

  First published in the United States in 2018 by Catapult (catapult.co)

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-948226-05-9

  eISBN: 978-1-948226-06-6

  Jacket design by Nicole Caputo

  Book design by Wah-Ming Chang

  Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by

  Publishers Group West

  Phone: 866-400-5351

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018938834

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Zzz, a sleeper, and

  Charlie, intrepid crosser of borders

  Who sleeps at night? No one is sleeping.

  In the cradle a child is screaming.

  An old man sits over his death, and anyone

  young enough talks to his love, breathes

  into her lips, looks into her eyes.

  MARINA TSVETAEVA

  “Insomnia”

  INSOMNIA

  Sometimes the rattle of a clapper sounds over your bed. Or a ghostly draft lifts the hairs on the back of your neck, cooling your skin; or there’s an upstroke, feather light, along the inside of your forearm. A sudden lurch, maybe just a blink, then a sense of falling upward and it is there. So are you.

  If we insist on defining something in terms of what it annuls then how can we grasp the essence of what is lost when it shows itself? And how can we tell if there is anything to be gained by its presence? This is the trouble with insomnia.

  When I am up at night the world takes on a different hue. It is quieter and closer and there are textures of the dark I have begun paying attention to. I register the thickening, sense-dulling darkness that hangs velvety as a pall over deep night, and the green-black tincture you get when moisture charges the atmosphere with static. Then there is the gently shifting penumbra that heralds dawn and feels less like the suggestion of light than a fuzziness around the edges of your perception, as if an optician had clamped a diffusing lens over your eyes then quizzed you about the blurred shapes that dance at the peripheries of your vision. In sleeplessness I have come to understand that there is a taxonomy of darkness to uncover, and with it, a nocturnal literacy we can acquire.

  At the velvet end of my insomniac life I am a heavy-footed ghost, moving from one room to another, weary, leaden—there, but also not there. I read for an hour, make myself a cup of tea, and sit with the dog. We stare at each other with big cow eyes and I marvel at his animal knack for sleep. Curling in beside me on the sofa, he is out within minutes, legs splayed like bagpipes, his warm little body rising and falling. If I so much as twitch he snaps awake instantly but without any sense of alarm; he just lifts those liquid brown eyes toward mine, wanting to know if the world is unchanged.

  On nights like these I leave a trail of evidence behind me to be discovered and remembered in the morning: my reading glasses upturned on the coffee table, carelessly cast off like a pair of party shoes, an open book facedown on a chair, food crumbs on the kitchen counter. Sapped by fatigue, I stand in the middle of the living room in the dusty light and pull my dressing gown around me. I am trying to puzzle out the clues so as to reconstruct the events of the night before, but I keep blanking. The mise-en-scène of morning starts to resemble the scene of a crime. All that is lacking is the body shape outlined on the floor: the missing body, wakeful when it should be sleeping.

  There are also luminous moonlit nights, lurid nights, when everything feels heightened and I jerk awake with a fidgety awareness, my mind speeding. In the grip of an enervating mania, I creak my way down the stairs and switch on the computer, scrolling for bad news from places where daylight reigns: an exploding bomb, the wreck of human carnage, floods, fires, terrorist traps. Ordinary disasters. I pace and fret, railing at the dumb news, racing with emotion. I feel held back by the night because I am convinced that the hidden mystery of our beautiful existence might be found in its very bowels. I am looking for insight, for a nugget of value to carry across night’s border into morning.

  But where is the hidden value in this spinning carousel—a flash memory of my daughter hula-hooping, Earth, Wind & Fire singing “Ah-li-ah-li-ah,” a presentiment of abandonment: Am I or am I not loved?

  Insomnia (noun): a habitual sleeplessness or inability to sleep. It comes to us from the Latin insomnis, meaning without sleep. The insomniac complaint was known to Artemidorus of Daldis, one of the Western world’s oldest interpreters of dreams. In his second-century treatise Oneirocritica, Artemidorus distinguished mortal dreams that arise out of the dreamer’s life experience, and conjure with symbols drawn from the raw materials of his or her desires, from prophetic dreams, or oneiroi, which are gifted or sent to us. But the Greeks had another term to denote sleeplessness: agrypnotic, from agrupos, meaning “wakeful,” which in turn derives from agrein, “to pursue,” and hypnos, sleep. Insomnia, then, is not just a state of sleeplessness, a matter of negatives. It involves the active pursuit of sleep. It is a state of longing.

  What do I long for? I ask myself this question in the witching hours because it cannot be asked by day. On certain turbulent nights this longing is so great and deep and bald it swallows up the world. Defying comprehension, it just is. And I am a black hole, void of substance, greedy with yearning. To be without sleep is to want and be found wanting.

  Mostly, though, I long for benevolent Hypnos, dreamiest of the Greek gods, to swoop down over me, scattering his crimson poppies, and drug me into a sweet insentient sleep. Hypnos reminds me that the bestowing of sleep comes from above. It is literally a gift from the gods.

  When you cannot get sleep you fall in love with sleep, because desire (thank you, Lacan) is born out of lack. Perhaps there is an inverse relationship here, between the degree of lack and the corresponding degree of love. How much do I love sleep, I wonder. And can sleep love me back? The medieval Islamic poet Rumi seemed to think the relationship might be reciprocal. In “The Milk of Millennia” he wrote: “every human being streams at night into the loving nowhere.” I find it comforting to think that we might stream beyond our bedroom walls at night, like a crystalline liquid (or like data), as though our avatars were flowing toward, then alongside those of others in surging formation while our bodies were at rest. I find
it reassuring that nowhere can be a loving place. Although when I am revving in the night hours, Nowhere does not feel especially loving.

  These days my prime time is 4:15 a.m., a betwixt and between time, neither day nor night. At 4:15 a.m., 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, victim to an escalating anxiety about the way the darkness appears to be yielding to the idea of retreat. (I don’t want it to yield; I want it to last so that I can sleep.) Unable to settle in one position for more than a few beats, I try them all out in turn: the plank, the fetal curl, the stomach-down splat—as if I’d landed on the mattress from a height. Each of these poses is contrived insofar as it corresponds to an idea I have of what relaxation looks like. Some nights I trawl the whole alien repertoire of self-help. I try breathing deeply and slowly like a yogi, my fist pressed into the chakra under my rib cage. I try to stay my galloping pulse, tripped by fretful thoughts I would like to banish, by thinking of water or mountains, or fluffy sheep. I tell myself I am heavy, heavy, heavy. I pursue sleep so hard I become invigorated by the chase.

  Through it all, I am aware of a slumbering form beside me, a still mound under the duvet, heaped up like a rock formation under the sky. I peer at the shadow-shaped mass across the bed, my rock, my stay, straining to detect any hint of movement in the dark. Let’s call this sleeping form Zzz. I am loath to wake him, knowing that he, like me, is exhausted to the point of defeat. I also know that if my thrashing does wake him he will snarl and shift; occasionally he swipes at me, a big cat in his lair lashing out with a heavy paw. There is a sleep-charged force field around Zzz and woe betide me if I disturb it.

  Zzz and I have a history of beds we have slept in together. Hotel beds with silky sheets and too many pillows; beds so old we’d end up rolling into the middle; tufty beds with broken springs in cheap rented flats where we popped corn and watched scary movies through finger fences. In our shared history of sleep there have been beds of character and beds of convenience. Beds that spring out of sofas, supplied by relatives happy to accommodate our long-distance visits, and twin beds (supplied by relatives lacking fold-out options) that create an austere, prohibitive gulf between us, and bring on fits of the giggles. There have been state-of-the-art mattresses we have bought and regretted (especially the orthopedic kind once believed to be best for backs, but which I now think belong only in jails), and beds we have drooled over on the Internet but cannot afford—beds made out of “memory foam.” We have shared countless beds down the years and across continents, Zzz and me, under mood clouds fair and foul, and we continue to commune by night, in code and often in counterpoise to the way we relate to each other by day.

  To share a bed with someone is to entertain a conversation played out in the language of movement and space.

  There have been times when this conversation sparkled, I can tell you. Like those weeks we spent in Italy, not long after we first met. I’d been awarded a six-week writing fellowship, which we fattened up with vacation, training south from Milan and Venice, then stopping off in Florence en route to Rome. It was the first time either Zzz or I had seen Italy’s golden city. Each day, we wandered ancient twisting streets until our feet hurt, squinting into the sun as we took in architectural triumphs and follies. We guzzled pastas we’d never heard of, shaped like tiny stars, pigs’ tails, and miniature money bags, and ducked in and out of churches, hunting down artworks we had read about in books, before threading our way back to our pensione for a daily afternoon nap. Glutted with art, ice cream, and wonder, we slept with limbs entangled, our breathing synchronized, foreheads touching, and when we awoke we had sleepy sex. Such glittering conversations are hard to sustain over time.

  You don’t need a bed in order to sleep with someone. But the first time I shared a bed with Zzz I was insomniac. At least I refrained from asking him to get up and leave so that I might stand a chance of sleeping, which request had lost me a boyfriend or two in my time. But I suspect that a precedent was set.

  Like travel, insomnia is an uprooting experience. You are torn out of sleep like a plant from its native soil, then shaken down so that any clinging vestige of slumber falls away, naked confusion exposed like nerve endings. Sleep, in its turn, is a matter of gravity. It pulls you down, beds you in the earth, burrows you in. In sleep you connect back to the bedrock that provides nourishment and restorative rest.

  Rubin Naiman, a psychologist at the University of Arizona’s Center for Integrative Medicine, reminds us that when we turn to sleep aids we often reach for gel-filled eye masks and weighted blankets, to “swaddling” that acts to counter the restive states of arousal we experience in insomnia. I have noticed that my teenage daughter, in her own struggles with sleep, loads up pillows on top of her head to acquire that longed-for sense of gravity. “It’s not about sleeping on a cloud. It’s about sleeping like a stone,” says Naiman.

  The body must be grounded to sleep well. I think this is a lesson for the ages. It must be earthed in its own garden bed, or, unmoving, sunk at the bottom of time’s river (for when you are asleep time stands still). In her poem “Sleeping in the Forest,” Mary Oliver writes of tumbling into the earth’s wondrous embrace, its maternal reclaiming of her, as she falls asleep on the dank and mossy forest floor, slumbering heavily, like a stone on the riverbed. Hypnos would be proud of such a sleeper. Not merely drugged, but comatose.

  In the grip of insomnia I am constitutionally inconsolable. Out of humor. It is not just a question of physical disquiet—not just about flapping. Or even existential disquiet (a fish out of water, a plant ripped from the earth), because insomnia is about temperature as well as motion. On nights when I am consumed by the flames of my own thermo-cellular generator, my skin prickles and oozes, the heat radiating off me in waves, the sheets dampening beneath me. If the lights were suddenly to be turned on, I would be glistening. Coated from head to toe by a film of sweat, I would flare red, like a warning.

  Ancient physick would most likely designate me a choleric. The basic characteristics of this personality type are hotness and dryness, and its corresponding humor is yellow bile. People of a choleric temperament have appetites that are sharp and quick. Check. They are frequently overcome by ravenous hunger. Check. They are lean and wiry, with prominent veins and tendons. Check. Their metabolism is keen and catabolic, which is to say they generate a lot of heat. Even their urine can be hot and burning. They are prone to anger, impatience, and irritability, but then they are courageous and audacious as well. Check. They are individualists and pioneers who like to lead and to seek out exhilarating experiences. Check. However, their stools tend to a yellowish color (the bile) and emit a foul odor. Choleric types are notably poor sleepers. Check. Restless at night, they are assailed by indigestion and stress, or by violent dreams that jolt them into states of feverish or fiery readiness.

  Fevers notwithstanding, in insomnia it is usually my mind that is on fire. What does a mind on fire look like, I hear you say? Like a Formula One driver tearing up the asphalt. Like a shimmering shoal of restless fish, darting forward together with fleet, quicksilver movements. Like a vacuum cleaner draining juice from the outlet and spinning off around the room of its own accord. My insomnia often feels like this: turbocharged. It is not one idea that teases and prods me awake, a finger tickling me in a single spot, wriggling my mind into consciousness. It is as if all the lights in my head had been lit at once, the whole engine coming to life, messages flying, dendrites flowering, synapses whipping snaps of electricity across my brain; and my brain itself, like some phosphorescent free-floating jellyfish of the deep, is luminescent, awake, alive.

  In the first book of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Marcel muses on his insomniac experiences, on how he finds himself confused, as if he has been d
ropped fully conscious but unsuspecting into someone else’s waking dream. In his perplexity, he imagines that he has been reading a book about his own life and that his thoughts about himself come secondhand from print; but then he realizes that actually he is not in the book but in his bed, and that he cannot separate his recollections from his imaginings. Even so, Marcel can picture an ideal kind of insomnia for himself (the one he yearns for but does not get) in which he wakes at night for just long enough to appreciate the unsullied darkness that envelops him before falling peacefully back to sleep.

  The matter of what to do with an overactive brain determined to forge ideas and connections in conditions of sensory blackout troubles me.

  I know that the human brain is not a computer and yet computing metaphors are difficult to avoid when what is going on in your night-waking head feels like an electronic event. I’ll give you a for-instance. On nights when I cannot easily will myself back to sleep because the switch has already flipped to ON, I begin to sense some unknown part of my brain, some lower-order, engine-room, grafter gland, busy itself running an hours-long system scan. Lucky for me, wakefulness has given me an unexpected window onto its operations. Patiently, systematically, this biological algorithm roots through my store of mental files, searching out broken bits of code—ideas that refuse to link up, shards and stray threads of mental activity—and desperately tries to join them. Then it scans for duplications, thoughts that double up and play over needlessly. All these duplicates and shreds qualify as junk to be cleared out, along with half-formed memories, non sequiturs, ideations stuck in unhelpful configurations, and coiled notions that spiral fruitlessly, going nowhere.