Insomnia Page 4

  nightmares of other islands

  stretching away from mine, infinities

  of islands, islands spawning islands,

  like frogs’ eggs turning into polliwogs

  of islands . . .

  Bishop’s poem contains a lesson that ought to knock my island-ideal off its pedestal once and for all. The lesson is this: islands can only beget islands. The insomnia that afflicts her Crusoe is toxic.

  Zzz says, “I wish you would go and see the doctor again,” when I complain that my eyes are stinging from lack of sleep and that my brain feels spongy, as though waterlogged. I want to cry all the time, for no evident reason.

  “She’ll give you something strong to break the cycle and change up your rhythms,” he says.

  “But then I’ll just become a zombie,” I tell him, and raise my arms out in front of me to take zombie lunges at him at in the kitchen.

  “Better a zombie than a ghost,” he says.

  He does not say: because at least a zombie is present. But this is what he means.

  When Zzz is in a mood to reminisce about when we met, it is a quality of electric presence he likes to recall, a sense of being alive and loving life, and being there and being real: a mass of blood and guts and knotty desires. Romance, especially the chemical kind, is like that, a living thing. But factor time into that equation and the variables involved need to be realigned. You have to allow that life’s most ordinary demands, applied day by day, can smooth the textural interest of the most durable of bonds. Even those forged in commonalities so deep they are subterranean. Foundational.

  I am saying that the electricity can stop sending sparks through you. In my experience this is a matter of amplitude, however, not supply. We are still on-grid, Zzz and I, still connected to the power source.

  Even so, Zzz says that nowadays I am present mostly in my writing, by which he means I am present only to myself. I don’t say it out loud, but insomnia, too, is manifestly about presence.

  In truth I am already a zombie. My skin is crawling with discomfort, as though some werewolf form lurking within wants to split it open and burst free. My head lolls with the effort of keeping myself upright. My eyes are glassed over. I am out of sorts with my self. My lack of intent turns me into an alien blob, a sack of seething pulp. I am hungry for whatever it is that makes us human.

  It goes without saying that I know all about sleep aids, because insomnia and I have history. We are bound together so tight we’ve experienced all the phases of love, from thrill to bewilderment to boredom and back again. Like the phases of the moon. Insomnia is the thief of my repose and demon lover both. Moonstruck by wakefulness, I have many times looked to sleep aids for succor and I have burned through varietals galore, most of which worked in brief, hopeful spurts, before flatlining.

  Ranked in no particular order, these include:

  i) Catnip for humans, otherwise known as valerian root. Bought across the counter from any herbalist, also health stores with aspirations. You brew it into a tea to drink before bedtime then hope against hope.

  ii) At the other end of the scale, temazepam and its cousins. I have practically begged for these rhomboid beauties from stony-faced doctors who make a virtue of prescribing only a dozen or so every few months. For your own good, they explain: to stop you getting addicted. More recently, with my phasic insomnia now a relentless nag, I’ve taken a nonbenzodiazepine hypnotic agent called zopiclone. It puts you to sleep for six or seven hours straight, but the next day it’s as if a cat pissed in your mouth.

  iii) Meditation. Actually, I pretty much gave up on this before I started, terrified of the blankness I imagined it led to.

  iv) Nytol. One of a range of antihistamine preparations that I have dabbled with, and a current favorite. But should I take the “One-a-Night” or “Two-a-Night” kind? It is difficult to know. The dilemma here has been discovering that the Two-a-Night kind is not worth buying: the multiple is there only to fool you, since even two of them are weaker than the other sort, the One-a-Night. Besides, if you can take two a night, why not experiment with taking two of the One-a-Night tablets? That’s my feeling, anyhow.

  Rubin Naiman, who is not a witch doctor but a sleep doctor, bemoans the way that “sleep has been transformed from a deeply personal experience to a physiological process; from the mythical to the medical; and from the romantic to the marketable.” This is why there exists a whole booming economy obsessed with sleep metrics and insomnia cures, all of it hokey. For, as Naiman so rightly points out, “sleeping pills produce a kind of counterfeit slumber by inducing amnesia for nighttime wakefulness. They do not heal insomnia; they suppress its symptoms.”

  Besides, you never wake from an opioid sleep or antihistamine-induced slumber feeling rested. You wake up feeling heavy-limbed, lug-headed, one-dimensional. Sleep aids such as these do not simply fail to heal insomnia: they exchange one ailment for another.

  You would think that writing on insomnia has turned me into some kind of expert! Practically everyone I meet now tells me about their sleep troubles. It often turns out to be one of those earplug moments, since there is barely a story I have not heard, a pill I’ve not tried, or a method I haven’t worked before. But it is the mathematics of insomnia that really kills me: the never-ending count of hours lost and gained logged in the ledger of sleep missed and unexpectedly found that every insomniac carries in their head as an account of their own sorry deficiency. Perhaps, after all, the collective noun that fits us best is a calculation of insomniacs.

  One of my friends told me how she scissors pictures from glossy magazines of imposing king-size beds topped with fluffed-up pillows, spread with thick duvets and quilted coverlets, and with swags of material draped over everything to conjure the requisite degree of swaddle. Made of rich damasks, pima cottons, jacquards and silk, this bedding is designed to soothe and cajole, lull and coddle, enticing sleep. It calls out to her. Whenever my friend is sleepless, she pulls out her stash of soft-furnishings porn and projects herself into the frame.

  Most prized among this collection of hers are pictures she has snipped from brochures advertising cruises, so that as well as imagining herself sinking into the comfort of a bed in a luxury yacht, with views stretching out over moonlit horizons, glinting dark off the water, she can, at least in her head, feel the gentle rock of the boat and listen to the waves tugging at her from beyond the porthole of her womb-like berth. This, too, is swaddling.

  Then there is the fellow insomniac who introduced me to skullcap. You have not slept until you have tried skullcap.

  Skullcap is a plant and it goes by many other beautiful names: blue pimpernel, Scutellaria, Grand Toque, helmet flower, hoodwort, mad-dog herb, mad-dog skullcap, mad weed, Quaker bonnet, and scutellaire. It should be taken with caution because it can damage the liver, but then so can alcohol, which I happen to be both wanton and incautious in consuming—often in combination with sleep aids. But when you are desperate, and your skin is crawling and your eyes bulging and your head dropping and your brain itching, and you cannot get warm and you cannot be still, then you will reach for skullcap. And, believe me, when you take skullcap you will sleep the proverbial sleep of the dead.

  My mother slept under the stars as a child. Imagine that. On impossibly hot Baghdad nights, her entire family dragged thin mattresses upstairs to replicate on the rooftop of their high-walled town house in the Old City the very same arrangements of privacy they enjoyed in their bedrooms. Each couple had its allocated space, curtained off from the extended family by sheets suspended as screens. My mother and her sister shared a cozy corner cubicle, where they were treated to the sounds of the street drifting up to them, mangled and hazy. This kind of sleeping, sleeping that is essentially collective, dormitory-style, is reassuring. It evens out the odds on insomnia. If you are awake, it is more likely that someone else will be too.

  But my mother does not recall nights of agitation and turmoil. What she remembers is wriggling beneath the sheets, chattery with
excitement, trading whispered secrets with her sister under the sky’s glittering blanket. Then, when the gossip ran out, the two of them would gaze up with lump-in-throat wonder at the star-spangled magic in motion. What can it be like to have the sky for a ceiling and the soft breeze for walls? To have the rooftop for a floor and the desert wind blowing welcome dreams your way? It must feel like pumicing the deadening surface right off your existence and exposing raw skin to the air.

  I, too, long to be taken out of myself, to feel enlarged by contemplating the grandness of the vaulting heavens above. It isn’t angels I wish to see, nor sprites and fairies, not winking stars or alien ships: it is the impossible vastness of the cosmos itself, the infinite depths of its receding darkness—Rumi’s “loving nowhere”—that I long to reach out to and to touch.

  The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard has probed the unlikely relationship between outer immensity and inner intensity—the one cool and distant, the other hot and insistent. In The Poetics of Space, a fat coffer of a book, rich with insights coined like silver and gold, he pictured this relationship as intimate, as if the trusting act of opening up the soul might allow us to gobble up the whole of creation. Somehow, in Bachelard’s calculation, the body is capable of becoming a vessel for containing the world. Which is what love feels like, too, is it not: astonishing in its expansiveness?

  It is almost too much for one person to bear, this feeling of cosmic aggrandizement—this sense that by contemplating the heavens one becomes not just spiritually enlarged, but spookily attuned to every possible and as yet unrealized potential, as if channeling time itself. Anything, it seems, could happen.

  In my heightened, near-euphoric states of sleeplessness, I can count a handful of memorable occasions when I have felt this way, porous as the night itself, open to whatever might come my way and at one with the fluid universe. Most of the time, though, the very opposite is true. I feel contracted in insomnia, hemmed into my own head and oppressed by the impenetrable dark. My bedroom is like an oven awaiting the igniting flame: a dead space.

  When insomnia strikes in night’s viscid and inky depths the limits of your vision are all too palpable. You feel occluded by darkness; pressed into your bed, all your horizons are obliterated. It is suffocating, this oppression.

  Vladimir Nabokov once likened insomnia to a solar flare (the word he used was sunburst) because he loved the way that sleeplessness left him feeling “joggy, jittery and buzzy.” All the same, he dreaded absolute darkness and insisted upon leaving his bedroom door slightly ajar at night, saying: “Its vertical line of meek light was something I could cling to, since in absolute darkness my head would swim, just as the soul dissolves in the blackness of sleep.”

  Too often what keeps me awake these days is pain, which is another form of contraction. The pain is concentrated in my hip, from where, like the central blip on a radar screen, it pulses steadily, and every now and then it sends rods of fire down one of my legs. This is the kind of pain that demands attention, eats up my focus. Lying awake, it is as if all of my body, invisible in the dark, has become my hip, as if I am morphing under the covers into some Picasso-like woman, every part of me reconfigured into twisted joints articulating around magnified nodes of discomfort.

  And so I get up. I get up to escape the pain, and to free myself from sweats both hot and cold (the whole menopausal caboodle) and to prevent myself grinding my teeth, a largely unconscious activity that, over time, has worn down my front three bottom teeth to chalky stumps, dentine exposed along their top ridges like a seam of precious ore in a craggy rock. Some nights my jaw throbs from the grinding, a pounding ache such as you get when the dentist is fumbling too long inside your mouth, bashing and pulling at your molars. When I move about, the pain recedes, gets supplanted by other sensations—and so I get up.

  When I cannot surrender myself to sleep this is how I broker a truce with wakefulness.

  Yet what would I not give for a spell of enchanted sleep, a dreamless, inert, and benign slumber such as the stuff that fairy tales are made of? I’m talking about pinpricks, hexes, and poisoned-apple territory, those thorny gateways to a somnolent paradise. Not sugar and spice and all things nice, which only keep you awake.

  Paradox #1. As every insomniac knows, the more you try to will yourself to sleep, the more sleep will evade you. The push-me-pull-you logic underlying the problem is easily explained, since it is impossible to strive at yielding or to actively prepare oneself for passivity. As William Wordsworth (sounding sorely tested) complained in his ode “To Sleep”:

  Even thus last night, and two nights more I lay,

  And could not win thee, Sleep! by any stealth:

  Painful experience has taught Wordsworth that you cannot trick yourself into sleep, nor gain it by virtue of being deserving: you cannot wheedle or inveigle when it comes to oblivion! And you cannot command sleep either, any more than you can command the elements. Sleep is predicated on submission. It will not be bidden, only beckoned, as Wordsworth himself eventually learns. “Come,” he intones.

  Paradox #2. Sleep is in any case perverse. Invite it over and it will spurn you, deny it and it ambushes you. Our relationship with sleep is fundamentally embattled.

  Gilgamesh, wayward warrior-king of ancient Uruk (my ancestral homeland), is one of literature’s great insomniacs, locked out of sleep by a sweeping exultation over the many battles he has won and the multitudes of lives he has taken. Gilgamesh prowls through the epic prose-poem that bears his name like a hungry hyena, his anxious wakeful mind always second-guessing itself, never satisfied, always wanting more (land, wealth, women, blood). Insomnia is greedy, after all. It is also, in Gilgamesh’s estimate, a triumph: not for him the darkness of mortality. For him there is only the light of the everlasting vigil—the eternal watch for enemies—and an appetite for battle, which, in turn, precludes sleep. You might say that Gilgamesh is at war with himself. That his real battlefield is the battlefield of the mind.

  In the epic of Gilgamesh, insomnia stands in for ambition: and Gilgamesh’s ambition is boundless, which is to say that it respects no borders, neither territorial nor diurnal. In Gilgamesh’s reckoning mortality itself is just another threshold. He longs to be immortal, like Utnapishtim—a Mesopotamian Noah figure gifted with everlasting life by remorseful gods who send a flood to kill humankind and all too nearly succeed. Utnapishtim duly puts Gilgamesh to the test and commands him not to sleep “for six days and seven nights.” Only then does sleep come, uninvited and unwanted like the contrarian that it is, and sink our prickly hero into a deep and all-too-human slumber.

  While we are on the subject of perversity, I should tell you that I recently signed up to a five-week course of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) aimed at curbing my insomnia. Instantly I have begun to sleep as never before. It’s like booking an appointment to see the doctor only to find that your vexing symptoms suddenly disappear.

  Toward the end of 1906, two French scientists, René Legendre and Henri Piéron, performed a series of experiments on dogs. They kept one group of dogs awake for days on end, tying their collars to a wall so that the animals could not lie down. Then they killed the dogs and extracted fluid from their spinal canals, believing this fluid to be rich in “hypnotoxins”—an endogenous sleep-inducing chemical that had built up inside the dogs’ bodies over the days and nights of prolonged wakefulness. Legendre and Piéron injected this fluid into healthy dogs and found that without exception the dogs swiftly fell asleep. Their hunch so easily confirmed, they rushed to announce that they had stumbled upon, or so they believed, their very own sleep potion.

  I would like to know if hypnotoxins are real. Or if they ought to be classed alongside phlogiston and aether, or any number of other material causes fantasized into existence by science. Then again, perhaps hypnotoxins belong elsewhere entirely, with the ontological inventions of Perrault, Andersen, and Grimm.

  Another student of sleep swayed by the idea of hypnotoxins was Constantin von Economo, the
Romanian-born medical doctor who named the mysterious sleeping sickness that broke out in 1917 and, over the course of the next decade, caused the deaths of some five million people across the globe. The pandemic sounds like something a Bond villain might concoct, or like a novel by José Saramago, in that suddenly people began suffering raging fevers and experiencing hallucinations, before falling into spells of prolonged sleep from which it was near-impossible to rouse them. Many of them subsequently died (mostly in their sleep, but occasionally in states of sleeplessness so acute as to preclude sedation). This was a wicked enchantment indeed.

  Von Economo’s sickness, encephalitis lethargica, became the subject of Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings, a deeply affecting clinical work that grew out of Sacks’s treatment, in 1969, of a number of the original surviving patients, plunged into a real-life equivalent of enchanted sleep. Unresponsive, immobile, speechless, closed off from and indifferent to the world around them, these patients were awakened, as if by magic, by the administering of levodopa. Coming to life after more than forty years, like fairy-tale characters clicked out of suspended animation by a kiss, they reinhabited their identities as if nothing had happened, as if whole decades had not passed them by. They were astute, engaged, communicative, full of hopes and plans, and then, one by one, when the effects of levodopa proved temporary, they fell back into an inert state, under the somnolent spell of their sickness.

  One patient, Leonard L., tried to cram as much life as he’d been swindled out of into his temporary “awakening.” He chased down sensation in all its forms, soaked up every savor. Sacks notes, “Everything about him filled him with delight: he was like a man who had awoken from a nightmare or a serious illness, or a man released from entombment or prison, who is suddenly intoxicated with the sense and beauty of everything around him.” Leonard L. was drunk on reality. Going out into the hospital gardens, he would touch the flowers and leaves and bend to kiss them. He began to take taxi rides through New York City by night, each time returning breathless with excitement over the neon-doused sights. When he read Dante’s Paradiso, it was with tears of joy in his eyes. “I feel saved,” he told Sacks, “resurrected, re-born. I feel a sense of health amounting to Grace . . . I feel like a man in love.”