“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.
• Insomnia by Marina Benjamin is published by Scribe. To order a copy for £6.99 (RRP £9.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
