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 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 £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.