The Sleep Blogger
Turning sleeplessness into literature
The New York Times has discovered sleep — rather, it has discovered the absence of it. Two weeks ago, the Times unveiled “All-Nighters,” a series of online essays focused around insomnia. While most of the essays tend to treat insomnia as an interesting affliction (and at least one of them celebrates it), taken together they provide a unique insight into a problem from which countless numbers of people suffer.
For instance, one contributor describes the difficulty she has in turning off her mind:
When I have insomnia, I cannot drop into this peculiar zone between waking and sleeping — this half-dreaming, half-aware state of words and pictures does not arrive…. My internal narrator, the one who is speaking in my head all day long, refuses to shut up. The day voice of the self-conscious thinker races along heedless of my desire to stop it and relax.
Another contributor explains why it’s hopeless to think you can stop thinking about the fact that you’re not sleeping:
Whenever we establish a mental goal — such as trying not to think about white bears, or sex, or a stressful event — the goal is accompanied by an inevitable follow-up thought, as the brain checks to see if we’re making progress. The end result, of course, is that we obsess over the one thing we’re trying to avoid….My conscious goal is to fall asleep, which then causes my unconscious to continually check up on whether or not I’m achieving my goal. And so, after passing out for 30 seconds, I’m woken up by my perverse brain.
A third points to the folly of pharmacological solutions to sleeplessness:
By 2012, the market for insomnia drugs is expected to grow 78 percent, to nearly $3.9 billion. But with sleeping pills what are we really getting? They only provide an additional 11.4 minutes of sleep over placebo pills, and they interfere with memory formation, with the result that people sometimes forget how badly they actually slept.
And a fourth actually revels in her insomnia:
I like being the one who is awake while others sleep — the watcher, the one who courts by choice that liminal space between sleep and waking, where “reality” and inner vision blur, and all the big questions loom with heightened clarity.
Somebody get this woman a glass of warm milk — stat.
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