A Night’s Sleep

I don’t remember when my insomnia started, or rather I don’t remember a time when it wasn’t there, as an active presence or a latent (I almost said dormant) threat. I remember, as a child, having hot milk in the dark—was it 4:00 a.m.? was it 5:00 a.m.?—with my father, an insomniac like me. I remember summers spent with my cousins, who slept until midday. I woke at dawn or before and spent several hours on my own, careful not to make any noise, eating cookies slowly and reading stacks of old comic books illuminated by my uncle’s tiny desk lamp. I’ve sometimes said these hours made me a reader, but the claim is probably spurious, a way to find an upside to it all. In truth, I think the lesson I learned from those summers was how to live with envy. As the sunlight changed from light purple to white and golden yellow, I’d feel boredom shift into loneliness, frustration shift into anger at the inability to sleep that separated me from everybody else. My aunt and uncle didn’t empathize so much as arrange things so I wouldn’t be a nuisance (hence the cookies, the comic books). They seemed disappointed. They didn’t understand why I couldn’t sleep like a normal kid. Neither did I.

I define periods of my life, from childhood on, based on the ebb and flow of my sleeplessness: 1998 was a bad year; 2012 was my worst so far; bad, too, were 2021, 2022, 2023. 2019 was OK. 2025 was OK until I started thinking deeply about this essay. I had been gathering notes for it, sleeping fairly well; then, on a plane to Poland, I wrote down the first sentence in my Notes app. The next day, I woke up at 4:00 a.m. in my hotel in Kraków. Insomnia, like a malicious djinn, is easily summoned.

insomnia can take different shapes. People who suffer from it often describe it in detailed, intimate terms, as they would the behavior of a pet. You anticipate its mood changing, you learn (or anyway convince yourself of ) specific tricks to cajole it into obedience. You accept that its worst qualities won’t change, because they are part of its nature.

Doctors call my kind of insomnia terminal, an ominous adjective I like, though it simply means that the end of my sleep is most affected. I go to bed at 11:00 p.m.; waking up at 5:00 a.m. counts as a good day. On other days, the bad ones, I wake at 4:00 a.m., or at 3:00 a.m., and I know that’s all the rest I will get. I seem to wake up most often at exactly 4:48 a.m., but I suspect I am simply more likely to remember that combination of numbers when I see it, because it’s the time the playwright Sarah Kane said she would experience a moment of lucid torment before plunging back into psychosis.

Doctors have also identified another form, initial insomnia, which affects your ability to fall asleep. When you do—if you do—you can theoretically sleep until the afternoon, something that has never, ever happened to me in my four decades of life, not even when I go to bed drunk after partying all night, not even with the help of sleeping pills so potent they are banned to prevent them from being used as a date-rape drug.

writing is the way I try to understand my life, so I also tried writing about my sleeplessness. I told myself I could translate it into insight, but in retrospect the truth seems more mundane: I wrote about insomnia because there was little else I could have written about. At the peak of the worst period, I lacked the breadth of imagination and depth of focus that literary invention requires. My insomnia didn’t fill up only my nights; it laid claim on my days, too. Like the single thread that, once pulled, gradually unravels an intricate embroidery until nothing but blank fabric remains, lack of sleep leads to other losses: of energy, appetite, sexual desire; of concentration and its opposite, the ability of the unencumbered mind to freely wander. Even if you’re not actively thinking about sleep, your thoughts are disrupted by the dullness of sleep deprivation, which ultimately means you’re thinking about sleep again.

And so I ended up attempting to build a novel around it, as a sort of fail-safe—at least when I couldn’t think of anything else, I could think of that. I came up with a character, or a serviceable facsimile of one: a man who tries to sell insomnia as the ultimate self-optimization hack, a way to extend your life by reclaiming a portion of the time you otherwise wouldn’t experience. I spent five years on this exercise in wish fulfillment. I wrote hundreds of pages. Of course it wasn’t fulfilled.

It wasn’t a very good idea for a novel—fiction rings false when it is employed to convince yourself of something. And insomnia itself somehow resists narrative structure. In theory, it could be seen as an ideal premise for a plot—a person desperately wanting something. In this case, though, the protagonist’s quest is passive and boring. And it always fails, whereas stories happen when a cycle is broken by something unexpected. My favorite example comes from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”: “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.” Insomnia is the cycle, the thousand injuries. Every night you pray for the unexpected to happen, and it never does.

It’s no coincidence that most writing about sleeplessness (and about sleep, which is also cyclical) adopts a fragmented or episodic form: consider Marie Darrieussecq’s Sleepless, or Theresia Enzensberger’s Schlafen, or Haytham el-Wardany’s Book of Sleep. The writing an insomniac tends to produce is short and self-contained, because you can’t summon the concentration for anything longer. The sleep you manage is short and self-contained, too. Writing about insomnia ends up looking like insomnia itself, not an analysis of it but an illustration.

Ancient biographers claim that the Latin poet Lucretius was driven mad by a love potion and wrote his books, according to Saint Jerome, per intervalla insaniae. This means “in between bouts of madness,” but a childishly literal translation would read: “during the pauses of his madness.” Lucretius’ condition is presented as a single overarching presence in his life, which every now and then abated long enough for him to become himself again, an occasional clearing in a dark forest. I pause on these three Latin words because I often apply them to myself. (They appear, rather self-aggrandizingly, in my Instagram bio.) It takes a minor slip of concentration for insaniae to read as insomniae: I wrote my books “during the pauses of my sleeplessness.”