Waking, by reason of their continual cares, fears, sorrows, and dry brains, is a symptom that much crucifies melancholy men.
—Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
All he could do was transcribe the interminable babbling voice of the night, the insinuating perverse voice of the demons.
—Pietro Citati, Kafka
One time I was in south Florida, in the central part of the state, and I was staying in a roadside motel in a little swamp town. The desk clerk had sold me a six-pack of beer, and I sat around watching something called “The National Bird Dog Field Trials” on television until the local station went off the air. I couldn’t sleep so I went back out to my car and drove out to a truck stop diner at the edge of town and went in for coffee and hash browns. I sat in a booth near the window and eavesdropped on a conversation between two guys and a woman at an adjacent table.
“They can finger you with nothing but bones,” I heard one of the men say.
“Slivers,” the other guy said. “The fucking scientists can nail you with nothing but slivers. You have to be burning very hot to do it right, and they can still figure you.”
“You can’t just toss a body on a plain wood fire and expect you heard the last of it,” said the first guy. “That won’t cut it. It wasn’t just teeth they found.”
“And all that swamp out there,” the other guy said.
“Gene wasn’t thinking,” the woman said. “He was crazy to burn her, that’s all. It wasn’t no thought at all.”
“He still would have been wise to take a step back and bury what he had left,” one of the men said. “Bury it deep.”
“Swamp it,” said the other. There was laughter around the table.
“Gene just plain fucked up,” the woman said, and everyone nodded their heads and kept right on forking food into their faces.
What if an individual is perceiving a daydream and a series of external sensory inputs at precisely the same time, and has lost the capacity to distinguish one from the other? What happens to his perceptual world? Clearly he will be peopling his universe of awareness with elements that are altogether private, presences generated from within which for him will be a genuine part of the real world; these are what he sees, or hears, or is otherwise sensing. And should he then be unable to differentiate these from his everyday perceptions, then indeed he may move into a haunted, nightmarish world, and be a very troubled human being.
—Joseph D. Noshpitz, “Reality Testing: A Neuropsychological Fantasy,” in Comprehensive Psychology
A common notion about the relationship of sleep to mental health is that total sleep loss…deranges the mind and may result in some kind of breakdown….When serious sleep disturbances are present, as they almost always are in the mentally ill, the patient’s history often indicates that the sleep disturbance preceeded the actual break from reality.
—William C. Dement, Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep –Exploring the World of Sleep
Some nights you’d sit there tracking moonlight across the floor, or studying the garage roof next door as if it were a radar screen. Your mind on a very low flame, a few tired words alternately see-sawing in the silence or surfacing through the waves of static. You’d sit there barely conscious, but the moment you’d try to climb into bed and close your eyes the whole chorus would convene again with a vengeance. The variety show of hypnagogia. Channel surfing long before the advent of cable television and remote control. So random, stuttering, and relentless was your consciousness in those hours that you would make an exercise of trying to isolate a particular fragment, and then attempt to concentrate your mind on the fragment’s origin, trying to trace it back, if possible, to its original source. Sometimes it would be a line from a book or a television commercial, other times it might be something you’d overheard in school, or a snippet from a song or a random conversation. You would find yourself obsessing about an outrageous pair of shoes you had seen on a complete stranger in a grocery store, weeks earlier.
Ultimately, towards dawn, you were always left with nothing but the barely-beating heart of the sleeping world. The under-hum and throb of its basic operating systems. The furnace. The ticking of the clock. The world on the back burner, as close as the modern world comes to stasis: You were left with only you and what was left of the night, the retreating darkness, shadows receding on the walls, the cruel pinch of exhaustion, the terrible reality that you were going to have to sleepwalk through another lost day. What was that they were saying about what?
Eventually, every night you would reach a point where you could not fall asleep but you could nonetheless not be truly awake. You were reduced to fumbling around, grasping, in a dense and hazy subterrannean no man’s land, lost in the gauzy, impressionistic foothills of sleep. You would take a walk to try to resuscitate your sanity, to get clear thoughts moving again in your head. You moved in slow motion through a woozy, muslin-filtered border country, imagination and hallucination bleeding into reality. You heard what sounded like chanting. You heard the clanking of a cowbell. You heard the distant tolling of a clock, and a burst of faint music sucked from a car window somewhere out in the town. You heard a baby crying, then someone laughing, wretching, congested laughter. You heard a radio playing in a junkyard. You heard what sounded like a piano. You heard windchimes twisting in a backyard somewhere. You heard the barking of a dog, answered by another, in the next block. You thought of the men across town, in the slaughterhouse, exhausted on their feet in the slippery dead mess, blood bubbled everywhere, the tangy reek of animals being broken down into meat. You would go there from time to time to stand at the mouth of the tunnel that took the tired men to and from the slaughterhouse. You would stand there in the last of the darkness with a little collection can for UNICEF, and you would shake your can at the blood-soaked, broken-knuckled zombies as they plodded past blank-faced, clutching their empty lunchboxes, moving almost unconscious into the bruised light that was just then creeping into the eastern sky.
Wakefulness during the time when one ought to be asleep is frequently a distressing condition, undermining the strength and incapacitating for active and efficient work. Insomnia or sleeplessness often afflicts those of active mental habits and lays the foundation of premature decay.
When sleeplessness overtakes a brain-worker it is a sure indication that less intellectual work must be done, and that he ought to betake himself, if possible, to out-of-door exercise in the pure air of the country.
—Encyclopedia Brittanica, Ninth Edition. 1899
The victim of insomnia, having seen the slowness of the dawn, arises with every nerve tattered and the capacity for happiness ruined. His morning is a desolation.
—Arnold Bennett, Things That Have Interested Me. Third Series. 1926
Among the imposts which humanity pays for the true or imaginary advantages of what, for lack of a more consistent term, is denominated ‘civilization,’ there is not one whose tyrannical invasion of physiological law is so fraught with mental and physical bankruptcy as sleeplessness.
—J. Leonard Corning, Brain-Rest: A Disquisition on the Curative Properties of Prolonged Sleep. 1885
Aristotle, On Sleep and Sleeplessness
The BBC’s brief History of Insomnia
The National Pain Foundation’s Insomnia Page
When I lie down, I say, when shall I arise,
and the night be gone? And I am full of tossing
to and fro unto the dawning of the day.
—The Book of Job, chapter seven, verse four.
This relentless repetition of the same illegible text….
—Yannis Ritsos, “Insomnia.”
Melancholics are not so sleepless as maniacs, yet the want of sleep is often an early and prominent symptom. They do not readily sleep, and if they do, they awake soon to be tormented by the vilest misery that it is possible for human creatures to endure.
—Insomnia and its Therapeutics, A.W, MacFarlane, M.D. 1891.
Want of refreshing sleep we believe to be the frequent origin of insanity, dependent upon moral causes.
—Psychological Medicine, John Charles Bucknill and Daniel H. Tuke. 1858.
Those who pursue a desultory method of thinking are very often the victims of an obstinate and peculiarly distressing form of insomnia. During the day such persons are observed to apply themselves with apparent zeal to the regular vocations of life; but, if closely observed, there is often visible a certain absence of concentration and devotion to the particular matter in hand. When questioned upon this point, they admit that they are ‘absent-minded’; and, while only too willing to apply themselves, are frequently tormented by the intrusion of ideas totally foreign to the particular subject at hand….they carry their responsibilities to bed with them; and, while other minds are at rest, their own intellection is morbidly active. Midnight, and even the small hours of the morning, find such individuals speculating upon the pros and cons of the past and future with an intensity which often drives them to a state of positive desperation. The small ills of life assume alpine proportions, and even the most trivial circumstances are distorted and magnified a thousand-fold. When at last sleep actually does supervene, it is no longer psychological, but, on the contrary, perverted by dreams and unconscious cerebration to such a degree that these unhappy individuals can hardly be said to have slept in the ordinary sense of the word.
—Brain Rest, J. Leonard Corning. 1885.
Under [insomnia’s] influence injurious changes are permitted by the patient to be made in his daily habits; pursuits which formerly engaged his attention no longer interest him; even important business concerns are sacrificed; and against such tendencies no pre-existing vigour of intellect will afford any defence; the strongest minds (intellectually considered) may sink into apathy and feebleness.
—James Russell, M.D., “On Sleeplessness.” British Medical Journal, November 16, 1861.
After dinner, my friend drove me, in a carriage, some five miles back into the country –the greater part of the way, along the margin of Migunticook Lake, and under a terrific precipice, whose boulders every moment threaten destruction. In fact, the whole of a bright sunny day, cooled with healthful zephyrs, was spent in pleasurable excitement. Interesting conversation beguiled the evening; and, after family worship, I sunk to rest in a luxurious curtained bed. Ere long, I slept; and, about five o’clock next morning, was awakened by the crowing of the cock. This was the only night’s sleep I have had these last six years and seven months; so help me God. Since then, my nights have been tedious, as usual, without sleep, and some of them distressing.
—“An Example of Protracted Wakefulness,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. July 31, 1845.
Experience in private practice, and extended observation in the wards of general and lunatic hospitals, have taught me that the ordinary hypnotics are frequently unreliable, and that in some instances their use is attended by results as bad as, if not of more serious consequence than, the conditions they were intended to remove. I do not wish by this somewhat sweeping assertion to be understood to condemn the ordinary hypnotics, or to doubt their efficacy in suitable cases; but it seems to me that we run great danger of becoming routinists in the matter of sleeping-draughts….Like most of my fellow practitioners, I constantly meet patients who have run through the whole gamut of sleep-producing drugs, and find their last condition, in many instances, worse than their first.
—Edward N. Brush, M.D., “Some Clinical Experiences With Insomnia,” The Practitioner, January 1889.
