The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping

by Samantha Harvey

For all those awake in the night. And for those I’ve woken up; I’m sorry.

The attaining of sleep long ago left the realm of natural act and entered that of black magic.

the desire for sleep is also the denial of it; the more you want it the less it comes.

Every night is a fresh night and a fresh roll of the dice.

When I don’t sleep the world becomes profoundly unsafe. If food were withdrawn, or water, you would feel unsafe; if withdrawn often enough – not long enough to kill you, but often enough to diminish you – you would begin to wonder what the point of life was, if all it does is threaten you with scarcity. There’s terror when a basic animal need isn’t met. At first you fear death, then a worse thing happens – you fear life. You no longer want your life, not on these terms.

Why does everyone want a test, a diagnosis, a pill? They want her to wave the magic wand, and it isn’t only that she has no wand but that there’s no magic in medicine and never was. The days of miraculous cures are gone – she’s thinking – or at least her days in believing in them are gone, and now what is she but an agony aunt and a drug dealer. Half of her time is spent not on diagnosing and treating primary illnesses, but on treating all the illnesses caused by side effects of the drugs she’s prescribed. She has become a doctor of side effects, treated with more drugs that create more side effects.

But then there are all these people who should never have let themselves get to the point of needing medicine, whose problems were preventable and who now want her to take an action that will compensate for the actions they didn’t take themselves.

People in Syria can sleep with bombs falling, why can’t you sleep on your king-size mattress with your winter-togged duvet and your kelp-scented hair on a fake-down pillow under a bomb-free sky? What pea disrupts your sleep, princess? A passing Audi? What paucity and fragility of spirit has left you relying on drugs to do that which is the natural inheritance of all animals everywhere and forever?

Some sleep regimes say you should get up if you’re still awake after twenty minutes, so that you don’t associate bed with sleeplessness. Others say you should stay in bed regardless, so that you don’t signal to the body that it’s normal to be up in the night; instead you stay in bed and accept what comes.

If something doesn’t exist in a language, does it also not exist in the minds of those who speak the language?

every day presents a new threat: the night. Every night is a battle, most often lost, and any victory is one day long, until its challenger comes along: the next night.

It is the fear of not sleeping that raises the heart rate and tenses the muscles; fear, not anxiety. Here is where insomnia becomes intractable, because it deploys fear to act like anxiety. Where fear is a response to an external threat, insomnia is almost unique in giving rise to a fear that then causes the external threat.

This is the cure for insomnia: no things are fixed. Everything passes, this too. One day, when you’re done with it, it will lose its footing and fall away, and you’ll drop each night into sleep without knowing how you once found it impossible.