Oh, the splendours and the deep agony of sleeplessness

The longer I live, and the older I grow, the more I get convinced the biggest triumph a person can have is not in conquering the toughest battles, or prevailing over the most debilitating of tragedies but in every day enduring the night that presents itself every evening and enjoying the defeat that comes from sleeplessness.

INSOMNIA

One of the topics that has been trending lately in the world is that of insomnia. In the western world, for instance, the sleeping pill has become one of the must-haves in many households. Insomnia has been sweeping the world like a hurricane.

Yet, there are those who say they do not know what insomnia is. My wife can sleep through the most frightening storm. She can even sleep while walking. I always tell her that every day she wakes up, among many other things that she has to thank God for, the gift of sleep is one.

Ever since I was a small boy, I have always had an adversarial relationship with sleep. It started as a morbid fear that the world would end while I was sleeping. I feared that the then President of the United States of America, Ronald Reagan, would ignite a war with the then president of the USSR, Mikhael Gorbachev, and I was always in this constant fear of a nuclear war.

That was during the era of the arms race. I read a lot about the nuclear stock-pile and the many missiles that the two countries had. The more I did, the more I got convinced that I would die young, conflagrated in the flames of a nuclear Armageddon.

I do not know whether this is where my insomnia started. All I know is that I could not fall asleep as easily as everyone else.

I was forced then, as I am forced now, to remain awake while all others slept, drifting away in the blissfulness of death’s brother, sleep.

Yet, this problem is not peculiar to me. It has affected many people throughout the ages.

Desperate and looking for an anchor they could cling to in the impotence of their sleeplessness, many writers have documented the agonies they have gone through in this state.

SLEEP

In Shakespeare, Henry IV, after seizing the throne, lamented about what he was going through every night:

“O sleep, O gentle sleep, Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frightened thee, that though no more will weigh my eyelids down, and steep my senses in forgetfulness.”

As desirable to Shakespeare as sleep was, it was also one of those things that held to him a certain mysticism which led to his fearing it.

He thus called sleep “the brother of death”. For when you sleep, you may not be very sure that you will wake up.

Yet, it is the nature of every living thing to desire sleep.

Things that are desirable happen, oddly, to be elusive.

In 1977, Philip Larkin, one of the most celebrated poets of the second half of the 20th century, wrote a poem called “Aubade”.

In it he described this problem of sleeplessness that many of us who have been unlucky not to have sleep “weigh their eyelids down” have experienced.

Lying in the hazy torridness of emptiness, Larkin, unable to get any sleep, muses about his state and sees in it a prefigurement of his own death:

“I work all day, and get half drunk at night.

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what’s really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

Arid interrogation: yet the dread of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.”

CREATIVITY

When you are staring into “the soundless dark” as Larkin put it, all manner of crazy thoughts play in the theatre of your mind.

Mainly it is the thoughts of mortality, the thoughts of unimaginable tragedies, the thoughts of morbidity that occupy you.

The academic Andrew Kay, writing on the subject of death and sleep, observed that when one lies supine, gazing at nothingness, fully aware that all normal human beings are drifting away in the capsule of sleep, one grasps the inalienable fact that in life we are basically alone and that no matter what, we all live in that fear of being alone, and of dying unobserved. And this is what makes sleeplessness so unnerving.

“We are all speeding toward the endless acreage of death,” he writes, “and it’s a paradox of life that we only fully glimpse that fact against the clarifying backdrop of night and darkness.”

The artistic mind appreciates this. Some of the best writers and poets in the world claim to write better while all others are asleep, but it is when they want to go to sleep and they cannot that insomnia becomes their biggest albatross.

Caught in the vice-like grip of sleeplessness, one sometimes gets the feeling that it is those who are asleep who are alive and that those who are awake at that hour are disembodied ghosts roaming the face of the earth and waiting for daylight to send them scurrying back into their vampire hide-outs.

But, in their helplessness, insomniacs, especially if they be artists, are usually proud of it. As Kay, again observes, “afflicted by a crippling illness (insomnia) they occupy a place of lonely, privileged insight.”

THE INSOMNIAC

For sleeplessness can also have its own special graces.

Perched on this observatory of solitude and sleeplessness, one is also able to fully conceptualise what it is to be human, the misguidedness of humanity, the worthlessness of our daily, trivial pursuits.

Most history is written and observed during the day. But the insomniac has the special and unique gift of observing history enacting itself while all others sleep. They have the benefit of hearing the lark that sings in the dark, the hyena that howls in the night and the nimble steps of evil as it visits the sleeping in the form of thieves and witches.

Insomniacs have their uses. They are the ones that effect a continuity between the frenetic day and the soundless dark.

As the writer, Loren Eiseley, in his 1907 essay asked: “Oh sleeping, soundlessly sleeping ones, do you ever think who knits your universe together safely from one day’s memory to the next? It is the insomniac, not the night policeman on his beat.”

In a world where the going of the light heralds some sort of death, it is the insomniac who must become the reporter of what the sleeping cannot observe; it is he, who unencumbered by sleep, must notice all those things that happen in the dark but which the sleeping can only observe, second-hand when they wake up.

To be able to see this, as Eiseley observed, the insomniac must be disencumbered of reality, must have no commitments to the dark.

Only he must see, unlike the murderer and the thief, the splendours that we all so often miss in our sleep.

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