The 3am ravings of an insomniac

That accursed, congenital restlessness, that inner poltergeist of the worst sorts living within me. It has wrought upon me unspeakable torment, now as much as in my younger years when I built a habit of nightly clock-watching. Standing now at twenty eight years old, I have become more adept at cock work than anyone else. I can now simply intuit what time of the night it is. It is nothing to be envious of, of course, as in those small wretched hours of the night, time oozes and clings and crawls like syrup spilled on bare skin.

It is no wonder, then, that sleep deprivation has been weaponised by despots and tormentors who understand its uniquely potent cruelty. They understand that exposure to the follicles of time, slowly plucking out each moment, exaggerating it, magnifying it, will ultimately drive one to insanity. They are aware that there can be no misery greater than such hyperawareness of time, that time was never meant to be stripped naked in its completely raw form for the human eyes to see. And yet, for the insomniac there is nothing but this obligation to engage in a nightly congress with this disrobed, infernal spectre of duration, unwillingly dancing with it an ugly, ungraceful dance until dawn’s indifferent arrival.

I lie here, eyes clamped shut as though sheer will might coax slumber from the ether, wondering whether my mind has its own mind, perhaps that of a restless kitten utterly drunk on caffeine. I conjure, desperately, pathetically, a fleeting dream of another time when the world was warm and fuzzy, and my heart was open wide to love things for no reason at all, like the sick and the dying and those besotted with love. Sleep at once came unbidden to me, cradling me with the vigour of an untroubled child. But black smoke take the place of those cloudy memories, resignation sets in again, and the small white tablet labelled quetiapine waits on my bedside like an old adversary, teasingly whispering, come closer.

There is a peculiar cruelty in this arrangement, that the most conscious creature to ever walk the earth is also the one most burdened by the inability to switch that consciousness off. No other animal lies awake in tortured wakefulness, parsing over such utterly trivial things, all things considered. The human mind has been saddled with the paradox of being brilliant enough to interrogate its own suffering but helpless to resolve it. The sleepless Homo sapien in the dead of night begins to resent its own ingenuity, its over-evolved brain that transformed sleep into a battlefield rather than a sanctuary. What peculiar force of nature, what capricious evolutionary gambit, birthed this predicament? What purpose could it possibly serve, this waking half-light of semi-sleep? Some now-irrelevant, long-forgotten survival mechanism lost to memory? Or perhaps it is simply an evolutionary accident. Or maybe a product of modern urban dwellings. At any rate, the sleepless mind, trapped as it is in this prison of thought, would gladly trade all these troubled questions, its cleverness, for one night of true, untroubled rest.

In those desperate hours, I have envied the vegetable world; the tomato, the table, the stoic dignity of the tree in its unbroken sweet slumber. The tree does not stir, nor yearn, nor strive, nor dream for more. It simply is. What a thing to aspire to, a life stripped of restlessness and constant striving, not least for sleep. One envies the bird that perches on the windowsill at dawn, blissfully unaware of time, every chirp bringing to the waking sleeper a renewal. Matthew 6:24 tells us, ‘Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do they read, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth them all.’ What a wonderful thing to be incapable of abstract reasoning of time; past, present and future, where ones' immediate every day is not filled with concern about such abstractions of ‘3 am’, ‘tomorrow’, ‘Monday’, ‘winter’. Mathew continues, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; and they toil not, neither do they spin: yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these”. Oh, but to sleep like a lily for one night! Better a bird than a human; a fly than a bird; a lily than a fly—the chain of being toward freedom moves inversely.

I have never met an insomniac who does not philosophise. The insomniac is exiled from ordinary consciousness, and so becomes something of a philosopher by necessity. Anyone, really, who has been forced out of the structural order which satiates much of human life, eventually comes to see the absurdity in that order. To live without those manageable, routine rhythms that define life for all others; the pulsating cycles of consciousness and unconsciousness, animality and abstraction, day and night, is simply another instantiation of that process of disenchantment. But the processes of disenchantment are never a joyful ride. “The night drags its feet,” as some poet once said, and I think it was Shelly who once wrote, “Night came and went, and came, and went, and brought no day”. For the insomniac, it is not simply the night that drags; it is existence itself that drags, lumbers, and grinds its way forward in one unrelenting continuum. For the average sleeper, time is mercifully diced into digestible chunks: yesterday, today, tomorrow. Each dawn brings with it a baptism that gently washes away yesterday’s residue. “Blessed are the forgetful,” Nietzsche wrote, “for they get the better even of their blunders.” Blessed, too, are the sleepers, for they get the better of time, their life is a dual existence, broken up and made bearable by the nightly gift of forgetfulness.

No such thing for the insomniac; dawn is a cruel prankster to her, smiling at her through the window, bringing in a slight shift in the shade of suffering, but suffering nonetheless. She lives in a ceaseless present. Her consciousness is an uninterrupted monologue interrogating every part of her existence. Night after night, stripped of the comforting illusions skulking behind routine cycles, she begins to see that the world was never a playground for her desires, that it is in fact extremely vast, and extremely indifferent, and she is extremely small and extremely finite. This enforced detachment unmakes her, completely dissolves the boundaries between ego and world. She comes to see, as the old waiter sees, that she is nada, that there is only nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada, our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name. She now spends her lifetime yearning for the nada, where she can finally slip into a blissful void of nada.

And so, for the insomniac, death is not the grim spectre it is to others. Death is a reunion with the peaceful non-existence from which she was so rudely torn at birth. In death’s embrace, there are no ticking clocks, no feverish thoughts, no anguished hours clawing at the edges of sanity. There is only the stillness of eternal repose, a long dreamless night with no promise of morning. The insomniac has finally defeated that cruel demon we call Time, as it has now died too with her. She returns to the state of being unmade and finally take her rest.