There are rules to insomnia. The second rule of insomnia is: you don’t talk about insomnia. I made that up, but insomniacs cultivate their own psychological games, their own small superstitions. Naming the disorder while enjoying undisturbed sleep risks invoking it. At the edges of chronic insomnia lies something more ambiguous: subjective insomnia, where the body sleeps but the mind believes otherwise. We sleep, but perceive sleeplessness. Psychic integrity is fragile.
This morning at 2:30am I turned, instinctively, to books. It had been a long stretch without these night awakenings, but I’m in the midst of changes that would register high on the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale.
I tried Lacan, his mapping of the imaginary and symbolic in psychic life. He writes of the child’s encounter with the mirror, the recognition of the “I” as a fiction, a whole where there had been only a body-in-pieces. Ordinarily, Lacan’s density induces sleep. Not tonight. I reached for Beckett, then Kathy Acker, whose work I’ve been circling since a recent exchange with Kate Zambreno.
These are 2am thoughts, untrustworthy perhaps, but they’ve stayed with me: the oscillation between the “I” we perceive, the “I” we construct, and the broken narrative of the past—mostly fiction. Beckett and Acker return to this tension again and again. Their characters move between the wish to confess and the need to withhold. The potency of their writing lies in that fracture: the struggle to write their way out of the work.
I get insomnia occasionally, or rather I used to – it doesn’t tend to happen much these days thankfully. I was never able to read anything remotely intelligent, I always found my senses too dulled. I’d watch stuff or read comics.
I do find sleep state misperception fascinating. It’s another example of how unreliable our perceptions even of ourselves can be. Not only can we not trust that what we see in the world is as we see it, we can’t even trust that our own experiences are as we see them.
Oddly enough your last para is one of the key themes of the distinctly not-at-all-modernist Dance to the Music of Time. A big concern of the series is the creation of a personal narrative and the way that fiction can then shape reality. It doesn’t though explore the conflict between confession and privacy – it can’t since another key theme is the utter unknowability of other people.
I started reading Dance to the Music of Time a while ago, but got distracted by something else and never went back to it. You remind me that I must.
There’s always Kafka’s way: http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/11/how-kafka-used-dreams-and-insomnia-to-write-creatively.html
And, forgot, that other great vitalist Balzac, who wouldn’t even begin writing on the Comedy Humaine till 12:00 AM and stop at 6:00 AM punctilious day in day out till it was done.
If I had Kafka’s, or even Balzac’s insight, I might be tempted to follow their practise…