Insomnia. Marina Benjamin
beyond our bedroom walls at night, like a crystalline liquid (or like data), as though our avatars were flowing toward, then alongside those of others in surging formation while our bodies were at rest. I find it reassuring that nowhere can be a loving place. Although when I am revving in the night hours, Nowhere does not feel especially loving.
These days my prime time is 4:15 a.m., a betwixt and between time, neither day nor night. At 4:15 a.m., birds chirrup, foxes scream, and sometimes, when the rotating schedule for landing and takeoff from Heathrow Airport collides with my sleeplessness, planes rumble overhead. The quality of the dark is not as pure at this hour as it is earlier. It is porous around the edges. In my bed, I flap and thrash like a grouper caught in the net, victim to an escalating anxiety about the way the darkness appears to be yielding to the idea of retreat. (I don’t want it to yield; I want it to last so that I can sleep.) Unable to settle in one position for more than a few beats, I try them all out in turn: the plank, the fetal curl, the stomach-down splat—as if I’d landed on the mattress from a height. Each of these poses is contrived insofar as it corresponds to an idea I have of what relaxation looks like. Some nights I trawl the whole alien repertoire of self-help. I try breathing deeply and slowly like a yogi, my fist pressed into the chakra under my rib cage. I try to stay my galloping pulse, tripped by fretful thoughts I would like to banish, by thinking of water or mountains, or fluffy sheep. I tell myself I am heavy, heavy, heavy. I pursue sleep so hard I become invigorated by the chase.
Through it all, I am aware of a slumbering form beside me, a still mound under the duvet, heaped up like a rock formation under the sky. I peer at the shadow-shaped mass across the bed, my rock, my stay, straining to detect any hint of movement in the dark. Let’s call this sleeping form Zzz. I am loath to wake him, knowing that he, like me, is exhausted to the point of defeat. I also know that if my thrashing does wake him he will snarl and shift; occasionally he swipes at me, a big cat in his lair lashing out with a heavy paw. There is a sleep-charged force field around Zzz and woe betide me if I disturb it.
Zzz and I have a history of beds we have slept in together. Hotel beds with silky sheets and too many pillows; beds so old we’d end up rolling into the middle; tufty beds with broken springs in cheap rented flats where we popped corn and watched scary movies through finger fences. In our shared history of sleep there have been beds of character and beds of convenience. Beds that spring out of sofas, supplied by relatives happy to accommodate our long-distance visits, and twin beds (supplied by relatives lacking fold-out options) that create an austere, prohibitive gulf between us, and bring on fits of the giggles. There have been state-of-the-art mattresses we have bought and regretted (especially the orthopedic kind once believed to be best for backs, but which I now think belong only in jails), and beds we have drooled over on the Internet but cannot afford—beds made out of “memory foam.” We have shared countless beds down the years and across continents, Zzz and me, under mood clouds fair and foul, and we continue to commune by night, in code and often in counterpoise to the way we relate to each other by day.
To share a bed with someone is to entertain a conversation played out in the language of movement and space.
There have been times when this conversation sparkled, I can tell you. Like those weeks we spent in Italy, not long after we first met. I’d been awarded a six-week writing fellowship, which we fattened up with vacation, training south from Milan and Venice, then stopping off in Florence en route to Rome. It was the first time either Zzz or I had seen Italy’s golden city. Each day, we wandered ancient twisting streets until our feet hurt, squinting into the sun as we took in architectural triumphs and follies. We guzzled pastas we’d never heard of, shaped like tiny stars, pigs’ tails, and miniature money bags, and ducked in and out of churches, hunting down artworks we had read about in books, before threading our way back to our pensione for a daily afternoon nap. Glutted with art, ice cream, and wonder, we slept with limbs entangled, our breathing synchronized, foreheads touching, and when we awoke we had sleepy sex. Such glittering conversations are hard to sustain over time.
You don’t need a bed in order to sleep with someone. But the first time I shared a bed with Zzz I was insomniac. At least I refrained from asking him to get up and leave so that I might stand a chance of sleeping, which request had lost me a boyfriend or two in my time. But I suspect that a precedent was set.
Like travel, insomnia is an uprooting experience. You are torn out of sleep like a plant from its native soil, then shaken down so that any clinging vestige of slumber falls away, naked confusion exposed like nerve endings. Sleep, in its turn, is a matter of gravity. It pulls you down, beds you in the earth, burrows you in. In sleep you connect back to the bedrock that provides nourishment and restorative rest.
Rubin Naiman, a psychologist at the University of Arizona’s Center for Integrative Medicine, reminds us that when we turn to sleep aids we often reach for gel-filled eye masks and weighted blankets, to “swaddling” that acts to counter the restive states of arousal we experience in insomnia. I have noticed that my teenage daughter, in her own struggles with sleep, loads up pillows on top of her head to acquire that longed-for sense of gravity. “It’s not about sleeping on a cloud. It’s about sleeping like a stone,” says Naiman.
The body must be grounded to sleep well. I think this is a lesson for the ages. It must be earthed in its own garden bed, or, unmoving, sunk at the bottom of time’s river (for when you are asleep time stands still). In her poem “Sleeping in the Forest,” Mary Oliver writes of tumbling into the earth’s wondrous embrace, its maternal reclaiming of her, as she falls asleep on the dank and mossy forest floor, slumbering heavily, like a stone on the riverbed. Hypnos would be proud of such a sleeper. Not merely drugged, but comatose.
In the grip of insomnia I am constitutionally inconsolable. Out of humor. It is not just a question of physical disquiet—not just about flapping. Or even existential disquiet (a fish out of water, a plant ripped from the earth), because insomnia is about temperature as well as motion. On nights when I am consumed by the flames of my own thermo-cellular generator, my skin prickles and oozes, the heat radiating off me in waves, the sheets dampening beneath me. If the lights were suddenly to be turned on, I would be glistening. Coated from head to toe by a film of sweat, I would flare red, like a warning.
Ancient physick would most likely designate me a choleric. The basic characteristics of this personality type are hotness and dryness, and its corresponding humor is yellow bile. People of a choleric temperament have appetites that are sharp and quick. Check. They are frequently overcome by ravenous hunger. Check. They are lean and wiry, with prominent veins and tendons. Check. Their metabolism is keen and catabolic, which is to say they generate a lot of heat. Even their urine can be hot and burning. They are prone to anger, impatience, and irritability, but then they are courageous and audacious as well. Check. They are individualists and pioneers who like to lead and to seek out exhilarating experiences. Check. However, their stools tend to a yellowish color (the bile) and emit a foul odor. Choleric types are notably poor sleepers. Check. Restless at night, they are assailed by indigestion and stress, or by violent dreams that jolt them into states of feverish or fiery readiness.
Fevers notwithstanding, in insomnia it is usually my mind that is on fire. What does a mind on fire look like, I hear you say? Like a Formula One driver tearing up the asphalt. Like a shimmering shoal of restless fish, darting forward together with fleet, quicksilver movements. Like a vacuum cleaner draining juice from the outlet and spinning off around the room of its own accord. My insomnia often feels like this: turbocharged. It is not one idea that teases and prods me awake, a finger tickling me in a single spot, wriggling my mind into consciousness. It is as if all the lights in my head had been lit at once, the whole engine coming to life, messages flying, dendrites flowering, synapses whipping snaps of electricity across my brain; and my brain itself, like some phosphorescent free-floating jellyfish of the deep, is luminescent, awake, alive.
In the first book of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Marcel muses on his insomniac experiences, on how he finds himself confused, as if he has been dropped fully conscious but unsuspecting into someone else’s waking dream. In his perplexity, he imagines that he has been reading a book about his own life and that his thoughts about himself come secondhand from print; but then he realizes that actually he is not in the book but in his bed, and that he cannot separate his recollections from his imaginings. Even