What an Insomniac Knows (2025)

The exasperated experts, right here, begin to fire off e-mails and D.M.s, tutting at the eminent philosopher’s obvious failures of sleep hygiene. Of course if you drink vodka you’ll awake at midnight! Walker, in fact, explains that one of the by-products of alcohol metabolism is a class of chemicals, known as aldehydes, that are especially prone to impede REM sleep. But trust us, doctor, we have tried it all. The Mayo Clinic has just published a brand-new guide to sleeping, which rehearses yet again the familiar remedies and warnings: no caffeine within nine hours of bedtime (done); no alcohol within four hours of bedtime (done); exercise, but at least two hours prior (done); no screens before bed (done). Meditation can help (it does, sort of), and calculation can comfort—see how much you’re really sleeping by keeping a record, and you’ll be vaguely encouraged that it’s more than you know. Melatonin, the cautious man’s Valium, may or may not work, and the gummies may contain much less or much more of the active ingredient than the label promises. The veteran insomniac may arrive at a neat little stack of health-food-store supplements—CBD gummies (with or without THC), L-theanine, kava, valerian root, and so on—and is perfectly aware that, more likely than not, it works, if it works, as a placebo. (One would think that placebos, to work, couldn’t be known as such, but it seems that, when we need something badly enough, we welcome anything.)

We are told to find consolation in the creative and prolific souls who share the affliction: the Brontës, Baudelaire, Kafka, Proust, Nabokov. Wilt Chamberlain didn’t catch a wink of sleep in Syracuse the night before his hundred-point game. But then the number of unlikable people who slept four hours or so out of twenty-four includes such dubious sorts as Napoleon and Kissinger. Is it possible that they tried, consciously or otherwise, to sacrifice sleep for self-interest? The cognitive costs may be compensated by the careerist advantages.

The inevitable reaction to the universalizing claims of natural science is the particularizing claims of cultural history: sleep, we can be certain, will be shown to have as many cultural styles over time as the pajamas we wear, or don’t wear, to enjoy it. Though food is biologically necessary, we accept that it has innumerable local styles—there may be a universal grammar of a pungent protein piled upon a neutral starch, but it encompasses everything from pizza to cassava with spiced ants. Can sleep have something like the same tribal variety? Is there a peculiarly Sri Lankan siesta, an especially Swedish kind of slumber party? Right on cue, we have SebastianP. Klinger’s “Sleep Works: Experiments in Science and Literature, 1899-1929.” It’s an attempt to cross the wires of experimental sleep science with those of literary production, set as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. A devout “culturalist,” Klinger quotes approvingly the statement that there is nothing natural about going to bed, and yet if anything is natural—that is, common to almost the entire animal kingdom—it’s sleep. Although beds in our modern sense of four-footed furniture with a springy surface may have a particular history, the familiar use of “bed” to mean something soft that animals choose to lie down on is obviously wide-reaching. Hibernating bears do not lie on jagged rocks.

The statement means, really, that the way we sleep is more inflected by our beliefs than we might think, as touched by our private yens as our public yawns. Klinger’s subsequent thesis, not a terribly surprising one, is that insomnia is the consequence of the mechanization of leisure by capitalism, and that we became sleepless in the fin de siècle because we were being forced to work and shop. Insomnia is the occupational disease of enslaved mind workers, with a predictable spillover into the aesthetes who mock it yet participate in it.

But surely insomnia was, as it remains, an outlier issue—Henry Clay Frick appeared to have slept fine, and Frederick Winslow Taylor, who slept poorly as an adolescent, doesn’t seem to have slept worse after he pioneered the methods of industrial efficiency. In ancient Rome, Juvenal complained about being kept up all night by the city’s noise. Perhaps the special connection between insomnia and modernity is something we want to be true.

“Of course your mom was there—she just took all the pictures.”

Cartoon by Diane de Ferran

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Insomnia seems no more a generally modern complaint than it is a capitalist one. It is specifically a romantic complaint, which began to be heard in full right around the start of the nineteenth century and, like so many romantic complaints, became most intensified as it passed from country to city. If Shakespeare produced, in Lady Macbeth, the first great insomniac of English literature—albeit one who sees the condition as a punishment from God—it was Wordsworth who wrote our first real poem about insomnia. It’s disarming in its narrator’s search for some form of the white noise that sometimes helps the sleepless. He was trying to find pacifying country sounds even in the Lake District, the kind that are now synthesized on Spotify: “A clock of sheep that leisurely pass by,/One after one; the sound of rain, and bees/Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas,/Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky;/I’ve thought of all by turns, and still I lie/Sleepless.” What is essential is the taste to testify to the extremes of experience; Coleridge’s somnambulist and Wordsworth’s insomniac are two sides of a single phenomenon.

Klinger, to his credit, recognizes that the opposite side of the failure to sleep is the fetishization of sleep. Proust’s insomnia, though debilitating, was made, in classic wound-and-bow terms, into the engine of his art. And so with Kafka and Cioran: not being permitted to sleep by the lights of modernity, we make a melancholy playground out of the prohibition. Klinger also points out that this era marks the birth of the sleeping pill, the Communion wafer of the new century, with all its attendant miseries. Although sleeping draughts have an ancient history—evolving into the “stupefactives” of medieval medicine and then, starting in the sixteenth century, the much consumed tincture of opium known as laudanum—the twentieth century was a time of unexampled innovation in this area.

We are soon launched into the series of hypnotics—the barbiturates, the benzodiazepines, the “Z” drugs (such as zolpidem), and, most recently, the orexin blockers (notably, Belsomra). Like the rakes in a Jane Austen novel, they all began with great charm, and then soon afterward earned the most terrible reputations. You would think we’d avoid the next generation of pills after seeing the toll extracted by the previous one, but we don’t. The essayist Wilfrid Sheed wrote, in the nineteen-nineties, a funny, agonized book about his betrayal by benzo—in his case, Ativan, which promised much and ended up, in collaboration with alcohol, sending its otherwise well-balanced user off to a procession of rehabs.

Sheed called New York “the world’s insomnia capital.” This may be true, but what sane person would exchange the gleaming city at 3 a.m. for the farmhouse at 9 P.M., with all the exhausted hoers and threshers briefly asleep until the next dawn’s labor begins again? When our own country cousins come south from Canada, they emerge from the spare bedroom of our New York apartment hollow-eyed and sleepless, politely incapable of understanding how anyone can sleep amid the noise of ambulances and car alarms and honking cabs and city buses sweeping up the avenue right outside. Among the New Yorkers, both the good sleepers and the bad sleepers don’t notice it.

What of the dreams that sleep brings? If anything is universal, it is the belief, across cultures, that dreams are parables and portents—Freud became famous in Klinger’s fin-de-siècle modernity for seeking symbolic significance in dreams, but it is hard to find a single culture that does not include some version of this belief. The ancient Greeks thought that dreams held powers of prophecy; Hindus have apparently found encouragement in dreams of Lord Krishna. We want dreams to mean something, even though, yet another slumber paradox, they mainly puzzle us by their disjuncture of logic and meaning. Thus the dream relater (there is usually only one in a relationship) always begins, “I had the strangest dream last night...”

To find out what the new science of dreams suggests, we have “This Is Why You Dream,” by Rahul Jandial, whose name on the dust jacket is suspiciously followed by both M.D. and Ph.D.—a good rule of reading being that the more credentials on the cover, the less convincing the claims inside. Yet Jandial’s book, though perhaps breezier and less cautious than that of the more typical sleep scientist, is filled with empirical information that may seem dreamy without ever feeling wholly hallucinated. And so we learn of the “Halle Berry neuron,” a discovery of the neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, who found that, in one experimental subject, a single neuron fired to the invocation, or even the mention, of Halle Berry. The larger point being made, very much in harmony with Matthew Walker’s theory of human nightly emotional processing, is that our dreams are what Jandial calls thought experiments. We focus with such neural narrowness on Halle Berry—or on Brad Pitt—because having fantasy figures play roles in the stock-theatre company of the night helps prepare us to ensnare the real thing in our waking hours.

If there seems less evidence than we might want for such a confident claim, Jandial does make a plausible case that our dreams work in tandem with our “theory of mind”—our ability to grasp that other people are thinking and feeling in the same way as ourselves. At night, we rehearse the day’s actions, and our imaginations, so to speak, ruminate through the activities of those others we have encountered as though they were our own and try to make lateral sense of them. Throughout, Jandial is arguing against the “continuity hypothesis” of dreaming—the idea that dreams are basically extensions of our daily life in coded form. Instead, he thinks that the purpose of dreams is closer to the vernacular meaning of the word: it’s what we want, not what we got—the outer edge of our imagination, not the fabric of our days rewoven.

Sometimes, to be sure, dreams are obviously rooted in anxiety. We dream repeatedly of having signed up for a course that we forgot to attend, with the exam now drawing near. This may be the mind’s simple Post-it reminder not to do this, or anything similar. Others are more plaintively compensatory: a standard dream of New Yorkers is to have found an extra room in their apartment—a dream often elaborated with a Narnia-like act of pushing back coats and clothes to find a secret door in the back of a closet. We awake, sadly, to the same space we had before. (To this dream, one might add another, also seemingly peculiar to this city: having acquired a bigger apartment, we dream of having been forced back to the smaller one.)

But most dreams are less shapely in their signalling, tending to be the jangle of mixed-up stories and abruptly abbreviated actions which puzzle us in the morning. And so Jandial arrives at a highly hypothetical but agreeably plausible explanation, modelled, as such explanations usually are, on the most recent available model of the mind. In our case, that model is provided by artificial intelligence: when a system of machine learning becomes overly tethered to the material it is dredging and, Jandial writes, grows “too rigid and formulaic in its analysis,” it proves useful to “inject ‘noise’ into the information used to teach the machine, deliberately corrupting the data and making the information more random.” Dreams, therefore, “are much like the noise injected into the machine’s data.” Freeing our minds, dreams force us into new channels of possibility, which might, in their apparently surreal inconsequence, lead to the type of thinking that “looks at a problem in a completely novel way” and help us “find adaptive solutions to unexpected threats.” The illogic of dreams is not a riddle to be solved but a noise that can reveal the meaningful signal. We are readied for the unexpected by the nightly experience of the inexplicable.

What an Insomniac Knows (2025)
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