Between the lines, Énard seems to suggest, in language and plot, that insomnia is all about bridge-building: between East and West, land and water, day and night, consciousness and the unconscious, and finally with its dredging up of painful memories, past and present. Compass by Mathias Énard Inspired (I’m guessing) by Proust, Énard’s magnificent novel is set on a single sleepless night, when it auto-fictional narrator is beset by lustful longings for a youthful love. Beradt reveals a collective dreamscape of barely suppressed horror that makes for an unforgettable read.Ĥ. What emerges in this strange collection are the shared nighttime hauntings of a nation driven to paranoid self-doubt – and self-blame – by rigid intolerance and oppression. It led her to wonder if her fellow countrymen and women, living in fear of the totalitarian Nazi regime, were similarly troubled in their sleep. A Jewish journalist living and working in Vienna in the 1930s, she suffered endless nightmares of being “shot at, tortured, scalped”. The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation 1933-1939 by Charlotte Beradt Beradt was an unlikely sociologist. His discussion of the pre-modern habit to take a first, then a second sleep, bedding down as darkness fell, but then rising at dawn for a couple of industrious hours before a much-needed top-up, swiftly began to look to my tired eyes like some pre-capitalist nirvana.ģ. Ekirch’s book is notable for busting the myth of the eight-hour solid stretch of sleep. Samuel Pepys emerges as a star in recording his nocturnal escapades (a lot of banter and disputation sometimes reading, sometimes getting a haircut, sometimes consuming victuals with a friend). At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime by A Roger Ekirch This is a book to raid and pillage, rich with stories of wakeful nights, drawn from the diaries and letters of insomniacs past. Paradoxically, greater comfort did not engender more rest.Ģ. Wright finds it incredible that so simple an invention as the modern mattress was such a long time coming: attendant on the coil spring, invented in 1857. Wright’s old-fashioned history, chronological and dutiful, describes every kind of bed you can imagine palette beds, bunks and box beds beds that are curtained, pillared and hoisted up on mounts, kingly beds, merchant’s beds and pauper’s beds, dormitory beds, hospital beds and modern mattresses.
In looking at how we’ve made a fetish of sleep, then, everything points to the bedroom. No longer pedestrian or merely functional, it gets burnished with symbolism. Warm and Snug: The History of the Bed by Lawrence Wright For insomniacs, sleep possesses the sheen of an unattainable ideal. These are some of the books I reached out for when sleepless, to help me make sense of how being up at night speaks to our innermost fears, but also taps into the wellsprings of creativity and longing.ġ. By portraying my wakefulness from the inside, and recording it in the lived moment without censoring its unsettling, feverish and contrarian detail, I hope I posed difficult questions about why so many of us cannot sleep – questions that led me to ponder the nature of desire and the habits of the human mind. My book Insomnia is an attempt at a corrective. My sense that insomniacs are disillusioned with the language of affliction and cure persuaded me that they’re sated with meditation and CBT, “sleep hygiene” and pill-popping, and hungry for something more probing.
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