In Search of Sleep

“Two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock, insomnia without end.”

Leaving for work on Saturday, in the morning, I tell myself, though it’s really the middle of the night, I glanced up at the sky as I stepped out the door to my apartment building to see the moon glowing brightly above, nearly full, a guiding light for my short walk to the bakery. This was a precious moment, in the quiet of my dead-end street, among houses with their lights turned off, their residents asleep, where I was able to briefly revel in something spectacular. I was alone, but felt fully connected to the world. 

Getting up at 2:00 a.m. once a week used to excite me. I’d spring out of bed for what was then my favorite work shift of the week, looking forward to working solitarily and without interruption for a few hours. Just me, the ovens, and my choice of music. By mid-morning, my work for the day and the week would be done, and I’d go home to sink into a nap, to re-energize myself for whatever the rest of the day might hold. I would naturally fall asleep early that night; I fought to keep my eyes open past 8:30 to finish a movie on several occasions. I would wake up at 5:00 or 6:00 the next morning, feeling bright-eyed and refreshed. 

A close friend used to assume that I am a night owl, that I preferred nighttime’s darkness for reading and writing, but I’ve always considered myself a morning person, drawn toward the quiet solitude of early hours, romanced by the soft light of sunrises that instill a sense of calm. When I started this early baking shift, I felt connected with this interstitial time (it does mean I get to see the sun rise every Saturday), considering it early morning — but is it rather the dead of night?

Lately, I’ve been waking up around that same deadly hour on Sunday, my first weekend day. Around 3:00 a.m., inevitably, my body stirs, perhaps confused as to why it’s still in bed. Marguerite Duras said that this is the worst time, and I have to agree. “Two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock, insomnia without end.”¹I try to force myself back to sleep for at least another two hours, but the sleep is usually light, unfulfilling; sometimes, I’ll read something on my phone in an effort to tire my eyes and brain, seldom to any success. Eventually, I’ll get up, and begin my exhausted stumbling through the day. 

Marie Darrieussecq writes in Sleepless that to live without sleep is like “wandering around without a shadow.” But I wonder if we’re the shadow of ourselves without sleep? Floating along, passively participating in the world, trying to do what needs doing without exerting any meaningful effort, always feeling two steps behind, dragging around in a sleepy stupor. 

This is not my first experience with difficult sleep. Social anxiety kept me awake on Sunday nights as a middle schooler; during my last semester of my master’s program, my seemingly perpetual to-do list of submitting job applications, attending job interviews, finding a new apartment, and finishing my coursework dominated my brain at night (that was no counting sheep). My current anxiety around sleep, sometimes resulting in a few frustrated tears, is not foreign: leading up to and following my dad’s death, not being able to sleep characterized many nights for me. In Sleepless, Darrieussecq outlines, in the section titled “I’ve Tried Everything,” all of the remedies she’s experimented with to handle her own insomnia, including herbal teas, acupuncture, psychoanalysis, osteopathy, yoga, fasting, barbiturates, alcohol, abstaining from alcohol. The title of the section alone gives a sense of fatigue, of exasperation with the whole scenario. And it perfectly captures how attempting to deal with insomnia feels. When sleep becomes so elusive, a cup of Sleepytime tea is never strong enough; a meditation is too activating, making me too in touch with my surroundings, too cognizant of the hours without sleep that have already passed. My dad passed away in the middle of the night, just a few hours after we moved into a new calendar day. I woke up just a minute before getting the fateful phone call from my mom, who had spent the night in his hospice room. I’ve often wondered, was it my restless sleep that woke me then, or something more spiritual, my body somehow reacting to losing someone who had contributed to its making? The following night, I slept soundly and fully through the night for the first time in months.

In a seminar on the intersections of sleep, dreams, and capitalism, we discussed the roles of sleep and dreams in our lives under capitalism. Is rest an act of resistance, a complete turning off and turning away from the powers that control our time awake, a tool for “dismantling white supremacy and capitalism” such as the Nap Ministry promotes? Or is our rest in the service of production, a tool that keeps our bodies properly mechanized to go to work? 

In 24/7, Jonathan Crary takes this a step further to take a critical look at the way that sleeplessness can be harnessed for more productivity (and specifically, more warfare, an area in which the U.S. Department of Defense is particularly interested). Crary traces this perspective on sleep, as seeing it as wasted time, back to the Enlightenment:

“Descartes, Hume, and Locke were only a few of the philosophers who disparaged sleep for its irrelevance to the operation of the mind or the pursuit of knowledge. It became devalued in the face of a privileging of consciousness and volition, of notions of utility, objectivity, and self-interested agency. For Locke, sleep was a regrettable if unavoidable interruption of God’s intended priorities for human beings: to be industrious and rational. In the very first paragraph of Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature, sleep is lumped together with fever and madness as examples of the obstacles to knowledge. By the mid-nineteenth century, the asymmetrical relation between sleep and waking began to be conceptualized in hierarchical models in which sleep was understood as a regression to a lower and more primitive mode in which supposedly higher and more complex brain activity was “inhibited.” Schopenhauer is one of the rare thinkers who turned this hierarchy against itself and proposed that only in sleep could we locate “the true kernel” of human existence.”

Yet, it is precisely in the lack of sleep where madness lies. Anyone who has dealt with insomnia knows its horrors, the doomed feeling of being caught in it; I can practically say, of course, insomnia is being glorified, even chemically induced, for the horrors of war. To not sleep is to feel outside of life. It puts me at war with myself.

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This can be considered a companion piece to “Bakery Time.”

1. Sleepless, Marie Darrieussecq