Insomnia is a silent epidemic. reports suggest that 30% of adults do not get enough rest, more if you look at those over 65, while at the other end of the scale, schoolchildren have difficulty sleeping through the night. medical professionals blame our overstimulated lives for this plague of insomnia, decrying our lack of boundaries between work and rest, environmental disturbances like noise and light pollution, and our addiction to screens.
However, what qualifies as common sense is not always accurate. one sleep expert told me that clinical experiments that exposed people to blue light at night (the kind our cell phones emit) only delayed sleep onset by 10 minutes. still, not sleeping is bad for us. causes confusion, impairs cognition, and increases anxiety; exacerbates underlying gastric, pulmonary, and cardiac problems; it makes us fat, stupid and depressed.
You are reading: Best books on insomnia
my sense that insomniacs are disillusioned with the language of affliction and cure convinced me that they are satiated with meditation and CBT, “sleep hygiene” and pills, and are hungry for something more sounding . my book insomnia is an attempt at correction. By portraying my waking from the inside and recording it in the moment lived without censoring its haunting, feverish, and contradictory detail, I hope I have raised difficult questions about why so many of us can’t sleep, questions that led me to reflect on the nature of desire. and the habits of the human mind.
These are some of the books I reached for when I was sleepless, to help me understand how being awake at night speaks to our innermost fears, but also taps into the wellsprings of creativity and longing.
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1. Warm and Snug: The History of the Bed by Lawrence Wright For insomniacs, sleep has the glow of an unattainable ideal. it ceases to be pedestrian or merely functional, it is polished with symbolism. seeing how we have made sleep a fetish, well, everything points to the bedroom. chronological and dutiful wright’s old-fashioned history describes every type of bed you can imagine; pallet beds, bunk beds and box beds; curtained, columned and mounted beds, royal beds, merchant beds and beggar beds, dormitory beds, hospital beds and modern mattresses. Wright finds it incredible that an invention as simple as the modern mattress has taken so long to arrive: the coil spring assistant, invented in 1857. Paradoxically, more comfort did not breed more rest.
2. At the End of the Day: A Story of the Night by a Roger Ekirch This is a book of raiding and looting, rich in stories of waking nights, drawn from the diaries and letters of insomniacs of the past. Samuel Pepys emerges as a star in the record of his nightly escapades (many jokes and bickering; sometimes reading, sometimes getting a haircut, sometimes eating groceries with a friend). Ekirch’s book stands out for breaking the myth of eight hours of sleep in a row. his discussion of the pre-modern habit of taking first sleep, then a second, going to bed when darkness fell, but then getting up at dawn for a laborious couple of hours before a much-needed recharge, quickly began to look into my tired eyes like a pre-capitalist nirvana.
3. The Third Reich of Dreams: A Nation’s Nightmares 1933-1939 by Charlotte Beradtberadt was an unlikely sociologist. a jewish journalist living and working in vienna in the 1930s suffered endless nightmares in which she was “shot, tortured and scalped”. she led her to wonder if her compatriots, who lived in fear of the totalitarian Nazi regime, were equally worried in their sleep. so she started collecting her dreams. what emerges in this bizarre collection are the shared nocturnal hauntings of a nation driven to paranoid self-doubt, and self-blame, by rigid intolerance and oppression. beradt reveals a collective dreamscape of barely repressed horror that makes for an unforgettable read.
4. Mathias Énard’s compas Inspired (I suppose) by Proust, Énard’s magnificent novel is set on a single sleepless night, when his self-fictional narrator is haunted by lustful longings for youthful love. Conceptually it’s brilliant. between the lines, Énard seems to suggest, in language and plot, that insomnia is about building bridges: between east and west, land and water, day and night, consciousness and the unconscious , and finally with his unearthing of painful memories, past and present.
5. Olive Sack AwakeningsIn 1917, a bizarre epidemic of sleeping sickness swept the world, causing thousands of people to collapse with raging fevers and wild hallucinations before slipping into periods of prolonged sleep. Sacks worked with survivors of this epidemic 40 years later, after neurologists discovered that administering the drug levodopa could jolt long-sleeping victims into periods of manic wakefulness. some of them went from real-life rip van winkles to insomniacs, becoming enervated and hyper-alert, overly talkative, overly familiar, and, in one case, messianic.
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6. Sleep Falling by Jean-Luc NancyA taste for French academic writing, with its circular, self-referential, and tirelessly cultured language, is needed to continue this book. It reads like a daydream, as if the logic and perspectives of dreams have settled into Nancy’s thinking mind. she had me, however, when she wrote that “insomnia is a kind of nocturnal occupation.” is – a transgression and presumption, an infiltration and colonization. In fact, Nancy’s book is full of sharp little insights that resonated with me. I’ll give you another: “[in insomnia] I can’t sing or make noise. So I have to be with myself, hold on. and that’s hard.”
7. Getting to Know the Night: Poems of Insomnia, Edited by Lisa Russ Spaar Reading these poems was like taking vitamin pills: each offered the company’s balm, a balm for my own tormented soul. because what insomniacs lack is community; writhing awake in our own beds, we face only ourselves. and what collection is this. Russ Spaar places Plath next to Pushkin and Auden next to Bishop. her quite apt conceit is that poets and insomniacs alike pride themselves on being the ones awake enough to see the truth of things.
8. Night Passages: Elisabeth Bronfen’s Philosophy, Literature, and FilmAt nearly 500 pages, this scholarly, fact-filled study is an exceptional gift, rich in all kinds of symbolic uses of the night that writers and artists have made . Bronfen is especially interested in the moral dimensions of the night: its temptations, what it veils, its calculations and revelations. in a wonderful chapter on film noir, he examines the way providence manifests itself in our lives (and our stories), providence being a dark art, because its paths are unknown and cannot be seen, unlike the enlightened world artificially film noir. which illuminates the antihero’s desire to manipulate events. this book revels in the power of border crossing and transgression, the wiles of the night.
9. The Poetics of the Dream, From Aristotle to Nancy by Simon MorganworthamThe title of this book nods to Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space: Space, like sleep, is a quality we cannot comprehend; another absence. wortham asks how we can speak of a philosophy of the dream, since philosophy studies consciousness: the very thing that the dream forces us to abandon. the book is full of heavyweights: kant and freud, merleau-ponty, levinas, bergson, blanchot. He asks what kind of thought is dreaming and what kind of absence does the dream represent? Is there community in the dream? reality in dreams?
10. Covering the latest advances in dream science, Why We Dream by Alice Robb, Robb argues that REM sleep is valuable, not least because it helps us process emotional trauma. perhaps, then, insomniacs shouldn’t worry about sleep but about sleep loss.
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