Once in position there on the carpet, still in silence, I would begin to position my flesh into some comfortable contortion, bringing my head and arms and body together in minute positioning, still being careful not to move too fast, erupt in sound. This period was often, perhaps surprisingly, the one in which I would most often be apprehended, some shift near the bed itself bringing my mother into sudden awareness of her nearer air. I had to be extremely attentive to each inch of my arms’ or thighs’ dragged moving, rubbed on the carpet, friction sound. I had to adjust myself, even just to gather the semblance of a sleep position, pull by pull and pick by pick, slowly dragging the extremities and angles of my body into fetal, nighttimey. In that way it might take twice as long as it had taken to crawl from my door to the floor there to get myself tucked into a half-position I could therein begin to try to eke my way off into sleep, absolved at last of the coiled fervor the house enforced around me awake alone at night except in the presence of my makers. Sometimes I’d manage to drag along a blanket or pillow with me, but often these accoutrements made it more difficult to pass by without being heard, so I would abandon them for simply arriving in that blank-of-terror space. There — slow, careful, as if not underwater but held close against some massive still — there, however many minutes, hours, later — I at last, within and for myself, could sleep — if at the same time teaching my blood to enjoy the elongation, to rest only after some extended vapid thrall. Those were the nights I remember feeling safest, nearest, most open to the sound. Those, of all the nights I’ve slept, despite the odd shape, were likely hours that, if I chose out of all those I’ve glued through, would be the ones I would put on pause, and replicate in texture and sound forever, every evening, stretched right as the greatest kind of warming light.
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One third of America, at some point, has been locked out of sleep by mind or mood. Insomnia is “the most frequent health complaint after pain.”5 It is twice as common in women as in men until the onset of old age, at which point this paradigm becomes reversed — a swing explained for some by menopause. Though, in general, the rule is: the older you get the less you tend to sleep—our thickening inside more time—more than half of those over the age of sixty-five suffer the insomniac complaint. For many, enough nights in this thick circling can be enough to make a person, over time, wish for sleep’s older, more endless brother mode, the one with a front door we all know how to access: the big sleep. Dead and gone. Death and sleep are used interchangeably throughout the Bible, referring to each as instances invoked by god. That dying brings the same shape of turning off as sleep does — a final, most precise iteration of the mode in which we are truly dissolved of our wants and shifting selves — seems at once terrifying and sublime in the same hold. We can, ultimately, always end our own lives, if life turns to that, another constant door waiting to be opened, if in silence. And we remain surrounded, by so many easy sleepers, in their own bodies. And the more you want sleep the harder it becomes.
According to the DSM-IV, Primary Insomnia — that is, insomnia not caused by another mental disorder, a medical condition, or substances—“is often associated with physiological or psychological arousal at nighttime in combination with negative conditioning for sleep.” Often it’s not even the major presences that keep the circle spinning — the catastrophes, the major loom — as these kinds of motion often move in such broad strokes they sit upon the brain like wet. Two other forms of Primary Insomnia — Idiopathic (related to functions established in childhood) and Subjective (where the sleeper misperceives the sleeping state, feeling awake when not, or in shallow holes) — are also considered learned or conditioned states, not of trauma but sunk into the flesh by make of habit or cellular comprise, rather than in trauma of interaction with the air. Instead, it is more so the tiny particularities involved in those big ones, and the routines, as well as reflexive fleshy response to the physical effects of no rest: body aches, slowing of reflex and response rate, jumble of tongue; memory trouble, functional trouble, job absenteeism, higher health costs, depression. These conditions may linger in the body for years, returning even ten years after the main fact of its hold. “In certain respects, insomnia is a euphemism for free-floating anxiety,” writes Henry Kellerman in a 1981 study of sleep disorders, “that is, the insomnia is only a symptom of some more serious underlying disorder that can eventually merge in an unexpected form.”6
A range of secondary insomnias — also termed comorbid—come related to extrinsic factors, not necessarily inherent in the flesh. These include sleeplessness as a result of psychiatric, medical, or central nervous system disorders (panic attacks, dementia, bipolar, to name a few — all in all a set of roughly 75 percent of all psychiatric patients — as well as arthritis, osteoporosis, cancer: “Almost any form of brain insult disturbs the sleep-wake cycle, often causing insomnia at night and hypersomnia during the day”7); substance dependency (nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, and marijuana being most common); problematic breathing (apnea, snoring); environmental cues (sound, heat, illumination, space); sleep-wake scheduling disorders (circadian rhythm, restless legs and moving limbs); and parasomnias (sleepwalking, night terrors, nightmares, and so on). Paradoxical insomniacs misperceive the way in which they actually are sleeping, and actually are awake, caused by flagrant intensities of the room around them — louder sounds and brighter light. Psychophysiological insomniacs are often held awake by intense worrying of day and sleep and time, while otherwise free of factors that perpetuate the ruining. The manifestations of these effects also vary in the way they are turned on. There is sleep-onset insomnia, where the entrance to the sleep period takes longer than thirty minutes after head hits pillow; there is sleep-maintenance insomnia, where the subject does fall asleep but can’t seem to stay under for more than brief bursts, or wakes early without sufficient time elapsed; there are as well a variety of extremities and mixtures of these conditions, a veritable salad of sleep methods in which the sleep light might be deflected.
There are many common ways by which these sleepless forms might in anyone turn on:
General physical symptoms, e.g., old age, female gender (especially after menopause), or a history of depression—a depressive, mothering, ancient door.
Abuse of substances such as psychoactive drugs and stimulants, taking fluoroquinolone antibiotics, or abuse of commonly available sleep aids—a door forced open by the inhuman.