Replicate this obsession with each manipulable appendage across the body and what you’ve got here is a potentially overwhelming 3-D puzzle of the self—4-D if you want to count the constant inner monologue that usually accompanies it, the frustration, the grunt—5-D if you want to add on the awareness that what you’re doing during all this shifting and mental shitting is also a noisemaker barging into the potential comfort of those sharing your local space, who are also trying to find their own ways into sleep, the guilt and pressure of which some nights will hold me trying to hold still there in an acknowledged as not-perfect configuration, waiting slowly to find ways to suggest myself into better modes without stirring the bed, waiting, for instance, for that other person to shift herself or breathe or otherwise show she too isn’t fully gone, the prolonging of which only builds more and more inner frustration, which when finally the crust breaks and you make the impending shift regardless, as you have to do if you want to ever go, you do so with a simmered gusto, an extra compressed fury in your turn, which unfailingly seems to be just rough enough to stir the other person at last anyway, thus ruining the whole reason you stayed still so long at all—6-D if you even remotely begin to nod into the time you are eating off of your sleeping, and what else you could be doing, or what you’re supposed to do tomorrow, or so on—7-D if… — 8-D if… — and so the Rolodex compiles — soon at 15,000-D, just like that, amalgamated in one self.
More precisely than the fear of death, insomnia seems a hypersensitivity to the condition of being alive. For years the presence of sleep trouble in a body was held by science as an emotional, mental problem, a self-imposed roadblock in the night. Only after years of wonder, study, did the clearer effects of the state begin to become named, a hurt not only stuck in the moment of no nod off, but accumulated in the body overall. Personality traits including depression, extraversion, histrionic behavior, hysteria, hypochondria, hypomania, internalization, introversion, neuroticism, perfectionism, psychasthenia (inability to resist maladaptive thoughts), schizophrenia, and somatization (tendency to translate psychosocial stress into somatic stress) have all been shown to have clear links to insomnia.9 For many, though — the self-tortured, in rooms set within their waking homes — these are only temporary lockouts. Transient insomnia, defined as spread over less than three days, is often the product of temporary error in the environment or body, new stressors in sickness or in sound. Chronic insomnia holds on longer, defined over arcs, in patterns, becoming maps. In order for the antisleep state to be considered chronic, by definition it should recur on average more than three nights every week, over a period of more than six months, and should affect the daytime procedure in manifest problems in energy, motivation, moods.
These characteristics are as well relative to the subject’s own needs and inset criteria for what is needed to be “well rested.” One body might need only five hours to feel fully made new, while someone else might need nine. All factors are known to change over a lifetime, as the cells and information in the body shift and wrinkle and bend in. Problem sleepers often interpret their rest conditions to be more severe than recorded sleep times and depths may, to someone outside that skin, make them seem. In some self-perceived “insomniacs” there might be no sign of a disrupted state at all — and yet, in their mind and flesh, they feel arrested, turned out, scratched. In many instances, the effect is attributable to microsleeps, short periods spanning somewhere between a fraction of a second and up to thirty seconds, wherein the body cuts in and back out of a deep sleep due to exhaustion, a blink too short to quantify. In this way, though the person never experiences a full-blown, calculable sleep session, he or she does transgress the phases of consciousness, blurring the mind, allowing rest. Many claims to extensive insomnia are, then, not only questionable, but perhaps even delusional. It becomes difficult to say.
Even in more prolonged, intense phases, the sphere can come uncircled. “A person who becomes disorganized due to acute distress is likely to accept his psychotic experiences as real. .. The person may feel that he is ‘losing his mind,’ but unlike experimental subjects, he cannot leave the experiment. He is therefore suggestible and may accept his experiences, particularly if they provide an ‘explanation’ for, or a relief from, a difficult situation.”10 In this way, too, the memory might flicker, confusing waking rooms with memory and film, obfuscating where one has and has not been, in what way, with what markers set upon the flesh as ridges, and as color, as text inside a book that will not desist in its shift. The repeated rooms of waking, leaving, outdoors, indoors, transportation, evening light begin to betray their minor differences in repetition, the angles seeming each day to form the same boxes and expanses, air, but under the certain tutelage of dream context find little divots, smearings, burps (the dream replacing day space like a mask). The world in wormwood, in hidden liquid, known as trance — these tendencies, however hidden in daily rhythm, in the stilting position of being locked inside one’s slowing consciousness, begin to lurch — like obscure buildings under a coastline, rising up as the breadth of water becomes shallow, drying, an exposition by removal, by what remains among and underneath.
Therein again subdivided in the reverse direction — of the self-regulating his or her self via postures and over-aimed insides — there is the ongoing customization of our sleep apparatuses. There are bedclothes (pillows, blankets, comforters, sheets, each of intensely varying grade); there are nightclothes (pajamas, lingerie, eyewear, headware, gloves, goggles, and socks); there are countless under-teeming extras one might bring in to further modify the sleep space (scents, colors, panels, electronics, sound). Beds that might have once been made from earth or leaves or straw by now have turned to intuitively and scientifically fine-tuned machines, so selective — from brand to size to shape to make (air, water, or spring: What kind of spring? How many?) to thickness to firmness to surface (and interior) texture — to flipless mattresses, to stain resistance, to what’s the best bang for your buck, to pillowtop or no, to “Choose from memory foam, egg crates or natural latex foam toppers,” to “Healthy, all-organic quilted cases! Non-toxic & Handmade in Seattle”—to even further in-the-minute customization, where through use of electronics one can at any minute further tamper with one’s lying place to make it more conductive for best rest, therein forgoing that often not needing to choose is the most restful state. Can even not our beds make their own decisions? Could there be a bed that takes me wholly by the skin? There are so many possible combinations and adjustments to the becoming process, and the interim between finding one and falling in, that many nights can quickly swim into some limbo of bad alignment, flipping from one set of poses to another, stupid kabuki, burning a whole night by, unto light, before finally, in some defeated haze, the body gives in, unto dawning.
Or not at all. Even once we’ve done the work of getting ready in mind and body and shape and sound and space to do our best to move toward the sleeping door, the world still goes on around us. The unlit room is still the room, and beyond the room is all of elsewhere, other bodies, in their way. And so, just as you’ve begun to find your way to fall into the nothing, perhaps, the phone rings, or someone’s knocking at your door, or the person in bed with you gets back up or begins talking or turns on light, or you are itching, or you remember something unavoidable you have to do before sleep (you forgot to brush your teeth, you have this e-mail, you have a due date, you don’t want to forget to take this certain book with you the next day). All around the perimeter of this process is the potentiality of other-incursion, disrupting, resetting, turning in. Even if most nights nothing happens, there is the continual field of potential at all times around one’s head, and the more one thinks of what could happen, what might happen, what we didn’t do, the worse the context gets. For every definitive thing that has happened, that you can lash yourself to, there is a continuity of other-else. Ramifications. The unexpected. The on and on. This is in some ways reflective of the endless proliferation of attention-hoarding objects made manifest daily, spooling physically and as ideas in and around and outside the house. The more you think the more you’re thinking, and the more there is to think about.