Distortions
It’s two a.m. and I’m walking past the building that is haunted by ghosts or things that look like ghosts. The headlights of a passing car throw shadows up against the wall, suggesting the shapes of the trees and bushes. The car moves on and the whole world turns purple. A fox runs out of a bush, jumps into the air, and disappears.
Sleeplessness can cause hallucinations which, when prolonged, can lead to encounters with alternate realities. This has something to do with the abstracted spatiality of nighttime, the way shadows superimpose things in the visual field to reveal unexpected relations between them. It also has something to do with delirium, which generates all kinds of unexpected visual effects: wandering spirits, shapeshifting objects, wormholes opening and closing. These effects kick in after a couple of days without sleep and are preceded by a crowding or swarming sensation that I can only describe as the feeling you get when people are commuting to and from work in another world.
I’ve been wanting to write about these effects for a while now, but there’s something about the whole thing that makes writing seem unappealing. A ghost appears at the foot of my bed and I lose interest in literature, close my laptop.
Earlier this year I made a commitment to writing truthfully. I made this commitment because I had gotten into the habit of distorting the world for the benefit of a good story—a habit which, if we take seriously the idea that nonfiction is the pursuit of truth, had estranged me from the reason I was writing in the first place. I ransacked my old essays, deleted pages of exaggeration and ambiguity. It was during this time that I stopped writing about insomnia entirely.
The problem was that insomniac space was always already distorted. Its objects were indeterminate; they annihilated themselves as soon as they appeared. Writing about these objects meant pushing them through the mesh of metaphor, which counted as a second distortion. Distortion didn’t feel like honest work. But how else could I write about what I was seeing? How else could I describe a shadow that was also a fox disappearing in the air?
Paradoxes
I could begin with the clinical perspective. It’s ten a.m. in the doctor’s office and the sunlight is coming diagonally through the window, pressing thin purple lines into my vision. I tell the doctor I’ve been awake for a very long time. The doctor takes off her glasses and types something into her computer. She puts her glasses back on and looks at me.
Insomnia, she says, is a disorder characterized by the persistent absence of sleep. That’s annoying. Wasn’t sleep already an absence? By falling asleep, writes Jean-Luc Nancy, I fall inside my own satiety as well as my own vacuity: I myself become the abyss and the plunge. Sleep is a negative zone, an abyss, a counterweight to the relentless positivity of waking life. And its negativity is totalizing. It dissolves the sleeper like sugar in its mouth. I slip entire into the innermost and outermost part of myself, erasing the division… I fall from sleep into sleep.
If sleeping is an absence then insomnia is the paradoxical absence of absence, falling from / falling into / falling out of / falling back into its own vacuity. The paradox is intensified by any attempt I make to describe it because when I write about absence I make it present on the page.
If I want to write about the inner workings of insomnia then I’ll have to enter the paradox. This means sabotaging my writing, opening up vacuums, generating feedback. That’s okay, because insomniac space is full of feedback. The phosphenes, the phantasms, the persistent afterimages. The crowds and ghosts and wormholes. The double movement of delirium, which creates and obliterates objects. The persistent unwritability of everything which compels me to write this essay.
Dreams
There’s another paradox. Someone I knew in high school put it this way: when you go for too long without sleeping, your mind starts throwing dreams at you. I’m walking through a patch between streetlights, and the darkness has the symbolic pull of Rorschach ink. There’s a crow hovering on the edge of my perception; my dream dictionary tells me my shadow self is nearby. In the depths of delirium, insomnia becomes indistinguishable from sleep.
In Nightwalking, Matthew Beaumont writes that the monochromatic conditions of the nighttime partially obliterate the teeming, multicolored visual details that characterize everyday life. In this obliterated world, the spatial differences that usually structure the visual field are replaced by strange temporal differences: a stop sign morphs into a pedestrian, a reflection becomes a ghost, and the insomniac run up against the limits of his explanatory powers.
But I’ve been spending more time in the dark and I’m starting to get the hang of it. The nighttime obscures some details in order to make room for others. Possums, bats, and stars come out of their hiding-places. The illuminated window above the pub discloses a cozy domesticity. And, as the roads and buildings vanish, the precolonial landscape becomes more palpable. The city slopes into the river, gesturing toward the freshwater streams flowing underfoot.
At two a.m. in the empty streets, he goes on, no longer fighting against the traffic of cars and commuters, the solitary pedestrian’s feet begin to recall the real earth. No longer fighting against the traffic of determinacy, the insomniac begins to recall a world underneath this one. Objects wriggle out from under the laws of physics. The logic of the dream takes over.
Intertwining
I ?stopped sleeping when I was seventeen. It was like something inside me had tipped upside-down. I became impervious to darkness and other circadian triggers, and I slept for three, maybe four hours a night. My body adapted quickly to the nighttime; sunlight triggered headaches and I squinted whenever I went outside.
I did all the things you’re supposed to do. Meditation, yoga, boiling lavender and smelling it. During a particularly bad episode I went to a psychologist and endured a lecture about sleep hygiene, which I took to mean that my constant wakefulness had made me dirty. I followed her instructions—deep breathing before bed, charging my phone and laptop in the living room—then I lay awake all night to spite her.
In The Intertwining, Merleau-Ponty explains how opposites tend to get entangled. Here’s how it works. Use one hand to touch the other hand, then toggle between the sensations of touching and being touched. This toggling, which can feel like alternating between the shapes in a negative space painting, tells us something about the way opposing concepts create and are created by each other.
I understand now that my resistance was part of the problem. Insomnia creates and is created by the hatred of insomnia. Instead of entering insomnia and feeling it wholly, I meditated with gritted teeth and made more of it. It never occurred to me to plunge into the feeling, to become one with it, to fall from sleeplessness into sleeplessness.
A body that lies awake all night must have good reasons for doing so. The negative reasons are obvious: babies protest bedtime because lying alone in the dark is a surefire way to get eaten. The positive reasons are harder to pick out, but you know them when you feel them. The thrill of indeterminacy, the electricity humming through the body. The fuzzy edges of the hands and fingers, signaling the collapsibility of the self into the other. It’s difficult to describe. But it’s worth staying awake for.
Ghosts
Many people have tried to write about insomniac space. In his 1572 Of Ghostes and Spirites, Swiss theologian Ludwig Lavater catalogued encounters between people and ghosts at nighttime. My personal favorite is a story about a man who couldn’t sleep after his friend’s funeral. He was lying in bed, alone [and] broad awake, when the ghost appeared. The man asked the ghost what it was. The ghost didn’t answer, but slipping off his cloathes laide him downe in the same bedde, and drew neare, as if he would haue embraced him.
Lavater doesn’t linger on the sentimental stuff. What stands out is the effort he puts into substantiating his accounts. He organizes his catalogue into a list of proofes (that spirits do appeare to men, that there happen straunge wonders and prognostications, that spirites are sometime seene and heard), and he’s often so preoccupied with their credibility that the ghost stories themselves read as an afterthought (Alexander ab Alexan-dro, an excellent Lawier, born at Naples, writeth that a certain familiar friend of his, of good credit…).
Ludwig Lavater wants to be believed. I know the feeling. But I’m learning that truth works differently in the insomniac world, which is held together by paradoxes and entanglements, ghostly embraces and other unexpected intimacies. There is no proofe. You just have to believe it. The only thing there is to say is this is what happened, take it or leave it.
Aliens
It’s three a.m. and I’m at a party, talking to an insomniac who once saw a fleet of aliens exiting a spaceship, take it or leave it. The insomniac is sitting cross-legged in the grass, propping himself up with one hand and using the other to redistribute powder through his sinuses. He tells me that the aliens looked like people but with some important, almost imperceptible difference. It had something to do with the texture of their skin, the way they reflected light.
The uncanny factor, this important and almost imperceptible difference, is a common feature among alien encounters. In 1974 farmers in Nebraska woke up to find their cattle were dead and missing organs. Eyeballs, ears, tongues, and genitals, all missing. There was no blood. They all looked entirely normal apart from the missing organs and their being dead. The night before, one of the farmers reported seeing an object in the sky which looked as if it had a little bluish-green light on each side with a glow surrounding it. Senator Floyd Haskell: the ranchers and rural residents of Colorado are concerned and frightened by these incidents.
Important, almost imperceptible differences. Sometimes the ambience of nighttime has the power to displace everything with a copy of itself. The insomniac is walking me home and the light from his phone sends shadows up his face. The trees are no longer trees but the chalky white haloes that surround them. A pedestrian walks beneath a streetlight, and her body emanates a bluish-green glow.
Idioms
A fear of the dark is a fear about ghosts and aliens, but it’s also a moral anxiety. There’s the French adage: the good people love the day and the bad the night. The rhetorical quip: how can you sleep at night? The Bible verse: for every one who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed.
There’s nothing evil about the dark except for the evil that gets put into it—e.g., the concepts disseminated by the political establishment when it wants to expand police powers. Tonight I’m writing in my bedroom in adherence with a curfew that may or may not be doing anything to limit the spread of Covid-19. The curfew was based on the idea that the kinds of people who go out at night are the kinds of people who flout health regulations. It’s impossible to know for sure whether this is true and/or if the curfew is really limiting the spread because there are so many regulations taking place at the same time. But what we do know for sure is that the curfew affects people in ways that are consistent with the political history of the curfew, which is also a history of racism, colonialism, queerphobia, and the stigmatization of sex work.
The word nightwalker has historically served as a shorthand for many of the antagonists of the Western political establishment. This strategy dates back at least to the early 1100s, when Richard of Devizes included night-walkers in his list of London’s evil-doers (actors, jesters, smooth-skinned lads, Moors, flatterers, pretty-boys, effeminates, pederasts, singing- and dancing-girls, quacks, belly-dancers, sorceresses, extortioners, night-walkers, magicians, mimes, beggars, buffoons). Associations between immorality and the nighttime have the effect of streamlining the antagonism toward “evil-doers” (queer men, sex workers, poor people), and this is how state curfews import fascist and colonialist sentiments about the people they’re applied to. These sentiments are hard to miss when you look at the political history of the curfew in Australia and around the world: until the 1950s, curfews restricted the movement of Aboriginal people in so-called Bris-bane and Perth; during the Arab Spring, they were used to suppress protestors and expand police powers. Even in the absence of state curfews, nightwalking continues to arouse persecutory anxieties. And so a moral curfew (Beaumont) perseveres, transforming the nighttime into a field of fear and anxiety.
I know that the evil associations of the nighttime are fake, but it’s hard to shake off the feeling. When you’ve been taught your whole life to believe something, you can’t help but look out for evidence that confirms that belief (if you’re looking for a UFO, you’ll find one). I can’t help but look out for that evidence, especially when it suggests that all evil takes place in a cordoned-off space and time. The sun sets and now it’s time for bad things to happen. The ranchers and rural residents of Colorado are concerned and frightened by these incidents.
Nothing to see
There’s a man sitting next to me, blocking off my exit. I’m seventeen and half-asleep, peeling my cheek off the train window. The man asks me how I’m doing and what have I been up to tonight? The engine sends a soft silver sound through my body. I take the man’s hand off my leg. I put it in his other hand.
The train is traveling between stations and it’s so dark outside that the window is reflecting the inside of the carriage back at us. I’m one of those people who dreams in the third person, so my memory of this night might as well be a dream. In the window I can see the two of us sitting side by side. His hand on my leg, my hands intertwining in my lap, touching / being touched / touching / being touched.
It’s 2016 and everyone is talking about cat calls and wolf whistles. Nocturnal predators have burrowed into the language of gender-based violence, made a home there. So in a way this is my fault. I shouldn’t be going around on my own at night because the good people love the day and the bad the night / for every one who does evil hates the light / how can you sleep at night?
I tell the man I’m doing okay and that my boyfriend will be meeting me at the station. I’m gesturing toward the empty platform that is slowing down beside us. There’s nothing to see, but he stands up to let me out anyway. I walk toward my invisible boyfriend who may or may not be there. I take or do not take his hand.
Stargazers
Plenty has been written about women traveling alone at night. I’m not a woman anymore, but the fear lingers on like an afterimage. I’m scared of the way the night makes me vulnerable. I’m so scared that it’s hard to go to sleep sometimes. That’s the reason I’m still awake and walking around. A paradox: it doesn’t make sense and I do it anyway.
There’s a fish in the Mediterranean called the stargazer. He’s called the stargazer because he has his eyes and mouth on the top of his head. His hunting tactic is to bury himself so you can only see his face in the sand, which is horrifying (look him up, I dare you). When something swims above him he jumps up and swallows it. The stargazer kills anything that comes near it, but the other fish travel to the deep sea anyway. It’s just what they do.
Maybe those fish don’t have a self-preservation instinct, which is the wherewithal to distinguish between the self and the other. Or maybe they do, but the distinction is useless in the deep sea. Maybe all the fish, stargazers included, are tuned into a collective consciousness, so they don’t pay close attention to the lives and deaths of individual organisms. It’s hard to say. Not many people have gone down there.
No sunlight can reach the floor of the deep sea, where it is night forever. Just the feeling of looking at your own body and not being able to see the edges. I myself become the abyss and the plunge.
The thing about foxes, which I just found out today, is that they’re actually really common around here. They sleep in culverts and under people’s houses and they eat out of the bins. But they’re fast, so fast that they can outrun your brain’s ability to identify them. Around here all foxes are shadows at the same time as they are foxes.
In the abstracted spatiality of the nighttime it’s okay to forget who you are. You’re allowed to become part of an anonymous consciousness and it’s okay if you don’t want to write truthfully. You’re allowed to live in the mesh of metaphor and it’s okay to see a fox and then become that fox. You’re allowed to toggle between things.
In the abstracted temporality of the nighttime you’re allowed to forget what time it is. I’m walking down the street where my parents lived before I was born. There are no streetlights on this block and the whole world is deep purple. Sometimes I wonder if I might bump into them. I would say hello, it’s me, and everything turned out okay. I would touch or not touch their hands.?
Carly Stone’s essays appear in Meanjin Quarterly, Fence, and Going Down Swinging, among other publications. They are an Axinn Fellow in Nonfiction at New York University.
