An essay on insomnia and inspiration

*The assignment for this essay was basically to ask a question/make an observation and ramble whatever came to mind about it.  No joke.  It was awesome.  (Once I got over telling myself it was awful.)*

Kiersten M. Lawrence

17 September 2010

Honors English 160 – Personal Essay

Conspiring With Insomnia

Writing has always come easily to me.  My mind loves shaping words, and being shaped by the words trapped in its nooks.  The verbal language of humanity is entity all its own.  It is a living thing, one that cannot be contained even by the most basic of human functions—such as eating (is there a person alive who hasn’t talked with their mouth full?), or sleep.

Why do many writers seem to find—often to their frustration—that their inspiration flows the most freely at night?  Is it because we are surrounded by darkness and relative silence, alone in an environment where we are practically breathing possibility?  The night is a blank slate, a void canvas.  Our medium is pure imagination:  thoughts colored by the experiences of our day, stilted by the dozy state of half-consciousness between full alertness and full oblivion, dreams already pressing at their edges.  The music playing in the background—music from our own heads, from the mp3 player lulling us into another world, from the television in our parents’ room—channels our rambles of thoughts more easily into emotion, and that firework-filled river we fjord again and again and again, until we have at our fingertips not mere unbridled thoughts and feelings, but their defined avatar:  words.

We think we can make anything out of words.  We bring things together and tear them down with words; we perforate feelings; we paint landscapes with words.  The human language is, at times, in the pens of some, almost as versatile and vivid as thought itself.  Words grip us in a vise—a vise of emotion, clever masques that can arm themselves with new meaning depending from where they flow, the taste of the air through which they travel, the pre-present emotions they brush up against when they reach our ears.  They are often too easily roused, by anger or resent-ment or even passionate adulation.  We can be too hasty in the unsheathing of our vocabulary and the memories we often unleash with it.  In these moments we do not take the time to write; our words are only clumsy instruments chiseled into ugly poisoned thorns or careless lumps of nothing, hurled at an opponent or dropped into the ears of a lover, saying everything we think we should mean but might not feel in our heart of hearts.  We can mold words into many things we crave, as well; into castles and people and twilight trysts and heroic epics and magical wonders and food to tantalize the senses of metaphor.  How many stories—real or false—come to breathe of their own accord under strokes of the pen or the clicks of a keyboard?

An imagination’s best friend is Insomnia.  Sometimes Imagination  goes so far as to summon Insomnia to its aid in the darkness, as insomnia is the greatest foe of sleep, which reduces imagination into roaming the wordless universe of Dreams.  A writer’s imagination is frequently plagued with the inability to think long-term.  Imagination, when it is bubbling over with words in the dusky half-oblivion of sleep-seeking nighttide, fails to ponder the ramifications of depri-ving its host body of sleep; it fails to understand that exhaustion only exacerbates the limits of its host’s ability to translate pictures and thoughts and emotions—however down-to-earth or however preposterous—into literary coherence.

I read a quote by James Thurber recently where he said he “never quite knows when [he’s] not writing”; that he would simply be staring off into space, or eating dinner, and his wife would scold him and tell him literally to “stop writing”.  Why is night, for me, the most fertile ground?  Is it because at night we are most alone?  In a quiet house we always feel as though we must be the only ones awake in the world.  Even in a noisy house, if we’re in bed listening to the party rambling through self-sustained zest downstairs or across the street, we always feel as if we are the only one with the presence to think real thoughts.  Emotions string themselves tighter around us in the moments when we feel we can let them out in safety, without fear of recoil.  Is it because we have just run through a busy day, dipping our bucket in and out of our cistern of words, into the top of the well where floats the shallow oil of functionality, the words we use for small talk and business and utilitarian communication, and it is not until we have the time in the dark, sleepless, to sink our bucket deep into the well where we find the shadowy, shifting depths of rhapsody and epiphany and bewilderment.  Do we not have time to think before bed?  Is it untrue that on days when our bodies are successfully busy, cycling through a frenzied schedule or engaged in intently physical activity, our mind is often subdued, busying itself with the mundane rambles of to-do-lists?  Does it not stand to just as exemplary reason that in the moments of our corporeal form’s greatest silence, our minds scream in any medium, just to fill the abyss?  Peace is so rare.  Imagination is incontinent when our bodies have been perfectly organized.  

It twists the frustrations of sleeplessness and noise-filled thunderstorms into vivid, fatigue-christened perfection.  Just as we have finished being observant, we find we must invent our own creations for the observation of others—even if those others are only wisps of abstract unreality inside that creation.  

Night feels like an eternity, a secreted vault that sponsors me with endless amorphous frag-ments which prance with excitement like a Coke commercial in my mind, begging voicelessly to be commended to paper or laptop screen, disseminated into the mold of words.  No matter how drab  or flimsy or outright nonsensical it seems upon review in the light of the following day, I am always allowed to drift off with the satisfaction of feeling accomplished.

Writers live for blinks of epiphany, especially fiction writers who can’t get all their ideas from plain hard thinking.  When I was little—even before I really considered myself a writer—I used to love going to bed, for the sole reason that it was like dreaming with my eyes open.  My fertile young mind percolated fantastic chronicles of kidnapped dinosaurs who found their life’s purpose in a circus as a joint act with a ribbon-bedecked ballerina, or a tale of two orphans and their pet tree left to resurrect the ruins of their war-torn city atop the clouds.  Even through my teens, I would devote several brief increments of time during the day to simply looking forward to (as I thought of it sometimes) sleepless dreaming.  I recall one saga about a city, carefully divided by a complex caste system, and whose citizens could never leave, that went on for nearly two years of pre-slumber meanderings in my imagination.  No matter how I tried to continue these stories in broad daylight while cleaning house, I could never invest myself quite as wholly.  Every twist or scene I incorporated during the daytime never stood the test against the contortions of my imagination when let loose in darkness.

It saddens me to realize, as I have in the process of writing that last paragraph, that I no longer value those whimsical wanderings to quite the same degree.  Stress and frustration have enthroned themselves in its place.  Insomnia has become a “bane of my existence” rather than a coconspirator of opportunity.  My self-ordained schedule forces desperation for sleep.  Sleep has become half of my reason for being awake.  I function on five or six hours when I say I’d like eight and am dreaming of ten and a half.  The ethereality of that unsleeping-yet-unwaking hypnosis comes less and less often as I force-feed my brain sleepiness with exhaustion and melatonin instead of letting it take its own path to find the welcome catatonia.  I seek to shape words, words to tell a story, by intelligence only, instead of mixing careful cognizance with bewildering inspiration, and even I can sense a faint cadaverous smell about those words, characters who know they are doomed to rot away unfinished in the depths of my hard drive, never to be brought to closure or great adventures.  Even as my writing seems ever more urgent, dreaming takes the backseat to everything else I feel I must pack into my brain as I precariously tiptoe over the cusp of adult-hood.  I’ve stopped dreaming-while-awake, and to my perpetual frustration I’ve largely ceased writing prose that I genuinely love.  The night is a friend, but it is not long enough to afford me all the time I need for both sleep and creative roaming.  Insomnia has become a vicious antagonist instead of an intriguing coconspirator.  

Am I relearning to dream?  Perhaps.  But even the process, itself a kind of twilight, a darkness, might be comparable with possibility.