On Insomnia

When i say, "i suffer from insomnia" to someone, they always look for reasons. In diet or in habits or in mood, in obvious places, in well-surveyed areas. I rarely meet someone who can grasp that there is no cause for night-time restlessness.

The restlessness inhabits and infects one, it propels one to lurch up from the mattress, to cast the clothes on the floor, to fight and wrestle with the pillow.

Is it depression? No, it is something deeper and more vast than anything implied by that word. That word implies a restful, dark hollow, a valley that one can slowly traverse, never raising one's eyes to the horizon. My experience is rather a dreadful, punishing activeness that grips the body and poisons the mind, so that thoughts are not thought and let go, but regarded and over-regarded, monitored and over-monitored, in duplicate and triplicate to an unbearable infinity of infinities, each thought interrupted by shoals of others, flitting like dull, lumpen fish in a filthy ocean enfused with the mud of over-familiarity.

Because the inside of my brain is sickeningly over-familiar, because that interiority and that subjective pause, represented by the pre-sleep stage, are somehow appaling and overwhelming, because my limbs apparently still want to wrestle, my legs still want to twitch ceaselessly like those of a man shot in the belly...

Because of all this i cannot sleep.

Fragments:
The chick who went on a killing spree. By some pallisade or sidestreet, beneath a terrace.
As always happens on these occasions it seemed unreal. The goths were still joking, for a full minute after the shooting had already begun, not noting the import of it.
Sylvia the goth girl was halfway through a joke, and her cracked laugh bit down on it.
To realise as though half-seriously... the chick had already drawn a snubnose from a purse and began firing pointblank. Quick, like a scorpion sting. Manic, n we only came in here to shelter from the rain.
Car backfiring. Firework. Some prankster, bored, is letting off a firecracker.
Artschool. The chick who came into to look for folios along the shelves at the edges. Tall, brownhaired, somewhat geeky with protuberant front teeth, breasts stretching top.
Excitable. Can't move close to her.
Who was she?