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.