When sleeping becomes an impossible dream
ANYONE who has suffered through the wide-eyed hell of a sleepless night will find something painfully recognisable in Marina Benjamin’s searingly honest memoir about her years battling for rest.
But perhaps conversely for a book ostensibly about wakefulness, Insomnia has a dreamlike quality, structured as a series of fragmented and sometimes unrelated thoughts and memories. It’s as if we have a window into her vivid yet often convoluted nocturnal musings, when her “mind is on fire… It is as if all the lights in my head had been lit at once, the whole engine coming to life, messages flying, dendrites flowering, synapses whipping snaps of electricity across my brain.” It’s at once both beautiful and unsettling.
Benjamin skips erratically from recollections about the early years of her marriage to lengthy philosophical reflections on the nature of art, beauty, truth and love, all explored through their relationship to sleep. For an insomniac, everything revolves around sleep: it’s a constant obsession. Even her husband is known only as “Zzz”, defined by his absence in the hours that plague her. He is a “shadow-shaped mass across the bed, my rock, my stay”, in their later relationship they “had become continents in our own right: miniature tectonic entities, separated by a swathe of night”.
The skittish quality leads to moments of stunning poetry, suddenly interrupted by passages of fevered introspection. “I start to question what I am about. Why am I in this house, this bed, this marriage?” she asks. “Why, when I look back over a string of formative selves, all those era-defined embodiments of me pulling in different directions, do I find myself on this path and not on any other?”
But questions are left unresolved. It feels unsatisfactory. Much like a night spent tossing and turning, in fact. You are left desperately craving resolution.
Which turns out to be the point. For at its heart this is a book about desire, and the constant dynamic tussle between hunger and satiation. What does it mean to exist on the threshold of darkness and light?
Benjamin grapples with the very definition of what it means to be an insomniac and decides that it is, for her, a state of want: “an excess of longing and an excess of thinking”, “the last groover on the dancefloor, still going at it after everyone else has collapsed in a heap or gone home”. A wakeful night leaves her “prickling with longing”.
It’s through this prism of desire that Benjamin revaluates the world, and her place in it. Love is a form of insomnia, in that “both are states that pitch us face-to-face with a stinging absence”. Fairytales, Jungian archetypes, classical mythology, colonialism and feminism: all can be re-evaluated in this new world order of 3am thinking.
In many ways she has produced a love letter to an affliction she is trying to understand. While her condition is “suffocating, an oppression” and she “yearns for the replenishment provided by sleep”, she also thrills in the “excitement and danger” of the insomniac’s existence on the borderland. Sleep may well elude her, but it also defines her.