Musings of a Depressed Visionary: Insomnia -- or how I've learned to sleep only in my dreams

I can't sleep at night. I keep flipping sides on the bed, starring at images forming in my head. These used to be dreams. But they don't become dreams. They fill my head with shapes -- triangles, weird colours, sometimes a memory, or a sound. They feel like dreaming. But I am awake. Opening my eyes feels like a thunder ripping through that warm thought of drifting further. Insomnia.

I don't experience too many things in life lately. I remember it used to have a lot more in it, but perhaps the most difficult thing to stomach is that dreams are what I am looking forward to more than life itself. And yet, even when I do sleep... I don't dream. The weird shapes and symbols never really materialize into images. They just go away and then I am bathed in darkness. It is as if my brain goes blank for the few minutes it gets to sleep, and does not want to put any effort into it. Then, I wake up. As if a scream is piercing my head, and I suddenly come to be. Fully conscious. Had I dreamt?

It's still 3am. What I thought was sleep had only lasted a few minutes. I try to imagine what it would be like to dream. Even a nightmare would still be an experience worth imagining. I used to be good at imagining things. Now even this seems like a door sealed shut behind me, and I am supposed to be going out of it.

And so I do. It's a hall, surrounded in a deep blanket of darkness. There are no windows, no other doors. It leads nowhere. Turning back only brings me to the same place, as if through a mirror. There is no exit. Perhaps I am dreaming this time.

I wake up. Time is 3.12am. Maybe I dreamt that I was having a dream. But then again, I consciously remember trying to force it into my head. But my empty imagination was staring back at me and my empty hall. Perhaps it would be good if I could populate my empty hall with something. I try bunnies, but they don't fit. They are really out of place. Really, is this the best you can do? I try a colour. Red does it. For a moment. My hall is red now; dark and red, like the rooms photographs get produced in. But dark red is also the colour in which those proto-dreams I still can see -- the symbols -- are in. My empty hall is now full of weird shapes. And then it all goes dark.

Something is walking on me. I wake up to scratch myself. There is nothing there, but the sensation of crawling is ever so real. They are walking on my legs, my hands, my back, my hair. I feel that a shower will help me relieve myself of this strange itchy emotion, but that would only wake me up worse.

3.41am. I spent some time on the pc, looking at serene landscapes, trying to fire up my imagination into being. I close my eyes, yet the feeling of becoming one with the picturesque valley does not really embrace me. I close the laptop. Give it one more go.

But the clock is ticking. Every single tick becomes my obsession. I try to think of something that is stronger than the ticking bomb outside and inside my brain. It's impossible. I try to create some radical dreamlike explanation of what it is that I am listening to. It's the walking sound of a person outside the house. Perhaps she is going someplace interesting. Perhaps I should follow her. What would it be like dreaming of something entirely abstract or mysterious? She is going to meet a man and discuss something fascinating.

Yet, my dream doesn't follow. I am staying here, in this room, under that damned clock. I never get to leave the room. Instead, I fixate on the clock and its ticking. She is leaving. I have to do something! Yet I can't even instruct my head to follow her tick-tock walking sound. And as she goes away, I am still here. Fully conscious of my failed attempts to induce a dream-like state that could help me into sleeping.

Maybe I am nocturnal. Most mammals (except for most primates), are nocturnal. I am a mammal, therefore this could be a logical explanation. Ever heard of those apocryphal stories of 'evolution', in which arachnophobia is explained as an evolutionary trait of certain cave-dwelling primates, which were biologically instructed to avoid arachnids? Perhaps it is the same with me. Perhaps the sensation of insects crawling on me is an evolutionary trait taken too far.

I am in the cave now. I try walking not towards the light, but deeper, where the spiders are. And as I walk, I kind of drift off deeper and deeper, and deeper, and deeper. And nothing happens. Because I can't really dream. I have forgotten how to dream.

And before it's half past four, I will be awake again. And again. Until the morning comes to force me standing, my breakfast being a cofee break from an agonising night of insomnia.

How do you cope with insomnia? What are your own experiences and how did you come to terms with it or solve it?

This original work by Amadeus In Denial is licensed under a Creative Commons (Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0) License. All work created 2006-2011.