Insomnia: I lost the gift of sleep

After a decade of sleepless nights, I’ve learnt to live with my affliction

Ten years ago I lost the gift of sleep. I had left my full-time job and begun work on a difficult memoir, one that involved going to and from a war zone. I was under stress. I went to the doctor, who prescribed Zopiclone. But the sleeping pills didn’t work, so I stopped taking them. I assumed that sleep would return in its own time, but it never did.

Last night I slept in a new place and, as usual with new places, woke at four in the morning. The night before I had slept even less. I had a flight to catch the next day. I went to bed at midnight and at 3.30 I was awake and staring at the thin strip of street light between the curtains. I was anxious about the flight. Then I remembered that I had left a sentence unfinished in a piece of writing. Small anxieties stretched into long worms, burrowing through the brain. As the hours passed I began to feel the sensation with which I’ve become familiar: a nervous tension, a rising nausea. The more I chase sleep, the more it hides from me. Sleep is a temperamental creature: quicksilver, quixotic, stubborn and seductive.

Yes, those are bad nights.

Then there are the good nights. I don’t mean the nights when sleep comes and stays with me, though those are good, too. I mean the nights when insomnia feels like something special. One night in December as I prepared for bed I opened the curtain and saw the first flakes of snow float down. At four o’clock I was awake. I left my bed, pulled on some jeans and a coat and stepped out into the street. Thick snow reflected the light of a bright Moon. I walked up to a park at the top of the hill. Ahead, a vixen ploughed the same path and turned to look at me every few seconds. She was watching me, working out my intentions, keeping a distance between us. But that night, the only two creatures in a whitened world, it looked like something else, as though she wanted me to follow her.

In the decade during which I searched for my lost gift, I wandered out into the night on many occasions. There I met other insomniacs in parks and open spaces across London. Sometimes I drove through the streets, saw the single light burning in a row of darkened houses and recognised the lonely beacon of the insomniac. I practised something called “good sleep hygiene”, bathed in lavender baths and drank tisanes of valerian. I abandoned coffee after midday, bought earplugs. I became intensely aware how obsessed we are with sleep. We tell each other to sleep well and in the morning ask: “How did you sleep?” We all, not just insomniacs, count the number of hours we’ve had as obsessively as an anorexic counting calories. Parents suffer sleep deprivation, buy books and train their children to sleep alone, in the dark and on command.

The truth is that I never did much care for sleep. It feels like time wasted. When I do sleep, I dream intensely. I have sometimes been able to stop and start dreams, to think “oh, hell, it’s just a dream” and skydive from a light aircraft. If that sounds fun, it is. But if the dreams are vivid, so are the nightmares. Sleep leaves me exhausted as often as it leaves me rested.

Yet I envy sleepers. In Sam Kiley’s book about the war in Afghanistan, Desperate Glory, he writes about sleep the night before a battle, the “lucky ones” who manage it, and everyone else. In the middle of the book I came across a photograph of a soldier in full battledress, holding a rifle, head propped against a wall — asleep. What I felt in that moment — hugely and with a surge of hot shame — was envy. In the end, Kiley writes, sleep is learnt, you catch it when you can — because your life depends on it.

My life does not depend on whether or not I sleep. Kai Mansaray, a young orthopaedic surgeon, is also an insomniac. Several nights a week, dawn finds him standing in his yard, watching the Sun rise. His patients and his career depend on his ability to function with precision, but he is in danger of being defeated by lack of sleep. Luckily, Kai Mansaray doesn’t exist. He is a character in my novel. To research his work I spent two weeks in an operating theatre. The effects of insomnia I wrote from experience: the faint and persistent nausea, the inability to concentrate, the shakes and the irritability.

In the search for a cure I discovered that my problem is called “sleep maintenance insomnia”. I can fall asleep, but not stay asleep. At some point I discovered that a third of people suffer from insomnia. So many millions of people — when do we begin to reconsider what is normal? I did not know it, but I had reached a turning point in my relationship with sleep.

You see, the way we sleep now is not the way we once slept. In La Nuit au Moyen Age, the French historian Jean Verdon writes how, during the long nights of the Middle Ages, sleeping habits were quite different. Before artificial lighting people went to bed earlier and didn’t sleep through the night. They often rose in the early hours of the morning to set the ovens and bake bread, perhaps to meet or to make love — for sleep was a communal activity and moments of privacy had to be searched out.

Then along came Thomas Edison, who in 1881, at the Paris Exposition, demonstrated his new invention — the electric light bulb. Edison changed the way we sleep in ways that could scarcely have been imagined. In an era of accelerating industrial expansion, the race was on. The first lighting systems were installed in factories and soon after central electricity stations were built in London and New York. Electric light enabled work to continue beyond the hours of sunlight. To fit with the new demands, sleep was regularised. We became monophasic, sleeping in a single, consistent block just once in 24 hours.

But just as it was not always thus, so it is not the same everywhere. In many countries people sleep twice a day, or they used to. Only a fraction of the working population of Spain still take a siesta. In Mexico the Government cut the siesta for 50,000 public servants. As China emerges as an industrial superpower, the xiuxi (rest) has vanished.

Still, in many countries there is nothing unusual in the sight of people sleeping in public. Africa, Asia — these are the polyphasic societies where people literally sleep like babies, intermittently throughout the day. In West Africa I sat for 20 minutes opposite a snoozing clerk. Perhaps he was taking a legitimate break and chose to do it asleep at his desk. At the time I silently cursed him. In our world, time is money.

Now I know that it is us, the scheduled sleepers of the West, who are at odds with what is natural and are paying the price. It turns out that our lives do depend on it. We are permanently sleep deprived and it is killing us. Sleep deprivation has been linked with early death, Alzheimer’s and heart disease. One day, perhaps, we will wake up and realise what we’re doing to ourselves.

In Paris in the 18th century people demonstrated their anger against authority by smashing street lanterns: artificial light, a symbol not of civilisation but oppression. I don’t want to sleep just because everyone else is asleep. I want to sleep in my own time and on my own terms. So now — unless I have a flight to catch — I have abandoned the futility of chasing sleep. The day I saw that I didn’t have a disorder, but was normal, I decided to stop worrying about it. I went out and bought a breadmaker.

Aminatta Forna is the author of The Memory of Love, to be published by Bloomsbury in April

Sleep hygiene: rules for a good night’s rest

Try to maintain a routine – get up at the same time every morning, and that includes weekends.

Avoid strenuous exercise in the evening.

Go to bed only when you are sleepy.

Some people find reading in bed relaxing, but don’t work or watch television in the bedroom.

Avoid stimulants such as coffee, tea, nicotine and chocolate for at least four hours before bedtime.

If you don’t drop off within 30 minutes, get up and do something relaxing, such as reading, until you feel tired.

Don’t lie in bed turning things over in your mind – if you can, get up and deal with what is bothering you.

Avoid naps during the day, but if you must have one, limit it to a maximum of 20 minutes and take it before 5pm.

Don’t eat after 8pm.

Don’t drink. More than the equivalent of two small glasses of wine upsets the natural rhythms of sleep.

Dr Mark Porter

Aminatta Forna, The Times 06-02-2010

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