(Not) Sleeping On It

Sleep-wise, I've had an abysmal week. I suffer from a kind of insomnia known as early morning wakefulness, which means that I have no trouble getting to sleep, but staying asleep is a real problem. For the past six months or more, I've been waking up in the mornings at 4:00 or 4:30, unable to return to sleep (this is a cycle I've had periodically for more than 20 years).

However, this week my wake-up time has inched its way into the unreasonable zone. First I was waking up at 3:30, and then 3:00, then 2:30, and the night before last I was up at 1:30, just 2 1/2 hours after I'd gone to bed. Up and awake and alert, with no chance of going back to sleep.

Today I listened to a podcast on sleep disorders, hosted by the New York Academy of Sciences' podcast Science & the City. The opening segment was with journalist David Randall, author of Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep, who was inspired to delve into this topic because of his own sleepwalking issues. Randall discussed how the invention of the lightbulb has divorced modern sleep patterns from the cycle of the sun, by which our brains and sleep cycle are naturally regulated, as shown by experiments in which subjects are sequestered in an environment lighted to copy the sun's cycle. In those cases, sujects fall asleep just after sundown and wake up around daybreak.

However, there's one more behavior these subjects exhibit that I didn't anticipate. They tend to wake up around midnight or one in the morning, and stay awake for about an hour before returning to bed. (The natural phenomenon of this "first and second sleep" are documented in the Canterbury Tales and in 16th century French physicians' manuals.) During this awake time, subjects reported feeling quite good and indulging in "me" time. Researcher who drew their blood found the subjects' exhibited heightened levels of pro-lactin, a hormone which is linked to a feeling of contentment.

This was news to me...instead of feeling robbed of my sleep and desperate to return to it, I will now try to think of my middle-of-the-night awake time as an indulgence of free time for myself, a biologically-programmed way for me to get the downtime I am definitely not getting during the day (and perhaps that is why my body/mind keeps waking me in the night, for forced downtime?).

Coincidentally, today I also read an article on the Writer's Digest website, entitled "Do You Dream In Paragraphs? Mine Your Dreams For Writing Ideas," about ways to get creative ideas from your dreams. I've written about this in the past on this blog, so I won't cover that territory today, but if you are interested, check out the article at Writer's Digest.  As for me, I haven't fixed any poetry dilemmas in my wakefulness this past week, but I was able to solve a problem I've been having with an analytical task for my linguistics course. That liminal time between awake and asleep (which I've doubled with my first and second sleeps now!) is  a boon to the mind's flexibility--I'll remember that too when I undoubtedly wake in the middle of the night tonight!

Insomnia & Writing

So it's probably not a surprise, given that my first full-length book is entitled The Insomniac's Weather Report, that I suffer from insomnia. Funnily enough, I wasn't suffering from it during the time I worked on that book but was instead using my powers of recall (which are sharper when I've been sleeping well, in case you are wondering). However since finishing that book, I have once again had my bouts of the dreaded sleeplessness.

So I was interested in poet Lisa Russ Spaar's essay on insomnia and the poet in a recent edition of the New York Times. Spaar points out that while poets may or may not be more prone to insomnia than the general population is, certainly poets are more inclined to write about it, which may be why writing and insomnia are so strongly linked in our minds. Or it may be that poets, writers, and artists are bigger insomniacs after all.

Considering the purported sources of insomnia, the romantic hyperstimulation versus the corporeal breathing disorder, Spaar wonders whether an insomniac poet (or a poetic insomniac) would want to cure her own insomnia were it possible, giving up the "liminal hours between dark and dawn" in favor of health and sanity?

For me, the answer is yes, yes I would, given a choice, get cured of my insomnia. I am perfectly capable of waking up in the middle of the night to write down a good line or word and then going soundly back to sleep, all without venturing onto the desert island of insomnia. On the other hand I have written poems in the insomniac's suspended state, poems that wouldn't have been written otherwise. But they weren't better than ones written without suffering from sleeplessness, and I may even have missed other poems on days after which my nocturnal hyperactivity has rendered me too exhausted to string together a coherent sentence, let alone write. But who said that poetry had to be coherent anyway?

So I'm interested to hear from you writers out there. Insomnia: yes or no? And if yes, cure: yes or no?