Famous insomniacs include William Wordsworth, Emily Brontë, Vladimir Nabokov and Marcel Proust so could there be a positive side to sleeplessness, asks Marina Benjamin
“A bad night is not always a bad thing,” wrote the late science fiction author Brian Aldiss. A long-time insomniac, he appears to have been searching for the silver lining of a condition that, in chronic form, can suck the lifeblood from you.
One does not have to try hard to build the case against insomnia – the way its vampire clutch leaves just a hollow shell of you to ghost walk through your days; the way it trips you up and compromises your cognitive integrity. But Aldiss was after compensation. The “great attraction of insomnia”, he observed, is that “the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instinct and feelings; as with the dawn, a little honey is allowed to ooze between the lips of the sandwich, a little of the stuff of dreams to drip into the waking mind.”
[Sleep is] the most moronic fraternity in the world … [a] nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius
Related: Finally, a cure for insomnia?
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