There is no cure for insomnia. Like rain, or luck, or mercy, it comes and goes at will. There is “sleep hygiene,” the very wording of which seems to chide the insomniac for dirty habits, and which, more insultingly still, doesn’t help. Watching Samantha Harvey obliterate the advice that’s so often and so smugly offered to the exhausted—“Have you thought about a blackout blind?” “Why don’t you spray some lavender on your pillow?”—is one of the grim pleasures of “The Shapeless Unease,” Harvey’s new memoir about a year spent chasing a basic human need. “Have I thought about earplugs?” Harvey says at one point, echoing a friend. “Maybe that’s my problem, that I don’t think enough about earplugs.”
But, when night falls, Harvey grows desperate; she’ll try anything once, twice, a hundred times. She brews tea. She works on jigsaw puzzles. She smiles, to signal to her brain that she is content, and she attempts to practice “nocturnal forgiveness,” the temporary “letting go of all wrongs and all guilt or blame.” Insomnia turns Harvey into a haggler, she writes, and then into a beggar. “Maybe I can smuggle sleep in,” she fantasizes, flipping onto her stomach. “Maybe the night won’t notice me.” The book is a harrowing portrait of an intolerable problem—although there’s solace, too, in reading about somebody else’s abject 3 a.m.s. (Not that Harvey ever looks at the clock. “I usually know the time,” she writes, horrifyingly, by “the texture of my thoughts as the night abrades them.”)
Harvey, whose first novel, “The Wilderness,” addressed the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease, is a traverser of mental wastelands—those familiar, incommunicable terrains in which you feel, somehow, both more and less like yourself. This book seems appropriately messy-haired and wild-eyed. As Harvey documents her emotional extremes (at one point, she howls like a wolf), the language itself unravels; associations spiral, voices blur. The narrator, told to cultivate a “yes” mind-set, lies in bed repeating the word until its letters melt into a row of “eyes.” “Closeyoureyescloseyoureyes . . . ,” she commands. “Close you’re yes. Close you are, yes.”
Anyone who has lain awake the night before a big test will recognize such manic flourishes. Harvey captures the 4 a.m. bloom of magical thinking; stories proliferate within stories. There are shreds of a fictional piece that Harvey is drafting about a man who loses his wedding ring while robbing an A.T.M. A conversation with a friend is presented as screenplay dialogue. Harvey recounts the onset of her sleep disorder in a faux-scientific case study; a few pages later, her telling of the death, by neglect, of her childhood dog has the bewitched sparseness of a fable. Such writing seems to mirror the logic of the sleep-starved brain: casting about, circling, trying things out and then dropping them. Atmosphere—Harvey’s despair and frustration, an overpowering perfume—holds the parts together.
Poetry provides some consolation. (The narrator, seeking a détente with consciousness, adopts a phrase from Philip Larkin: “the million-petalled flower of being here.”) Doctors are useless, mostly, except for when they prescribe sedatives, which achieve the desired aim for two glorious weeks and then stop working. Harvey attributes her sleeplessness to a roulette of stresses, including Brexit. But it becomes clear that the root problem is her terror of death. After losing a cousin to epilepsy, she types him up a letter about what he can expect as he starts to decompose. “A dash of vanishing-dust, a choral song of death, a transformation, and Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo, lo-and-behold, the fingers that had not long been blue begin a creeping shift to something blacker. . . .” This is deranged. One feels deranged, reading it, and part of the book’s disturbia may derive from its refusal to stay confined between its own covers. Is it not true that we all must die? What’s to stop our defenses from crumbling, our rest from evaporating? The shapeless unease, it turns out, is contagious.
We are living through an epoch of sleep, interrupted. In an online speech to students at Harvard’s school of public health, Donn Posner, a Stanford associate professor and the president of Sleepwell Consultants, explained that the coronavirus pandemic has conjured a “perfect storm of sleep problems.” Normally, between thirty and thirty-five per cent of Americans experience short-term insomnia; those numbers, Posner suggested, are likely increasing, thanks to the rhythmlessness, loneliness, and heightened anxiety of quarantine.
Unrest has a miasmic quality, like a viral cloud. “Think of sleep problems as infection,” Posner said. “We want to jump on it quickly . . . lest it spread.” Yet even this metaphor proves hard to contain. If insomnia behaves like a transmittable illness, it also reproduces the sensations of a “cure” for that transmission: self-isolation. There are the same borderless hours, the same waves of panic. “The night is itself without narrative,” Harvey observes. During bouts of little to no shut-eye, she reports, time moves “less like a stream flowing somewhere and more like water swilling in a shallow pool.” People lucky enough to be sheltering at home may recognize that feeling. With its double binds and reversals, life in a pandemic feels beholden to dream logic, to the unreason of lying awake in the dark.
Harvey’s stuckness, though, has a particular source, which she locates in the distinction between anxiety and fear. Anxiety responds to hypothetical danger (the idea of a tiger), whereas fear signals present danger (a tiger in the flesh). Harvey contends that the peculiar madness of sleep deprivation stems from the way anxiety about not sleeping summons the inability to sleep, at which point fear of not sleeping becomes rational—but also irrational, because more vigilance intensifies the threat. (If that makes little sense to you now, try figuring it out when you’ve been awake for forty hours.) For all the formlessness of Harvey’s unease, then, her insomnia does, in the end, have a shape: “a vicious circle of Euclidean perfection.”
A sleepless night is thus a breeding ground for paradox—and Harvey, who studied philosophy as a postgraduate, makes a mighty, poignant attempt at intellectual rigor, as if the insanity of her ailment were best glimpsed through weaves of deduction. “I try to find a key to release me from it,” Harvey writes. “I try to solve the logic problem that is now my life.” One can almost diagram her efforts: If the narrator’s inability to nod off (x) has something to do with uncertainty (y), which has to do with loss (z)—of her cousin, her country—and if that loss (z) stands in for death (d), then . . . Such anxious games clarify the contradictions of insomnia. A fear of deprivation can steal everything away, and a terror of nonexistence can prove so acute that one craves temporary nonexistence, simply to relieve it.
But understanding these paradoxes doesn’t help Harvey sleep. The book seems at least as interested in the limits of reason as it is in reason itself—at one point, Harvey describes “a complex but specific compression of . . . futility, despair, tenacity,” which is as good an evocation as any of how it might feel to continually deploy logic against illogic. Surrender, Harvey realizes, can’t be willed or forced: you can’t think yourself through insomnia. But you might try to reconcile yourself to “this constant crackling and sparking and exploding of mind”—to view your awareness as a pure and abundant resource. Harvey, like a dragon on a treasure pile, begins to guard her mountain of sentience, striving for the relaxation that might, in time, embolden a thief to take it. “I am alive,” she thinks. As consolations go, it is the sort of limp sentiment one associates with “sleep hygiene,” until the petrified grace in it starts to stir. “I can feel my life being on.”
One night, a year or so into her insomnia, Harvey falls effortlessly asleep. The next night, it happens again. The narrator compares the end of her bedroom vigils to walking out from under the arc of an enormous wave. Writing, Harvey reflects, was her ally on the journey to dry land. “I am sane when I write,” she explains. “I proceed from some open and elusive subconscious formlessness roughly called ‘me’, definable only by being nothing and nowhere, just the silence in which shapes move.” The silence in which shapes move. To read Harvey is to grow spoiled on gorgeous phrases; she’s an author you want to encounter with pencil in hand. But this lovely description of the creative process also made me laugh. Harvey, that “open . . . formlessness,” herself emerges as the shapeless unease. This is the evasive “cure for insomnia,” she writes: that “no things are fixed.” For Harvey, self-expression gives rise to a form of self-reconciliation. Reading her book, I thought of a trick that sometimes helps when the world’s ills seem to throng at my bedside. “Relax,” I’ll tell my brain, as kindly as I can. “It’s just me.”
