428 Sleepless Nights Quotes For Those Nights You Can't Sleep

Insomnia has this romantic way of making the moon feel like perfect company.

When I go to sleep at night, I am sleeping only 3 percent and 97 percent I am thinking of thousands of whys, ifs, and

Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it. I drank more and continued my mantra. ‘Stop thinking’, swig, ’empty

Sleeping is so hard when you can’t stop thinking.

Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.

Dear Mind, please stop thinking so much at night, I need sleep.

RIP to all the hours of sleep I’ve lost to overthinking.

You’re up overthinking about someone who isn’t thinking about you. Go to sleep.

My nights are for overthinking. My mornings are for oversleeping.

Nothing is louder than overthinking after midnight.

It’s a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids.

A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.

I try to distract myself from reality by wielding an active imagination. Then I have nightmares.

Trust = telling someone about the things that make you sleepless.

If you’re worried and you can’t sleep
Just count your blessings instead of sheep…

In living this way, we discover new opportunities for comfort and enjoyment. Where the younger person may have tossed and turned throughout a sleepless night, the older man or woman can possibly feel the pleasure that comes from lying on a good mattress, resting one’s weary bones and overcharged intellect, whether or not one sleeps throughout the hours of darkness.

I hate people who can go to sleep as soon as they close their eyes. Like, that takes me 4 hours, 600 position changes, and

I’ve always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up

Loneliness, insomnia, and change: the fear of these is even worse than the reality.

I crave stillness,
And yet I fear the moment
Stillness turns into boredom,
And the moment boredom
Turns into loneliness.

Ralph reflected for a moment on the similarities between loneliness and insomnia — how they were both insidious, cumulative, and divisive, the friends of despair

I knew this feeling, the 2 a.m. loneliness that I’d practically invented.

I think the most common cause of insomnia is simple; it’s loneliness.

It feels lonely to be up when everyone else is sleeping.

Losing a grasp in reality or being misunderstood, being lonely always rises from isolation, dark, and frightening nights. They are scary and full of deep

You are the biggest enemy of your own sleep.

A stupid man stays awake all night pondering his problems; he’s worn out when morning comes and whatever was, still is.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

Insomnia is an increasing problem. I’ve become swayed that sleep disorders are conceivably the most unnoticed, ignored, underrated reason of health as well as performance problems in the place of work.

My problem is with the night,
incessant, rickety, desolate nights,
and not with the darkness.
There’s a lot of light inside me.

The problem is that people can’t sleep when they want to, but if they are forbidden to do so, they can’t help dropping off. So the method consisted of keeping your eyes wide open and fixing your gaze on some point of the bedroom wall. If by any chance you shut your eyes, hundreds of nasty little demons would pour out of the spot and eat you up. And you are absolutely not allowed to treat this as a joke.. According to Marc, you invariably fall asleep after ten minutes max, unless of course you replace the little devils with little fairies, which would stop you falling asleep at all.

My brain at 3 AM:
I can see you’re trying to sleep, so I would like to offer you a selection of every memory, unresolved issue, or things you should have said or done today as well as in the past 10 years.

The Sleep Problem today is not as much about being able to sleep for 7 hours; it is more about being able to sleep when you are ready to.

Late at night when all the world is sleeping
I stay up and think of you
And I wish on a star
That somewhere you are
Thinking of me

I think of you at 2 a.m. when I can’t sleep and I wish you were there to hold me.

I lie awake at night thinking of you.

And so, now, it is almost midnight of the first day, and I have broken my resolution to go to bed early – postponing sleep, and thereby the inevitable waking up in tomorrow. Another device of escape.

I thought calming thoughts and visualized serene places. Eventually, I found myself drifting along the frenetic edges of my mind. The Sandman was nowhere to be found, as I slipped further away from sleep.

Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose
To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude;
And in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then, happy low, lie down!
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Keep calm and enjoy no sleep.

I feel safe at dawn
The night is gone
I am tired of dancing with my pain
For a few hours I can pretend to feel sane.

Try staying awake for 24 hours and you’ll realize just how many needless worries your mind instantly shuts out.

And, even though I am a happy person, if I lie in the dark my thoughts veer towards worry. I have found it better to get up than to lie in bed teetering on the edge of nocturnal lunacy.

Ever lie awake at night wondering if there’s something you’re not losing enough sleep over?

Three o’clock —
anxiety, regret
in the depths of worry
swept away in the
whirlwind of nothing —
a horrible nothing.

A 2002 Oxford study showed counting sheep actually delays the onset of sleep. It’s just too dull to stop us from worrying about jobs and spouses.

If you can’t sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there and worrying. It’s the worry that gets you, not the loss of sleep.

Insomniacs don’t sleep because they worry about it, and they worry about it because they don’t sleep.

What you don’t worry about gives someone else insomnia.

The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to.

Sleep comes more easily than it returns.

The fitful sleeping makes the hours pass slowly; it seems to me the night has many nights in it―has years of nights!―through which, as if through drifts of smoke, I am compelled to stumble.

It’s hard to sleep at night when there’s so many thoughts going through your head.

Sleeplessness comes when my thoughts outweigh the night.

An insomniac is a man who is unable to sleep or who, when he does sleep, dreams that he is awake.

I want to sleep but my brain won’t stop talking to itself.

All she really wanted to do was sleep, but it seemed her awareness level was operating at peak efficiency, for some reason.

In troubled times one wishes for a sound sleep more than usual, but, realizing its amplified importance, sleep smugly impedes all attempts to woo it.

Insomnia is the wish to be immortal, granted by an ass.

When the brain has no thought to chew on, no memory to revisit, and no past or future situation to imagine, it then has only one desire: falling asleep.Delbert Curti

In the morning you beg to sleep more, in the afternoon you are dying to sleep, and at night you refuse to sleep.

Another sleepless night another falling tear another broken dream wishing you were here.

A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.

The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4 a.m. knows all my secrets.

You stay up until 3am – the time when the fine lines start to get blurry. You found yourself standing on the edge. You think you’re not supposed to be there so you jumped and crossed the line. You’ve come to a place where the voices are much louder…where the words are much clearer. It’s a place where the harmless things hurt you. It is where you wonder why the sea-like decisions you’ve made and the copper-like smiles has led you to loathe yourself. You wonder why your skin suddenly craves the feeling of metal. You laugh. Because it’s 3am- the time when salts and metals come together… the time when tears and blood embrace.

The rain is, in a sense,
The sole sad friend of those who find themselves
Thinking, wide awake, until the dawn,
Who, in bed, alone, with fevered hands,
Listen to it, soothed. They like the company
Of its faint moan across the sleeping plain,
Its rustling in the garden all night long.

Awake all night with melancholy thoughts…

He had been unable to drive away the gloomy thoughts which kept sleep from his eyes for a long hour… He had solved any number of difficult arithmetical problems, and mentally repeated the same prayer at least twenty times; but the sleep which he obtained after waiting so long and making so many efforts, brought neither rest nor comfort, and the old man struggled all night in the fiery embrace of the fever-god.
It was only in the morning, after awaking and happily falling off into a second sleep, that he enjoyed the peace and repose of both body and soul, which usually characterized his rest. When he again opened his eyes after this delightful morning’s nap, a joyous ray, cast by the rising sun through the bed curtains, danced on the counterpane like a streak of gold, and gave a marvellous brilliancy to its variegated embroideries.

And now I may dismiss my heroine to the sleepless couch, which is the true heroine’s portion – to a pillow strewed with thorns and wet with tears. And lucky may she think herself, if she get another good night’s rest in the course of the next three months.

Brain: I can see you’re trying to sleep, can I offer a selection of your worst memories from the last 10 years?

“I miss her so much. So much. I can’t sleep. I just cry. Sometimes when I’m in bed, and my arm loses circulation, or my leg is in a weird position, I think of her. Her stiffness. I just lay there, with my body, frozen, imagining if that’s what she feels like… I lay my tongue out like this, all dry.” He deforms himself. “I twist my wrist, and I tell her, ‘Goodnight.'”

A sad soul is always up past midnight.

A long boozy dinner in the East Village with people you need to impress. After dinner, more drinks down the street. After those drinks, more drinks at your hotel’s rooftop bar. After that, hours on the sofa in your room staring at CNN, shaking, afraid to go to sleep because it will lead to waking up.

You can drink yourself to sleep but not think yourself to sleep.

You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.

Two in the morning
mind humming from the inside out
thunder across crazy dreams
a night charged with god, heart, body,
thinking about how much I think.

I am a daydreamer and a night thinker.

When the sun goes down, the insomniac dreams of having a nightmare, just to get some sleep in this too-loud world.

During the hours when which our souls should be taking flight…
Dancing almost endlessly with our hopes and dreams…
As if only to aspire some sort of clarity prior to the morning light…
Yet, be it as it may, regardless as to how long one waits…
Sleep has yet again eluded me…
Leaving me alone once again with my thoughts.

Success is not a distant dream, it is a reality for those who sweat to achieve it, enjoy sleepless nights, take calculative steps through the day, and with self introspection keeps it humble with a smile. Then success gets loud with the achiever’s mouth shut, while the world celebrates one’s victory.

I’m just an insomniac struggling for a night where I don’t dream of you anymore.

Not sleeping tonight
Thoughts incoherent in mind
A lucid dream gives solace.

Legend says that when you can’t sleep at night it’s because you’re awake in someone else’s dream.

Your dreams may seem impossible to someone with insomnia.

It’s at night, when perhaps we should be dreaming, that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull. I don’t know if anyone has ever pointed out that great attraction of insomnia before, but it is so; the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instincts 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. I wish I believed, as J. B. Priestley did, that consciousness continues after disembodiment or death, not forever, but for a long while. Three score years and ten is such a stingy ration of time, when there is so much time around. Perhaps that’s why some of us are insomniacs; night is so precious that it would be pusillanimous to sleep all through it! A “bad night” is not always a bad thing.

Last night I dreamed I had insomnia. I woke up exhausted, yet too well rested to go back to sleep.

It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.

It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped.

In my head, I am Zelda
and this is my party, but the truth is
it’s almost morning, truth is
I’m the worker bee and not the queen.

I don’t have dreams. I don’t sleep well.

I knew what he was talking about to an extent – that indistinct line between awake and dreaming. But usually the line sharpened seconds after walking up. It didn’t stick with you and make you question what was real.

There is not enough night left for us. We have lost our true instincts for darkness, it’s invitation to spend some time in the proximity of our dreams. Our personal winters are so often accompanied by insomnia: perhaps we’re drawn towards that unique space of intimacy and contemplation, darkness and silence, without really knowing what we’re seeking. Perhaps, after all, we are being urged towards our own comfort.
Sleep is not a dead space, but a doorway to a different kind of consciousness – one that is reflective and restorative, full of tangential thought and unexpected insights. In winter, we are invited into a particular mode of sleep: not a regimented eight hours, but a slow ambulatory process in which waking thoughts merge with dreams, and space is made in the blackest hours to repair the fragmented narratives of our days.
Yet we are pushing away this innate skill we have for digesting the difficult parts of life.

She dreams more often than she sleeps.

While you lay dreaming,
I hear you sleep,
and slowly start counting
little lost sheep.
But I’d rather you snore,
than be no more!

You’re like a dream I never want to wake up from, but I; I’m insomniac!

Many things–such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly–are done worst when we try hardest to do them.

To many men, sleep comes with a blessed naturalness and swiftness. To others, for many hours during a troubled night, the words spoken and the thoughts unexpressed during the day run in wearily multiplied circles through a humming brain.

Lord, grant us rest tonight, and if we must be wakeful, cheerful.

I can’t sleep… can you? If you can’t, let’s can’t sleep together.

The hardest thing is to go to sleep at night, when there are so many urgent things needing to be done.

You are my favorite reason to lose my sleep.

Some nights I knew that if I slept I would die.

I have lost my rhythm.
I can’t sleep.
I can’t eat.

I have been robbed of
my filth.`

Nature is the greatest teacher and I learn from her best when others are asleep. In the still dark hours before sunrise God tells me of the plans I am to fulfill.

When I can’t sleep at night-
I stare at the empty side of my bed,
and wonder about the things
I would tell you,
if you were laying next to me.

Sometimes,
all you can do
is lie in bed,
and hope
to fall asleep
before
you fall apart.

Do I fear the sleepless nights? You have no idea how long the dark lasts when you cannot close your eyes to it.

Dear 3 am, We have got to stop meeting this way. I’d much rather sleep with you.

Everything in this world is temporary: including bad days and sleepless nights.

It causes some sleepless nights. Some change is going to have to happen.

Sleepless nights are for lovers and loners.

Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday’s omissions and regrets.

Another sleepless night, turn off my light.

A lot of stress, lots of that. Sleepless nights, the waiting is the hardest.

It get worse at night when I am alone and sleepless.

The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.

Tell me what you think about when you can’t fall asleep at night.

Better for you to have one sleepless night on earth than having millions in hell.

If it was an overnight success, It was one long, hard, sleepless night.

Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing.

It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness.

If a woman gets insomnia, you never know where you’re going to find her furniture the next morning. It’s primal. We have so little we can control, but we can perfect the way our room looks.

Nights are sleepless, Days are sleepy.

A sleepless night is as long as a year.

I had a lot of sleepless nights.

Oh, yes , I love sleepless nights.

Sleep resistance, bouts of insomnia, nightmares, night terrors, crawling into bed with parents in the middle of the night – all these are so common among children, it seems fair to call them ‘normal.’

There is, if one is lucky, the “first sweet sleep of night” and the last deep sleep of morning, but between the two appears a sinister, ever widening interval.

So you have insomnia? Well, just don’t lose any sleep over it.

I know my music is going well when I don’t have insomnia.

Whelk was not sleeping… he rarely closed his eyes for longer than a few hours at a stretch. He rolled in his bedsheets. He sat bolt upright, woken by whispers… His sleep patterns and energy seemed dictated by something larger and more powerful than himself, ebbing and flowing like an uneven tide.

For me, insomnia was something ordinary, and it came and went for ordinary reasons.

There is nothing like a sleepless couch for a clear vision of one’s environment.

I sometimes suffer from insomnia. And when I can’t fall asleep, I play what I call the alphabet game.

I take politics only medicinally, as a cure of occasional attacks of insomnia.

I hate it when my foot falls asleep during the day, because that means it’s going to be up all night.

I don’t think my insomnia is fixable: I think it’s in my DNA.

I am convinced that during bouts of insomnia, I have sometimes slept without knowing it.

I’ve had insomnia since I was a little kid and I never sleep well. Sometimes I sleep very badly and sometimes I sleep slightly badly. I get it especially when I’m on tour because you cross a lot of time zones, and I’m not very adaptable.

It is tempting to think of this form of insomnia, the inability to fall asleep, as a disease of agency and control: the inability to relinquish high self-reflexive consciousness for the vulnerable, ignorant regions of slumber in which we know not what we do.

In summer he always began his studies as soon as it was night; in winter generally at one in the morning, but never later than two, and often at midnight. No man ever spent less time in bed…

If you cannot sleep, put the sacred energy to use. You can pray, read and write.

Due to tonight’s lack of sleep, tomorrow has been canceled.

My eyelids are heavy, but my thoughts are heavier.

Error 404 sleep not found.

My guess is, they couldn’t sleep, and they had the kind of generous nature that reckons insomnia isn’t something you hoard all for yourself, you share it with your friends and loved ones.

I’ve had such bad insomnia the sleep cops have issued a warrant for my rest.

“Insomnophobia,” or fear of insomnia, is in truth one of the most frequent causes of chronic sleeplessness.

It is late
And the clock is striking thin hours,
But sleep has become a terror to me,
Lest I wake in the night
Bewildered,
And stretching out my arms to comfort myself with you,
Clasp instead the cold body of the darkness…

I’m an insomniacaholic
if there is such a thing
well, I know there is —
I am one, and their king!

INSOMNIA… Always undress in the dark. When you have broken three chairs, upset the centre table and stepped on six assorted tacks, you will realize what a stupid habit sleeping is anyway, and your senses will have become so acute that you will want to sit up and read the Family Story Paper during that portion of the night which has not been devoted to swearing.

In the earlier years of his literary career he would frequently awake at night, get out of bed, light a candle, and compose many lines upon some poem which he said had “forced itself upon his mind.”

I have never suffered from “insomnia” — I have not sleepless nights but wakeful hours.

I am afflicted, afflicted, afflicted!
Sleep has deserted my eyes
Through my longing for Thee…

Sleepless questions
In the small hours:
Have I done right?
Why did I act
Just as I did?
Over and over again
The same steps,
The same words:
Never the answer.

The only cure for writer’s block is insomnia.

A poet is an insomniac
and always writes best
by the light of a midnight candle.

My trouble is insomnia. If I had always slept properly, I’d never have written a line.

Awake until 3 A.M.
hard hours — in the dark
anxious shadows lingered in my imagination.

Whiskey may not cure your insomnia, but it makes you more content to stay awake.

If a man had as many ideas during the day as he does when he has insomnia, he’d make a fortune.

Every cloud has a silver lining: the man with insomnia doesn’t keep others awake with his snoring.

I ran in the house and I fell in a heap.
I needed my rest, but I just couldn’t sleep…
I tossed and I flipped and I

INSOMNIA… Lie perfectly still and count 287,643 in a slow, methodical manner. By the time you have finished counting it will be daylight, and you will be surprised to notice how quickly the night has passed.

I have benevolent insomnia. I wake up, and my mind is preternaturally clear. The world is quiet. I can read or write. It seems like stolen time. It seems like I have a twenty-eight-hour day.

A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by,
One after one; the sound of rain, and bees
Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas,
Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky;
I’ve thought of all by turns; and still I lie
Sleepless… last night, and two nights more, I lay,
And could not win thee, Sleep! by any stealth:
So do not let me wear to-night away:
Without Thee what is all the morning’s wealth?
Come, blessed barrier betwixt day and day,
Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health!

An insomniac finds it hard to fall asleep at night, and even harder to stay awake by day.

Is the insomniac one who is wide awake because he can’t sleep, or one who can’t sleep because he is wide awake?

An insomniac is one who sleeps better with a pill than with a pillow.

Insomnia is invisible
but hard as concrete.

Every insomniac wishes he could fall asleep as easily as his foot does.

The white sheep will not walk one by one, slowly counted, over green lawns through the gap in the hedge. You can count the stars in the dark pond up to twenty but no further without rebellion. The nursery-taught methods of courting sleep fail one by one.

She hadn’t slept. She lay in bed the entire night, the day’s events tumbling in her head like clothes in a dryer.

Insomnia is one of the ailments conveyed to man from dogs; some people get it from the dog next door.

Like travel, insomnia is an uprooting experience. You are torn out of sleep like a plant from its native soil, then shaken down so that any clinging vestige of slumber falls away, naked confusion exposed like nerve endings. Sleep, in its turn, is a matter of gravity. It pulls you down, beds you in the earth, burrows you in. In sleep you connect back to the bedrock that provides nourishment and restorative rest.

After counting all the sheep in the world
I enumerate the wildebeests, snails,
camels, skylarks, etc.,

then I add up all the zoos and aquariums,
country by country.

By early light I am asleep
in a nightmare about drowning in the Flood.

Sometimes I only sleep to wake up.

People who have insomnia lie awake all night for an hour.

I never noticed anything but you
But you but you
So that I couldn’t sleep.

Insomnia is sometimes caused by an upset stomach, but more often by an upset wife.

I can’t wait to wake up and try something new. I can’t sleep at night because I want to try something new.

For insomniacs, night steals the morning.

You haven’t a bad case of insomnia unless you can’t even sleep when it’s time to get up.

An insomniac is either asleep with one eye open, or awake with both eyes shut.

After a sleepless night the body gets weaker,
It becomes dear and not yours – and nobody’s.
Just like a seraph you smile to people
And arrows moan in the slow arteries.

After a sleepless night the arms get weaker
And deeply equal to you are the friend and foe.
Smells like Florence in the frost, and in each
Sudden sound is the whole rainbow.

Tenderly light the lips, and the shadow’s golden
Near the sunken eyes. Here the night has sparked
This brilliant likeness – and from the dark night
Only just one thing – the eyes – are growing dark.

Isn’t this a nice time of night to walk? I like to smell things and look at things, and sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise.

‘You need to believe that you can sleep again.’
‘Since when was sleep a matter of faith?’

Too much had happened that night, too much had happened before that night, and so too much climbed into bed with them, sat heavily upon them, and kept them up and thinking, even if they did not say the things they were thinking to each other.

No one can predict which of life’s vexations insomnia will favour.

3:30

In the dark
from over the water, a rooster
celebrates my insomnia.

He makes me feel stupid and it’s hard to sleep knowing so little about everything.

In their previous lives, poets were bats, and thinkers were owls.

When I had lain awake a little awhile, those extraordinary voices with which silence teems, began to make themselves audible. The closet whispered, the fireplace sighed, the little washing-stand ticked, and one guitar-string played occasionally in the chest of drawers.

All lonely, beautifully silent and so very enchanting the city seems at night when every tourist, hotelier and tour guide have gone to bed, almost like a ghost town if it weren’t for the one or other lit window and a few lonely insomniac people walking the alleys here and there.

I’ve seen far more sunrises because I was up late than I have because I was up early.

Go to sleep, I sing.
“No,” I tell myself.
Go to sleep, I beg.
I am a traitor to myself.

Sleep is like a fickle lover: one moment, it is warm and inviting; the next, cold and unattainable.

For me, now, a puzzle emerges. What, then, fuels insomnia – fear or anxiety? Anxiety, everyone says. Anxiety, my hypnotherapist says; you are safe in your bed yet your heart is racing as if a tiger is present. You must learn to see that there is no tiger.

But there is a tiger: sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation isn’t a perceived threat but a real one, like thirst or starvation. It is the fear of not sleeping that raises the heart rate and tenses the muscles; fear, not anxiety. Here is where insomnia becomes intractable, because it deploys fear to act like anxiety. Where fear is a response to an external threat, insomnia is almost unique in giving rise to a fear that then causes the external threat. Being afraid of the saber-tooth tiger is what makes the tiger keep coming back – not seem to come back, but in fact come back. It is no use to say ‘don’t be afraid’. There is a tiger in your bedroom, you ought to be afraid.

When your body begins to enter and remain in a state of relaxation and rest, it is no longer in a state where it consumes resources but in a state where it can regenerate itself, even without sleep.

I write a lot of my best music in the car, like late night. Three, four in the morning. I’m in the passenger seat, I got my driver, my getaway driver. My Bonnie, I’m Clyde. That’s when everything is just settled. In the daytime it’s chaotic. Everybody just goin’ nowhere fast. In a rush to go nowhere.

Then Night came down like the feathery soot of a smoky lamp, and smutted first the bedquilt, then the hearth-rug, then the window-seat, and then at last the great, stormy, faraway outside world. But sleep did not come. Oh, no! Nothing new came at all except that particularly wretched, itching type of insomnia which seems to rip away from one’s body the whole kind, protecting skin and expose all the raw, ticklish fretwork of nerves to the mercy of a gritty blanket or a wrinkled sheet. Pain came too, in its most brutally high night-tide; and sweat, like the smother of furs in summer; and thirst like the scrape of hot sand-paper; and chill like the clammy horror of raw fish.

(…) one of the most unendurable aspects of such an interlude was the inability to sleep (…) the disruption of normal sleep patterns is a notoriously devastating feature of depression (…). It had become clear that I would never be granted even a few minutes’ relief from my full-time exhaustion.

Persons in whom a crisis takes place pass the night preceding the paroxysm uncomfortably, but the succeeding night generally more comfortably.

I hadn’t slept for seven nights.

My mother told me I must have slept, it was impossible not to sleep in all that time, but if I slept, it was with my eyes wide open, for I had followed the green, luminous course of the second hand and the minute hand and the hour hand of the bedside clock through their circles and semi-circles, every night for seven nights, without missing a second, or a minute, or an hour.

The reason I hadn’t washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly.

I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.

It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.

It made me tired just to think of it.

I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.

Poor sleepers should endeavor to compose themselves. Tampering with empty space, stirring up echoes in pitch-black pits of darkness is scarcely sedative.

There are some nights when
sleep plays coy,
aloof and disdainful.
And all the wiles
that I employ to win
its service to my side
are useless as wounded pride,
and much more painful.

He had to take sleep by surprise. Preparing for bed simply alerted insomnia, brought all the busy thoughts, the renegade remorses and guilts and recriminations.

She married the prince
and all went well
except for the fear —
the fear of sleep.

Briar Rose
was an insomniac…
She could not nap
or lie in sleep
without the court chemist
mixing her some knock-out drops
and never in the prince’s presence.

Alone with thoughts of what should have long been forgotten, I let myself be carried away into the silent screams of delirium.

Who sleeps at night? No one is sleeping.

In the cradle a child is screaming.

An old man sits over his death, and anyone

young enough talks to his love, breathes

into her lips, looks into her eyes.

He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.

Both sleep and insomnolency, when immoderate, are bad.

Foolishness sleeps soundly, while knowledge turns with each thinking hour, longing for the dawn of answers.

The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.

Somewhere in the night a
human being is drowning.

In the absence of sleep, my restless nights have been fueled by my overactive imagination, weaving waking dreams onto the canvas of conception. Filling my head with lots of ideas waiting to be born into reality. I am eager to return to my beautiful mistress, Creation!

Insomnia is a variant of Tourette’s–the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance–as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.

There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public. There are worse things than these miniature betrayals, committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things than not being able to sleep for thinking about them. It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.

Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.

In the January that I turned thirty-five, sleep became a foreign and hostile country. I had never been more than what one might call a refugee in the country of sleep.

But [Pooh] couldn’t sleep. The more he tried to sleep the more he couldn’t. He tried counting Sheep, which is sometimes a good way of getting to sleep, and, as that was no good, he tried counting Heffalumps. And that was worse. Because every Heffalump that he counted was making straight for a pot of Pooh’s honey, and eating it all. For some minutes he lay there miserably, but when the five hundred and eighty-seventh Heffalump was licking its jaws, and saying to itself, “Very good honey this, I don’t know when I’ve tasted better,” Pooh could bear it no longer.

I think insomnia is a sign that a person is interesting.

Do you know what insomnia is?? It’s you telling yourself you need more time to complete your projects.

Insomnia

I cannot get to sleep tonight.
I toss and turn and flop.
I try to count some fluffy sheep
while o’er a fence they hop.
I try to think of pleasant dreams
of places really cool.
I don’t know why I cannot sleep –
I slept just fine at school.

The monsters were never
under my bed.
Because the monsters
were inside my head.

I fear no monsters,
for no monsters I see.
Because all this time
the monster has been me.

O sleep, O gentle sleep, Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frightened thee. That thou no more will weigh my eyelids down, And steep my senses in forgetfulness?

I was born in the city that never sleeps so perhaps insomnia is my birthright.

Am I sleeping? Have I slept at all? This is insomnia.

I won’t sleep
if that’s what it takes
to not wake up
as myself.

He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.

Oh God, midnight’s not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two’s not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning, there’s hope, for dawn’s just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three A.M.! Doctors say the body’s at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had strength to rouse up, you’d slaughter your half-dreams with buckshot! But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that’s burned dry. The moon rolls by to look at you down there, with its idiot face. It’s a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead – And wasn’t it true, had he read somewhere, more people in hospitals die at 3 A.M. than at any other time…

I’ve got a bad case of the 3:00 am guilts – you know, when you lie in bed awake and replay all those things you didn’t do right? Because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like a nice warm glass of regret, depression and self-loathing.

Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.

Insomnia never comes to a man who has to get up exactly at 6’ Clock. Insomnia troubles only those who can sleep any time.

Insomniacs exaggerate the pleasures of sleep.

In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.

Insomnia is an indication, not a chaos. Its like ache. You’re not going to provide a patient ache medicine without figuring out whats reasoning the pain.

When the world is itself draped in the mantle of night, the mirror of the mind is like the sky in which thoughts twinkle like stars.

Whoever says sleep equals laziness is probably a bitter insomniac.

When it becomes really impossible to get away and sleep, then the will to live evaporates of its own accord.

Insomnia is the violence of the night over a man.

Insomnia haunted me like regret.

You can hear it in the midst of the night
While your gaze roams the vast plains on the ceiling.

Sleep deprivation is physically miserable and creatively cathartic, as internal landscapes rise up from their dormant ashes.

Physical activity within four hours of bedtime and illness can also cause this type of insomnia.

Some thoughts are too angry to sleep. They lie awake all night and become obsessions.

For there is nothing quite so terror-inducing as the loss of sleep. It creates phantoms and doubts, causes one to questions one’s own abilities and judgement, and, over time, dismantles, from within, the body.

Hello darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again.

I’m not an insomniac. It’s just that my mind is in the best position to catch the weight of all hovering possibilities the moment I lie down.

The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.

A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.

Not being able to sleep because that certain someone is on your mind.

The loneliest thing in the world is lying awake beside someone asleep.

My life has become an endless cycle of ‘I can’t sleep’ and ‘I can’t stay awake.’

Sleep is like the tide only this time the moon doesn’t bring it in.

I’m so exhausted and yet I feel like I’ll never sleep again.

Most people do not consider dawn to be an attractive experience—unless they are still up.

I’m awake and I can’t sleep. The more I’m awake, the more I see, and the harder to sleep.

Do you know that awesome feeling when you get into bed, fall right asleep, stay asleep all night and wake up feeling refreshed? Me neither.

Insomnia: A contagious disease often transmitted from babies to parents.

I can’t go to sleep. You will always be on my mind, even if you are not with me.

There are twelve hours in the day, and above fifty in the night.

Three out of four voices in my head want to sleep. The other wants to know if penguins have knees.

I’m like, four days past my bedtime.

I have two moods:
Sleep is for the weak.
I need to sleep for a week.

I’ve forgotten what it’s like to have a normal sleeping pattern.

And if you are awake at 4 a.m., you are either in love or lonely, and I don’t know which one is worse.

My no sleep game is too strong.

Sleep is like the unicorn – it is rumored to exist, but I doubt I will see any.

That moment when tomorrow is here and you’ve been trying to go to sleep since yesterday.

Some people can’t sleep because they have insomnia. I can’t sleep because I have the internet connection.

Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with posters advertising faraway places.

I wish I had someone to talk to when I can’t sleep.

Morning: Tired
Afternoon: Dying for a rest
Night: Can’t Sleep

Sometimes I’ll lie awake at night and listen to the sound of the clock. The motor ticks on endlessly. What an unsettling sound it is when you’ve yet to find peace – to find solace. Sometimes no matter how exhausted my body is, no matter how tired my thoughts are, no matter how sore my brain and my heart are…even then I still can’t fall asleep. Sometimes I wish for nothing more than to sleep. Please, allow me to slip away into the darkest corners of the world and let me be. Just let me sleep. You can close your eyes to the surroundings, but you can’t close your ears off to the sound around it. And sometimes the things you wish the most not to hear – are the loudest. They will not go away in the night and be silenced.

50 shades of dark circles under my eyes.

Third eye of the sea,
the lonely lighthouse
never sleeps.

Sleepless nights I’m not a big fan of to be honest.

When I want to go to sleep, I must first get a whole menagerie of voices to shut up.

Ironically, just when she needed to get as much sleep as possible to prepare her for the next few days, her excited anticipation kept her awake long into the night.

Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across the hundreds of thousands of high walls, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.

It takes spells of aching and gives you a sleepless night now and then, but between times it lets you enjoy life and dreams and echoes and peanut candy as if there were nothing the matter with it.

The pattern of insomnia in children reflects difficulty in getting to sleep, whereas with adults it’s a problem staying asleep.

When I am with you, we stay up all night. When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep. Praise God for those two insomnias! And the difference between them.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

A good cop can’t sleep at night because he’s missing a piece of the puzzle. And a bad cop can’t sleep because his conscience won’t let him.

I won’t take a real nap. I have this halfway place, a rest stop on the road to sleep, where I can stay for hours. I don’t even need to close my eyes, just stay safe under the covers and breathe.

Patience takes away lots of stress, regrets, & sleepless nights knowing that all is well at the end of the day if we just wait a little bit.

Sometimes I sit up late with my thoughts, reluctant to fall asleep and leave my thoughts alone by themselves.

And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time.

Bedtime is fraught with fear and disappointment. When it is just me alone with my restless body and mind, I feel like the whole world is asleep and gone. It’s very lonely. I am tired of being tired and talking about how tired I am.

What a thing this sleeplessness was!…If sleep, she thought, could be compared to a gentle lake ina dark place, the sleeplessness was a roaring ocean, a raging, wind-buffeted voyage, lit with mad rocket-lights, pursued by wild phantoms from behind, plunging upon fearful rocks ahead, a mad tempest of the past and present and future all in one. Through all this the pale, strenuous mariner must somehow steer a way, until at last the weary dawn, not of sleep, but of resignation to sleeplessness, comes to calm the waters of the mind.

In the night, in the utter silence of the nights among those little houses where old people live, she felt him leave the bed and in the pitch-black reach his dressing gown and leave the room. She let him go. How it troubled her, all this. Not much to ask, peace of mind at nights and a bit of ordinary cheerfulness in the day, some conversation, something to laugh about and doing nobody any harm. And not all this. A slit of light came on under the bedroom door.

If the reason of your sleeplessness is competition, then you will make a successful businessman.

Sacred souls experience sleepless nights. It is enormous strength for specific sacred work.

And I will remember how we made the sun blush every morning.

Poems can get
sleepless too

and become

the loneliest thing
in the universe.

I wish I could fall asleep. But with a good book in my hands, I stay awake to finish reading.

So often we say, ‘You need to sleep when your baby sleeps’ but that’s never the case. When your baby is sleeping, you’re trying to get everything else done.

And at 3am you sit near the window and wonder if there is magic… because all you need are some fairies to take your pain away and help you sleep… you take a book to read… you take a pen and a paper to write…you cling on some music that might just make you fall asleep… yet nothing helps… another sleepless night and all you want is the dawn to break soon….

I was asleep but my mind was awake. Now, I’m awake, but my mind is still asleep.

The reasons we don’t sleep at night are usually the same reasons we don’t truly live during the day.

Dear Superwoman,
Be that woman who stands out.
Even if it means spending sleepless nights, do it.
As long as it is the right thing to do.
Do not settle for being where you were in the past,
so you can waltz towards a better future.

I switched the light out and drew the cover across myself, but I didn’t sleep. Instead I lay on my side watching the sea, rising and falling in strange, hypnotic silence outside the thick, storm-proof panes. And I thought, there is a murderer on this boat. And no one knows but me.

Life isn’t in our brain // It flows through our veins.
Just a little cut to drain out the galaxies that keep me up tonight.
Just a little cut and all this goes away. Just a little cut and no more thoughts. No memories. No pain. I mean screw nostalgia.
I don’t want it. Take it back!

I always come here when I can’t sleep [. . .] every night.

Seriously, who falls asleep that quickly? Imagine being able to sleep without listening to a true crime podcast episode or immersing yourself in your imaginary dreamworld for at least an hour.

If only I could bottle up the drowsiness that plagued me during the day so I could use it at bedtime.

Sometimes you can’t sleep on a feather bed, but you fall asleep peacefully on a cold stone!

She lay down and never stirred. To move hand or foot, or even so much as one finger, would have been an exertion beyond the powers of either volition or motion. She was so tired, so stunned, that she thought she never slept at all; her feverish thoughts passed and repassed the boundary between sleeping and waking, and kept their own miserable identity.

Sleepless nights lead only to crazed mornings—oneiric images, emotions, stories, desires, sensations arise when they choose and stay according to their own codes. The subconscious will not be denied. Dreams that should have been morph and manifest themselves in tricks of the mind: minor hallucinations play out before the eyes in the harsh light of day, they enter the ears from the inside out; wild thoughts lead away from reason. Disassociated, unprotected, not itself or too much its most base, worst self, the mind cannot be trusted. Self-skullduggery.

Sometimes I have trouble falling asleep but it’s not so bad
I don’t worry and I don’t weep. In fact I’m glad.
Because I get up off my pillow and I flip on the light.
I get down and get hip in the still of the night I stretch and I yawn and then I breathe real deep And dance myself to sleep.
I hoof around my beddie just a-tappin’ my toes
Before I know what’s happened I’m a-ready to doze
Got some partners I can count the boogie-woogie sheep
I dance myself to sleep.

You never know how much you truly appreciate sleep until it’s snatched away from you.

There was something in her eyes! Her eyes were expressive and from the first day that they met, they spoke to him a million things! He could know which night she had cried, which night she had slept peacefully and which night of hers had been spent in complete sleeplessness.

I needed to see you today. Once again it could not be. So I will spend the night tossing and turning and try to talk myself out of trying to talk myself out of you.

It’s not worth staying up all night just to paint masterpieces.

So quiet that house was in the night, so quiet all the other little homes around it were that held the elderly in them and the old alone or still in couples sleeping early, waking, lying awake and thinking about the past. So much past every night in the silence settling over those houses that all looked much the same on a hillside creeping up against the rock and gorse and tipping down to the river where it widened, widened and ended in the sea.

He imagined himself lying there, unable to sleep, thinking of his mother, separated from her by the unresponsive blankets tucked too tightly round him, feeling the ceaseless thumping of his heart in the silence of the night, the irrevocability of absence, the rigid stillness of repose, the agony of solitude and sleeplessness. If the room was a prison, the bed was a tomb.

Something amazing happens when the rest of the world is sleeping. I am glued to my chair. I forget that I ever wanted to do anything but write. The crowded city, the crowded apartment, and the crowded calendar suddenly seem spacious. Three or four hours pass in a moment; I have no idea what time it is, because I never check the clock. If I chose to listen, I could hear the swish of taxis bound for downtown bars or the soft saxophone riffs that drift from a neighbor’s window, but nothing gets through. I am suspended in a sensory deprivation tank, and the very lack of sensation is delicious.

I would never sleep. I knew that. Not with my blood ringing in my ears, and my heart beating an angry staccato rhythm in my chest. I would never relax.

I haven’t been out driving at this time of night in many years, much less in an unfamiliar area. These are the things that scare you as you get older. You understand night all too well, all its attendant meanings. You try to avoid it, work around it, keep it from entering your house. Your weary, ornery body tells you to stay up late, sleep less, keep the lights on, don’t go into the bedroom—if you have to sleep, sleep in your chair, at the table. Everything is about avoiding the night. Because of that, I suppose that I should be scared out here in the dark, but I am finally past that, I think.

Think what devils chase a man who cannot sleep in his own house.

But Mr. Hale resolved that he would not be disturbed by any such nonsensical idea; so he lay awake, determining not to think about it.

Don’t start me talking
I could talk all night
My mind goes sleepwalking
While I’m putting the world to right.

Women can go mad with insomnia.
The sleep-deprived roam houses that have lost their familiarity. With tea mugs in hand, we wander rooms, looking on shelves for something we will recognize: a book title, a photograph, the teak-carved bird — a souvenir from what place? A memory almost rises when our eyes rest on a painting’s grey sweep of cloud, or the curve of a wooden leg in a corner. Fingertips faintly recall the raised pattern on a chair cushion, but we wonder how these things have come to be here, in this stranger’s home.
Lost women drift in places where time has collapsed. We look into our thoughts and hearts for what has been forgotten, for what has gone missing. What did we once care about? Whom did we love? We are emptied. We are remote. Like night lilies, we open in the dark, breathe in the shadowy world. Our soliloquies are heard by no one.

That night I slept badly, thrashing about in my bed, not quite asleep and not quite awake. At times I had the feeling there was someone else in my bedroom who was talking to me, but of course I could not deal with this perception in any realistic way, since I was half-asleep and half-awake, and thus, for all practical purposes, I was out of my mind.

No human being believes that any other human being has a right to be in bed when he himself is up.

Perhaps it’s something other than insomnia, to lie listening to children yelling as if they’ve re-created light; to try to dream, but succeed only in remembering; to toss and sweat in a dirty paste of sheets, while the drone of a ball game is gradually replaced by the buzz of a fly — a fly buzzing like the empty frequencies between stations as its shadow grows enormous between the shade and windowpane. Is it insomnia for a man to wad his ears with the cotton from a pill bottle, to mask his eyes with blinders, and press a stale pillow over his head, praying for another day to burn down, so he can wake into another night?

He gets into the habit of thinking so passionately at night that he begins to be persecuted by insomnia.

Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eye,
And where care lodges, sleep will never lie.

After a night of insomnia the body gets weaker,
Becomes dear but no one’s — not even your own.

Tonight – I am alone in the night,
a homeless and sleepless nun!
Tonight I hold all the keys to this
the only capital city

and lack of sleep guides me on my path.
You are so lovely, my dusky Kremlin!
Tonight I put my lips to the breast
of the whole round and warring earth.

Now I feel hair – like fur – standing on end:
the stifling winds blow straight into my soul.
Tonight I feel compassion for everyone,
those who are pitied, along with those who are kissed.

I haven’t been to sleep for over a year. That’s why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn’t sleep.

When I can’t sleep I count the buckles on my straightjacket.

When I feel well and in a good humour, or when I am taking a drive or walking after a good meal, or in the night when I cannot sleep, thoughts crowd into my mind as easily as you could wish.

And that night he couldn’t sleep, but lay looking out at the light June night which was full of lonely whisperings and rustlings and the pattering of feet. The air was sweet with the smell of flowers.

The creak of bed springs suffering under the weight of a restless man is as lonely a sound as I know.

I tried and tried to sleep, lulled by the movement, the purring of the motor, and the snores of the other passengers, but it’s never been easy for me to sleep, and much less now, when I still have residues of the wild life running through my veins.

I’m so tired. Sleep’s been stalking me for too long to remember. Inevitable I suppose.

Sleep finally comes like a summer dry river, a trickle that’s shallow and splits around rocks and downed branches and tree roots, dividing and dividing, till by morning it’s the thin bead of gathered morning dew, dripping lazy off the army tent overhead.

Her eyes are like bruises, as though 2am
punches her in the face every time they meet
amid the faded glow of alarm-clock hands
and the crumpled sheets of a sleepless night.

That gap between half sleep and half awakening has always been occupied by nostalgia.

It was impossible to sleep. Anxiety stopped me from falling asleep; depression woke me up.

Someone observed darkly that it is always two A.M. when one is in the ‘dark night of the soul.’

Right now I can’t even control my own imagination as it grips my hair and drags me into the dark.

Henry’s also an insomniac. He suffers from Restless Leg Syndrome. I feel the sheets twitching as his legs move restlessly and think about how incredibly bourgeois we are, with our Sur La Table kitchenware, our Sundance catalogue lamps, our upper-middle class insomnia. Why can’t we sleep, I wonder? We have enough to eat, we have a roof over our heads, we’re not living in a mud hut sporting a thatch of gnarled leaves that barely cover our genitalia. I’m filled with self-loathing.

Finally, as the sky began to grow light in the morning, I’d feel that I might be drifting off. But that wasn’t sleep. My fingertips were just barely brushing against the outermost edge of sleep. And all the while, my mind was awake. I would feel a hint of drowsiness, but my mind was there, in its own room, on the other side of a transparent wall, watching me. My physical self was drifting through the feeble morning light, and all the while it could feel my mind staring, breathing, close beside it. I was both a body on the verge of sleep and a mind determined to stay awake.

The incomplete drowsiness would continue on and off all day. My head was always foggy. I couldn’t get an accurate fix on the things around me—their distance or mass or texture. The drowsiness would overtake me at regular, wavelike intervals: on the subway, in the classroom, at the diner table. My mind would slip away from my body. The world would sway soundlessly. I would drop things. My pencil or my purse or my fork would clatter to the floor. All I wanted was to throw myself down and sleep. But I couldn’t. The wakefulness was always there beside me. I could feel its chilling shadow. It was the shadow of myself. Weird, I would think as the drowsiness overtook me, I’m in my own shadow. I would walk and eat and talk to people inside my drowsiness. And the strangest thing was that no one noticed. I lost fifteen pounds that month, and no one noticed. No one in my family, not one of my friends or classmates, realized that I was going through life asleep.

It was literally true: I was going through life asleep. My body had no more feeling than a drowned corpse. My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think that my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. Hold tight, I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to.

The kingdom of sleep demands its forfeits, and the world looks very different through eyes cracked and yellow with its denial.

His impatience for sleep often frightened that very sleep away.

Tonight is going to be a big night, like any other night, because certain 10 million Americans will not be able to sleep well tonight.

A fickle lover, sleep takes us as it will, when it wants, and how. Sensing her desperate need, however, it draws Corrie deeply into its embrace, somewhere between her tears and terror.

It is at night when sleep like the outgoing sea leaves you dry and cold and the morning light arrives like a small punishment.

But who, in these modern times, slept well?

Like chocolate, she craved sleep and it made her life brighter, but she could do without.

I didn’t sleep all night, thinking. I thought about you, about those puppy eyes you give me, when you fake your sadness to make me smile– and that upper lip of yours that brings life to all of my senses. I thought about your laughter when you get tickled, and that soft mellow place near your arm pit that I wish could be knit into a pillow for me to hug all night long. I thought about your stomach, your soft and sensitive stomach, scared like a baby kitten under the pouring rain. And I remembered the feeling of protection that comes washing over me when I get a glimpse of it, the feeling of covering it with the layers of my very own skin. I remembered your head when it rests on my heart, a rock sheltering itself on the verdure of infinity. I remembered your silky black hair, and how I never imagined that hair curls so thin could twirl, in the way they do, the rigid core of my existence.

In night…
in night is when my mind is a flutter, and the world ablaze.
In night I see you, subtle, yet sure wrinkles in your smile and the echoes of your laugh.

In night
my mind tries to forget, but it is still there branded as etchings.

In night
my heart is set a fire thrashing to and fro from distant lands and seas.

You were a sailor but your anchor was no match for the wild waves and so you floated, but quickly sank.

And in night I write about a hundred moons and a hundred deaths. But they are all you.
For you are the sky and the wild seas.
And in night, I think, I will sail across your shore once again and once more.

We stood there like that for a very long time until the sun had said its official good morning, and then Van turned me back to him. “Let’s go inside. It’s getting early and I have a feeling you could use some coffee.” I smiled, it’s getting early, that was the way I felt too, and I could definitely use some coffee.

I can’t sleep alone anymore
and I get used to
company
too quickly. You’re always gone too soon.

Our faster than ever evolution has resulted in our undermining certain incredibly important aspects of humanity—like our sleep.

Insomnia

I wonder
If those talks matter
Few done in the clarity of day
Or the many
Done at 3 a.m. in the morning.

What delicious abandon in the sleep of the child. Where do we lose it?

Your brain needs plenty of rest to function at it’s optimal level. Go to sleep!

During last night’s insomnia, as these thoughts came and went between my aching temples, I realised once again, what I had almost forgotten in this recent period of relative calm, that I tread a terribly tenuous, indeed almost non-existent soil spread over a pit full of shadows, whence the powers of darkness emerge at will to destroy my life…

The endless ocean was his sole companion , and on some deeply sentimental level, it seemed sufficient. Almost apt. He aligned himself with Thoreau and Tolstoy, he felt like their peers. The kinship with nature devoted humans to a mythical state, a heightened persona beyond the reach of mere mortals. At least that was what he told himself on the lonely nights when insomnia played on his fears and the howling wind pierced through his soul.

Every morning I tell myself, “I’ll sleep early tonight.” And every night I say, “One more chapter.”

Last night, I repeated your name like a mantra before falling asleep. Somehow the simple pleasure of uttering your name, and the added pleasure of hearing your name was heaven for me and I didn’t go to bed until dawn. Isn’t it odd how your name, a single word associated with you, can bring another person such joy that they inflict insomnia upon themselves and call it a blessing?

But his dread was the nights when he could not sleep. Then it was awful indeed, when annihilation pressed in on him on every side. Then it was ghastly, to exist without having any life: lifeless, in the night, to exist.

If you really want to mess someone up, you sleep deprive them.

It was the middle of the night, and Bingo couldn’t sleep. The ground was hard, but he was used to that. . . .His blanket was dirty and smelled disgusting, but he was used to that too. A tune kept going through his head, and he couldn’t get it out of his mind. It was the Wendels’ victory song.

Working hard to pay the bill,
I need a break and take a pill,
Need some sleep right away,
But insomnia gets in the way.

Five a.m. and mooching round
Compartments in my brain
Every corner occupied
By garbage and disdain
Down all day – up all night
Beneath that energy draining light.

Many bad days were preceded by a bad night’s sleep.

She had always been astonished by people who could fall asleep fast, like there was nothing to it. Like their spirits weren’t burdened with suffering and resentment. Like their hearts and minds could so easily be at peace.

My heart can feel the softness of a star
Only when the moon stays afar
I lay my mind on the pillow of sky
Where sleep dares not ever to pry.

All I want is this night to end,
But this insomnia keeps me awake
Till the sunlight shines on my bed
and the thoughts die in my head.

Not being able to sleep is a nightmare.

I still smell your absence on my skin. It smells of insomnia and rusted key locks…

In insomnia we encounter the very heart of love’s darkness: the essential otherness of the beloved.

I finally got eight hours of sleep. It took me three days, but whatever.

Insomnia is the act of pushing through sleep to achieve the art of insane creativity.

When I don’t sleep, it’s not that I feel tired so much as assaulted. In the morning after a night of no sleep my eyes are sore and tender and can barely open. My joints ache. There’s a taste in my mouth which isn’t like any other taste, only a feeling, and that feeling is defeat. My skull aches evenly across its hemisphere. […] I go to bed at night, I get beaten up, come downstairs in the morning. Then I go about the day as if things were normal and I hadn’t been beaten up, and everyone else treats me as if I hadn’t been beaten up, and that way I survive, but no more than that. If somebody willed your destruction they could do it this way, by taking away your sleep. Of course, it’s tried and tested.

I lay awake for a long time. It was like sitting in a cinema after the lights go down, waiting for the previews to begin. But nothing was happening. I regretted the coffee.

Hours into the night, sleepless Elijah sat up in his bed and rubbed his face trying to put his thoughts and feelings together. He went into the kitchen, turned on the light, and poured himself a cup of milk. He gulped it after taking a deep breath trying to ease the perturbed feeling in his stomach and the weight in his chest.

He is long past sleep now. His mind has begun to work on the agenda that it sets for itself, and he knows that he will not be able to stop it.

There is no faith and no hope without sleep.

Insomnia, then, is not just a state of sleeplessness, a matter of negatives. It involves the active pursuit of sleep. It is a state of longing.

On the nights I can’t sleep, like that one, like so many recently, I wish I could just turn my mind off like a lamp.

‘Insomnia is different,’ I said. It was hard to explain this to people. ‘You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on.’

Right now, our model is the culture of exhaustion. We need to be exhausted before we can fall asleep, so we keep pushing and pushing ourselves. But if a society can’t rest, how can it sleep?

Whenever I feel myself sinking into a deep sleep, something always recalls me: “Not so fast now. Suppose you should go to sleep and it should happen. What then?” Clearly nothing. Yet there I lie, wakeful and watchful as a sentry, ears tuned to the slightest noise.