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

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.

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

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

The relationship between insomnia and anxiety is complex. Insomnia can cause anxiety, and experiencing a chronic anxiety problem also can interfere with the ability to sleep.

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 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.

Try again. It’s evening now. Why can’t you sleep like a normal person?

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.

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

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

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

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.

“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.

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

Every man’s insomnia is as different from his neighbor’s as are their daytime hopes and aspirations.

Your dreams may seem impossible to someone with insomnia.

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

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

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

The CPAP sleep apnea machine would trigger insomnia during nighttime treatment.

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

Sleepless nights are for lovers and loners.

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.

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

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

Living chronically with insomnia can generate considerable anxiety and interfere with the quality of life.

I call modern electronic light bulbs ‘Insomnia light bulbs’ because they are known to disrupt sleep.

Insomnia can be one of the first symptoms of hypoxia.

The worst insomnia I have experienced in life occurred during using a CPAP machine.

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.

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 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.

Error 404 sleep not found.

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.

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…

The only cure for writer’s block is insomnia.

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

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Whoever says sleep equals laziness is probably a bitter insomniac.

Insomnia haunted me like regret.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Poems can get
sleepless too

and become

the loneliest thing
in the universe.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.’

I don’t sleep
I am friends with time who passes by in front of my open eyes
The clock can go for a long time, to my surprise
I am familiar with the dark yet light blue of the sky at dawn
I lay there in my bed, waiting, wishing, for the
sweet release but it doesn’t come
Everyone is asleep and I hear every breath and every snore
It can be a very interesting thing or such a bore
I don’t sleep.

A night full of nightmares is way better than a sleepless one.

Insomnia is only mind over mattress.

The best cure for insomnia is a Monday morning.

Sleep is such a luxury, which I can’t afford.

Staring at the blue sky causes insomnia to occur in the human.

Insomnia is my greatest inspiration.

I’m an insomniac, my mind works the night shift.