Nighttime finds insomniacs opening new worlds
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BY GEETA SHARMA JENSEN / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
In the dark night, when the world sleeps and the silence is broken only by the whisper of an occasional car, Anne Wilde tosses and turns and tosses and reaches for a book from the pile on her bedside table.
“I love night,” she reads, as she begins a favorite book by Canadian poet Christopher Dewdney. “Some of my earliest memories are of magical summer evenings, the excitement I felt at night’s arrival, its dark splendor. Later, when I was eleven, there were hot summer nights, especially if the moon was bright, when I felt irresistibly drawn outside. … After quietly shutting the back door behind me, I was free, deliciously alone in the warm night air. A bolt of pure electric joy would rush through me as I stepped into the bright stillness of the moonlit yard.”
It is all familiar, a familiar paragraph, familiar words, as familiar as her sleeplessness.
Wilde has read Dewdney’s “Acquainted With the Night: Excursions Through the World After Dark” a dozen or more times. His hour-by-hour exploration of a nocturnal world — its beauties and darkness, its creatures, its starlit sky, its nightclubs and neon, its graveyard shifts — soothes her as she lies awake. And by and by, perhaps in two hours, perhaps more, she drifts into sleep.
“I have almost a geeklike interest in the book because when you are awake and everyone else is asleep at night, it’s a very surreal kind of loneliness; you feel you’re the only one on Earth,” she says. “It comforts me to know that someone else was awake at that hour to share his experience of what’s going on at night. … And some of them are things I would never have known or talked about.”
Wilde has had trouble sleeping at night since she was about 10. In her early 40s now and an assistant buyer in a Mequon, Wis., bookstore, she has her fix. Her nightstand is stacked with books about the night. Titles such as “Night: Night Life, Night Language, Sleep and Dreams” by A. Alvarez and the brand-new “The Library at Night” by Alberto Manguel teeter above the classics she reads for her book club. Her daytime reading and her nighttime reading are sequestered.
“I love to read about the night when I am ‘alone’ in it,” she says. “I wonder if other insomniacs share this feeling.”
Many do. And some, like writer Dewdney, venture out into the environment of their wakefulness and tell us about it. Literature and insomnia are old friends.
Robert Frost wrote:
I have been one acquainted with the night
I have walked out in rain — and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
And Alexander Pushkin, in “Lines Written at Night During Insomnia,” wonders guiltily:
What do you mean, tedious whispers?
Is it the day I have wasted
Reproaching me or murmuring?
Wilde is not as alone as she thinks. Roughly one in 10 adults experiences bouts of toss-and-turn wakefulness at night. Rose Franco, director of the sleep medicine program at the Medical College of Wisconsin, says that in one study of sleep-starved adolescents, 75 percent said they used books as a technique to overcome their insomnia.
For many adult insomniacs, books are better than counting sheep, turning to wine or watching reruns on a flickering screen. But literature can be both the devil and an angel, a sedative as well as a picker-upper.
To send you to the Land of Nod, reading requires the right setting as well as the right genre. Insomniacs must remember — must trick their brain and body into remembering — that the bed is for sleeping only, and a comfortable armchair is for the reading that’s to comfort and soothe them. You want routine — which is why reading to kids before bedtime works so well.
Some mysteries and other page-turners stimulate your brain in much the same way as television images do and could keep you up until the birds twitter. Even dry textbooks, if in a field you find interesting, could keep you up. Other books, though bestsellers and wonderfully energizing and imaginative during the day, could be narcotic at night. And reading familiar titles to children at night not only puts the child but also you to sleep.
“You don’t want anything that’s going to feed the adrenaline,” Franco says. “Even better will be books on tape — but you want to listen to the same tape, the same book, over and over again. The repetitiveness of it is what you want.”
Books that allow you to browse, not burrow deeply, books that are meditative and familiarly repetitive — these have an incantative effect and lull you to sleep. They could be anything from the best classics to the pulpiest romances, self-help books such as the recently popular “Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert, or much-thumbed collections of poetry, even “Mother Goose.” Encyclopedias. Dictionaries. Junk mail. They’re all an insomniac’s darling.
Linda Wolfe, a New York author and journalist, tells of once interviewing the sex therapists Masters and Johnson for a Playboy piece. The research “included spending a weekend at their home,” Wolfe said in an e-mail. “Virginia Johnson, when we got to talking about bedtime reading, told me her bedtime reading when she couldn’t fall asleep was cookbooks. And then showed me the stack on her night table. Who’d a thunk??”
Barbara Hoffert, editor of the Library Journal Book Review, swears by a dog-eared copy of “The Crystal Cabinet: An Invitation to Poetry,” a 1962 anthology her mother gave her when she was a child. The anthology, by Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska, is no longer in print, but various editions can be found on Amazon.com for anywhere from $2.49 for a used hardcover to $49.50 for an edition with engravings by Gregory.
“It has some beautiful poems by William Blake,” says Hoffert, a longtime insomniac. “I know them really well and the book is really satisfying, just fulfilling enough but just challenging enough, and it makes you just tired enough to fall asleep.”
Hoffert’s husband and her 12-year-old daughter both suffer from disrupted sleep patterns. Her daughter reads novels about Tudor-era British royals; her husband gives up on sleep and turns on the computer to bid for stamps on eBay.
Poems, says Hoffert, are easy on the eyes. If Hoffert thinks she’ll be awake for about an hour, she’ll devour short stories, which are just the right length to finish in that time. If she suspects insomnia will grip her for at least two hours, if not more, she figures she might as well try a medieval mystery or a page turner.
If you’re wanting to know about the life of an insomniac, try “Sleep Demons: An Insomniac’s Memoir” by Bill Hayes, or the 1998 novel “No Lease on Life” by Lynne Tillman, whose main character, Elizabeth, is an insomniac who sits at her window nightly and keeps an eye on everything in her building.
Then there’s the international collection “Acquainted With the Night: Insomnia Poems” edited by Lisa Russ, and the fascinating “At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past” by A. Roger Ekirch.
For Myra Poe, a children’s bookseller on the east side, old favorites David McCullough, Douglas Coupland and “almost any Stephen King,” fit the bill. If those don’t work, she tries something dense and challenging like consciousness researcher Douglas Hofstadter (“Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid”).
If that still doesn’t work, she tries “something I have zero emotional attachment to,” like a kitchen manual or a “cookbook I don’t care for.”
And if that doesn’t work, she turns to the final weapon in her arsenal: Shakespeare.
The Bard is a man for all seasons, all times, all ages, in difficulties and in ease, in excitement and in boredom, and in sleep and in sleeplessness.
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