sleeplessness

My word stinkof blood and goreof sleepless nightsof invisible demonsof razors and knivesof slashed wristsMy words - they stink.

This mind is continuous and ever taxing, Sleep is an endeavoring luxury for the carnivorous mind

Every morning I tell myself, "I'll sleep early tonight." And every night I say, "One more chapter.

I feel as though whenever I create something, my Mr. Hyde wakes up in the middle of the night and starts thrashing it. I sometimes love it the next morning, but other times it is an abomination.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oh God, midnight__ not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two__ not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning, there__ hope, for dawn__ just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three A.M.! Doctors say the body__ at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You__e the nearest to dead you__l 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__ slaughter your half-dreams with buckshot! But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that__ burned dry. The moon rolls by to look at you down there, with its idiot face. It__ 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__ it true, had he read somewhere, more people in hospitals die at 3 A.M. than at any other time...

Dark circles under my eyes sink deeper and deeper into my skull, in contrast to my pale skin there is an undeniable resemblance to a fresh corpse.

All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me. I loathe Somnus, that black-masked headsman binding me to the block; and if in the course of years I have got so used to my nightly ordeal as almost to swagger while the familiar axe is coming out of its great velvet-lined case, initially I had no such comfort or defense: I had nothing - save a door left slightly ajar into Mademoiselle's room. Its vertical line of meek light was something I could cling to, since in absolute darkness my head would swim, just as the soul dissolves in the blackness of sleep.

Hail O mighty, fathomless sleep, come on and hug me tight and sweet; when I whisper those deepest pains, onto your ears mute and keen, sing for me the sweetest song that would sound the profoundest of life! Leave me upon your rocking arms, watched by spirits of placid nights!Goodnight, world, sweet dreams folks, blessed are those who would sleep at peace!

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The last thing she remembered before finally drifting off was how nice Steffi's hair smelled.