Her insomniac highs and her dawning sleeplessness

Sleep disorder is a common problem thought to regularly affect around on in every three people in the UK and is predominantly common in elderly people. Sleep is a great commodity and we should protect, analyse and invest in it so that it promises us a full night’s rest.

Most people affected by insomnia are business owners, creative types as some of their best ideas develop at 3 am, which made our desire for a night of uninterrupted slumber totally complicated. Benjamin treats insomnia less as an affliction than as an encounter that she engages with and plumbs, but adds new dimensions to both our understanding of sleep or sleeplessness and how we perceive darkness. She focuses attention to the relationship with women and sleep –Penelope up all night, unravelling her day’s weaving for Odysseus, the pre-Raphaelite artists’ portrayals of deeply sleeping women, and the worries that keep contemporary females awake.

Benjamin a long-term sufferer from sleeplessness, thought about  what happens to her brain at night as she plunders literature both ancient and modern for clues as to the nature of her condition, from Homer to Nabokov to the late Oliver Sacks, neurologists.

Rumi, a Islamic poet, inspires her to think that we might “ stream beyond our bedroom walls at night like a crystalline liquid or data as though our avatars were flowing towards, then alongside those of others in surging information while our bodies were at rest”.

Secondhand flash backs to her mother’s childhood nights sleeping on a rooftop in Iraq bubble up and other things that can interfere with or aid our sleep cycles among them sugar and hormones and sex and earplugs.

Benjamin takes us deep into the anxious mind of cosmopolitan and literary sleepless woman. The lengthy bibliography and acknowledgments suggests trips to libraries, galleries and even foreign countries in pursuit of understanding insomnia.

Her bedroom become “like an oven awaiting the igniting flame”, wide lapels and toothy grin the last grover on the dance floor singing along to all the tunes gyrating body popping and whooping”.

Insomnia by Marina Benjamin, Scribe £9.99, 144 pages.