The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping QUOTES

2 " 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. "

― Samantha Harvey , The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping

4 " 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 "

― Samantha Harvey , The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping

6 " Sleep. Sleep. Like money, you only think about it when you have too little. Then you think about it all the time, and the less you have the more you think about it. It becomes the prism through which you see the world and nothing can exist except in relation to it. "

― Samantha Harvey , The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping

8 " Writing is lucid dreaming – the work of the subconscious that has a toe in the conscious, just enough to harness the dream’s waywardness. I always heard it said that writing draws on the subconscious, but that isn’t true. It is the subconscious, and it draws on the conscious. "

― Samantha Harvey , The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping

10 " What an unlikely wonder is life, that it holds in itself the whole wildness of death – those bacteria didn’t come into life at the point of death, they were always there and they always wanted to eat you, and your cells always contained in them the enzymes that would assist your rotting. It was only ever your vehemence to survive that prevented all that. Did you know, were you ever able to detect within, the passionate warfare that kept you here? "

― Samantha Harvey , The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping

12 " Much is said to disparage authors who write outside of their expertise, and worse still, who appropriate the experience of others about whom they cannot know – a white man appropriating the experience of a Bangladeshi woman, a childless woman that of a mother – but nobody took the pen from my hand when I, well-slept, found a notion in my brain of sleeplessness. To write fiction you have to engage in organised fraud, the laundering of experience into the offshore haven of words. "

― Samantha Harvey , The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping

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

― Samantha Harvey , The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping

16 " But my sleep was ragged that night, she wrote. But she didn’t know anything about ragged sleep when she wrote that. She knew the word ragged and she knew it was an adjective that could describe many things, including sleep, but she knew nothing about ragged sleep. Nowadays she is shocked by the fraudulence of words. Every word claims an authority and every word craves to be believed, and we read others’ words and we find something to relate to, solace in a shared experience. Yet there doesn’t have to be any experience behind a word. A word can be a shadow not cast by any object. "

― Samantha Harvey , The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping