East West

Reflections on sleep and insomnia

Dr..

Kamal Abdul Malik

May 27 2022

Readers forgive me, I'm going to talk to them about a topic that's bothering me this morning.

Successive nights passed while I was suffering from insomnia.. I became one of the victims of the insomnia that characterizes modern civilization.

Statistics mention that more than a quarter of the residents of major cities, such as New York, cannot sleep without a hypnotic drug, and some of them have lost the ability to sleep naturally.

My time scale turned, I fell asleep during the day and woke up in the middle of the night, and I knew I had no hope of getting any rest.

I have repeatedly tried to sleep at night as creatures sleep, to enjoy the pleasure of sleeping at night, and the joy of being awake during the day... but I have not succeeded.

We had a relative, or a mother of children, advising people to wait in childbearing unless they were ready to spend five years - at least - suffering irregular sleep, and we laughed, considering that it was an exaggeration (by breaking the pain) in her advice, until God blessed us with girls;

As soon as the five years pass with one, until the other comes, we start counting from the beginning, and so on, until we get used to installment sleep, not wholesale sleep.

Sleep, insomnia, and love are intertwined themes in our literature, in Western literature, and among English romantic poets, such as William Wordsworth (d. 1797) in a poem entitled “Sleep.” Like other insomniacs, he often imagined sleep as a rebellious, rebellious, distant lover. Al-Manal, who embodies sleep in the poem, addresses it as the source of good health, new ideas, and the rest he needs during the night to enjoy the blessings of the day.

The English romantic poet John Keats (d. 1821) has a similar poem, also entitled Sleep, in which he expresses with remarkable lyrical his desire to sleep, and sleep is similar to him as a place of wellness and tranquility, compared to the noise and troubles of the day.

Poor Franz Kafka (d. 1924) throughout his creative life suffered from insomnia, and hallucinations arising from his lack of sleep formed a large part of his writings, and perhaps we can read his famous novel “The Metamorphosis” as a metaphor for the ill effects of insomnia.

I once wrote in my diary reflections on sleep, some of them from previous readings, and some of them figments of imagination, including: Sleep Sultan.

You are asleep, you are the ruler of yourself.

The blessings of sleep are many: being asleep means that you are alive, but without the troubles of life.

Being asleep means that you are alive in a metaphorical death before reaching the borders of the other world and eternal sleep.

Sleeping is filling the body with calmness and peace of mind, and emptying the mind of fear and sadness.

Sleep and death are from one family, as in the myths of ancient Greece, in which we read that the Greek god of sleep is Hypnos, and we forget that he is the brother of death Thanatos. Is sleep a short death or death a long slumber?

Sleep is associated with death, not only with the bonds of kinship, but also with the bonds of meaning: sleep, sleep, sleep, and the name of the place derived from the root is “manama” which means the grave, where the human body is laid to rest to begin the journey of eternal sleep.

The sleeper does not grow old in sleep.

He is not afraid, nor does he hear a news that is pressing on the end of his heart...

Sleep is a cinematic display of meaning, an exploration of the sea of ​​darkness surrounding you, unguided tours of the subconscious knowledges that border the clouds of clouds and the vapors of Oceania.

The sleepers are equal, despite the difference in the beds (plural of beds) and secrets, but waking up divides the sleepers, and drags them into wars and conflicts... If the world sleeps more, divisions will decrease, conflicts will subside, and humanity will prevail.

• Visiting scholar at Harvard University

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