Kafka on the Relationship Between Insomnia and Creativity – The Marginalian

Where we go to sleep and why we go there is one of the great mysteries of the mind. Why the mind sometimes refuses to go there, despite the pleading and negotiation of its conscious owner, is still a great mystery. We know that since REM evolved in the bird brain, the third part of our lives we spend sleeping and dreaming is key to our ability to learn, regulate emotions, and create. But the price we have paid for these amazing abilities has been brutal self-awareness, the thought that has turned on itself, nowhere is it more maddening than insomnia – that terrible moment when, faced with the split between your rational desires and your unconscious will, you realize that you are helpless against yourself, that there is no pull of thought and one feeling. gives you a collection of marionettes.

Against this already finished background, insomnia causes more cruelty: the more you think about not being able to sleep, the more you can't sleep, filled with anxiety about how helpless night wakings will jeopardize your day. But although the lack of sleep reduces basic functions such as intelligence and memory, ironically, the edge of sleep can be useful in the creation of creativity: In that balanced area between restlessness and rest, the mental planning systems begin to break down due to the fatigue of the day's work and the forbidden thoughts begin to appear in the unconscious space, begin to faint with unconsciousness. The insomniac's angst, begins to form unexpected combinations that we call reality.

Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883–June 3, 1924)—one of the worst sleepers in history—knew this, celebrated it, and enjoyed it.

Throughout his creative struggle, Kafka found himself sleepless. Like Patti Smith, who fights insomnia with visualization, she would cross her arms and put her hands on her shoulders, imagining herself lying as heavy as possible “like a soldier with his pack.” On his good days, he saw his insomnia as a badge of honor for a mind burning with thought: “I can't sleep because I write too much,” he wrote in his diary. On his worst days, he felt a tension between the “vague pressure of the desire to write” and the “approach of madness,” which he feared left him too exhausted from creative work. On one such day, he writes:

Due to fatigue he did not write and slept now on the sofa in the warm room and now on the one in the cold room, with sick legs and disgusting dreams. The dog was lying on my body, one paw near my face.

But another part of him saw that sleeplessness, rather than being a hindrance to his creative power, was its work, shaped at the edge of the night:

Insomnia only comes because… I write. Because no matter how little and how badly I write, I am still asked by this small shock, to feel, especially in the evening and even more in the morning, the approach, the imminent possibility of great moments that can tear me apart, that can make me able to do anything, and in the general chaos that is inside me and that I do not have time to order, not finding rest.

In a passage that suggests the creative impulse may be our best way of measuring how much truth we can hold, how much pain and rapture we are still alive – what Virginia Woolf called “the capacity to accept shock” that makes a person an artist – Kafka adds:

In the end this chaos is only a repressed, inhibited harmony, which, left free, could fill me completely, which might even expand and yet still fill me. But now such a moment raises only weak hopes and hurts me, because my self does not have enough strength or power to hold the current mixture, during the day a visible voice helps me, during the night it cuts me to pieces without restraint.

It is in the last moments of booking a sleepless night that he finds the source of his creative energy:

In the evening and in the morning my awareness of creative abilities in me is more than I can put together. I feel shaken to the core of my being and I can get out of myself anything I desire.

If you're not ready to embrace your insomnia as a full creative outlet, try Maurice Sendak's mindfulness remedy; if you're ready to live in your creative potential, take note of Kafka's understanding of the four psychological principles between talent and their talent.