Where we go when we go to sleep and why we go there is one of the great mysteries of the mind. Why the mind at times refuses to go there, despite the pleading and bargaining of its conscious owner, is a greater mystery still. We know that ever since REM evolved in the bird brain, the third of our lives we spend sleeping and dreaming has been a crucible of our capacity for learning, emotional regulation, and creativity. But the price we have paid for these crowning curios of consciousness has been savage self-consciousness, thought turned in on itself, nowhere more maddening in its mania for rumination than in insomnia — that awful moment when, facing the fissure between your conscious wishes and your unconscious will, you realize that you are helpless against yourself, that there is not a single you pulling the strings of the mind but a tangle of thought and feeling rendering you a troupe of marionettes.

Against this already discomposing backdrop, insomnia foregrounds an added cruelty: the more you think about not being able to sleep, the less able to sleep you are, spiraling into anxiety about how the night’s helpless wakefulness will compromise your day. But while lack of sleep does diminish basic functions like reflexes and recall, paradoxically, the brink of sleep can be salutary to creativity: In that liminal space between restlessness and rest, the mind’s organizing principles begin to fray with the fatigue of the day’s conscious labors and unbidden thoughts begin to emerge from the recesses of the unconscious, begin to collide with one another in the seething cauldron of the insomniac’s angst, begin to form the unexpected combinations we call originality.

Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883–June 3, 1924) — one of history’s most prolific insomniacs — knew this, celebrated it, relished it.

Throughout his struggles with creative block, Kafka regularly found himself sleepless. Like Patti Smith, who fights insomnia with an imaginative visualization, he would cross his arms and lay his hands over his shoulders, visualizing himself laying 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 ablaze with thought: “I can’t sleep because I write too much,” he writes in his diary. On his bad days, he felt in it the tension between “the vague pressure of the desire to write” and “the nearness of insanity,” feared it left him too tired for creative work. On one such day, he records:

Because of fatigue did not write and lay now on the sofa in the warm room and now on the one in the cold room, with sick legs and disgusting dreams. A dog lay on my body, one paw near my face.

But another part of him realized that sleeplessness, rather than a hindrance to his creative vitality, is a function of it, honed on the edges of the night:

Sleeplessness comes only because… I write. For no matter how little and how badly I write, I am still made sensitive by these minor shocks, feel, especially towards evening and even more in the morning, the approaching, the imminent possibility of great moments which would tear me open, which could make me capable of anything, and in the general uproar that is within me and which I have no time to command, find no rest.

In a passage that suggests the creative impulse may just be our best way of calibrating how much reality we can hold, how much of the pain and rapture of being alive we can bear — what Virginia Woolf called “the shock-receiving capacity” that makes one an artist — Kafka adds:

In the end this uproar is only a suppressed, restrained harmony, which, left free, would fill me completely, which could even widen me and yet still fill me. But now such a moment arouses only feeble hopes and does me harm, for my being does not have sufficient strength or the capacity to hold the present mixture, during the day the visible word helps me, during the night it cuts me to pieces unhindered.

It is in the liminal times bookending the sleepless night that he discovers the fount of his creative powers:

In the evening and the morning my consciousness of the creative abilities in me is more than I can encompass. I feel shaken to the core of my being and can get out of myself whatever I desire.

If you are not yet ready to embrace your sleeplessness as a fulcrum of creativity, try Maurice Sendak’s antidote to insomnia; if you are ready to live into your creative powers, take heed in Kafka’s insight into the four psychological barriers between the talented and their talent.