The chief difference between ourselves and our forebears with
regard to insomnia is the devaluation of sleep that modernity has
brought us. When sleep is described in the language of awakeness
(as in the psychiatrist William Dement’s well-intended catchphrase
‘The brain never sleeps!’, intended to indicate that sleep is highly
active1), its darkest qualities – its enigma, dreamscapes and mortal
connotations – become invisible, hidden by the light. Consequently,
for us, although we do not always know it, insomnia means much
more than loss of sleep. But what it means is hard to access,
because, as well as undervaluing absence – and what is insomnia
but the absence of the oblivion one longs for? – we have difficulty
attributing agency to dark states. Nocturnal literacy, a term I have
coined to describe awareness of the complex interactions of different
kinds of darkness in their own right, is something globalized
modernity does not value, so we lack a lexicon for nocturnal
aptitude. And when Westerners do recognize dark activity, it is
often in a limited and fearful – if ironically archaic – fashion. While
darkness is increasingly crowded out by neon and by 24-hour workand-
play lives, it is still being invoked to cast opprobrium on others.
The globalized West has a centuries-long history of deploying
dark as a term of abuse.