Exploring your "night self": How one author embraced the joy of being "Sleepless"

You know that age-old advice that if you're swimming and feel yourself getting pulled out to sea by a rip current, to swim across rather than fighting it? Imagine doing that, but for your insomnia.

I have never read a writer who could turn the lemons of sleep deprivation into the lemonade of creative inspiration quite like Annabel Abbs-Streets does in "Sleepless: Unleasing the Subversive Power of the Night Self." The English novelist and nonfiction author had, by her own admission, never been a great sleeper. But when she was hit with the deaths of her father and stepfather in rapid, peak COVID-era succession, the sandman took a more extended leave of absence. What could have become a mental and physical health crisis instead served as an catalyst for Abbs-Streets to get to know her "night self," as she explored the curious, creative and quiet power of those midnight hours. 

Along the way, she discovered she had unique company in the female artists and writers — from Sylvia Plath to Lee Krasner — who carved out space for personal liberation in the middle of the night. Weaving history, scientific research on brain chemistry and Abbs-Streets's own personal nocturnal explorations, "Sleepless" is uniquely engaging and hopeful account of a condition that is more typically a truly miserable experience. And while the author acknowledges that "a good night's sleep is still the most fantastic thing ever," she offers an upside — especially for women — to wakefulness.

I talked to Abbs-Streets via Zoom recently about why sleep loss looks different in women than men, learning to not be afraid of the dark, and making friends with the night self. 

This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Talk to me about the galvanizing experience that starts you on this path of meeting your night self. 

I haven't been a great sleeper for about 25 years, since I was pregnant for the first time, actually. That never got any better, and I was sort of okay with that. I just read a lot of books. But then a series of deaths happened within the space of about six weeks. It was also during COVID, before the vaccines had appeared.

So I had all my children at home and my mother and my stepmother were suddenly bereaved and isolated on their own. I took it upon myself to look after after everyone and everything, to organize all the funerals and give the eulogy and write the obituaries and do all the admin that comes with a death. I didn't really have space to grieve. I think grieving really needs its own space, and I didn't have that. But night became that space. 

First of all, of course, I tried to fight that because like everyone I'm told you must have seven hours of sleep — even though I've never had this. I thought, even more than ever, I need to sleep. But by this point, nothing worked. I started off trying the usual, the melatonin, the [cannabis-based drug] CBD. Absolutely nothing had any effect whatsoever. But I had already started working on a book on women who worked at night. I'd always been interested in how so many women created such different things in the middle of the night. And my editor said, "That's a great book. You write something lighthearted and funny." 

Something lighthearted and funny that will include Sylvia Plath and Louise Bourgeois.

At that stage, Sylvia wasn't in it. I had a lot of Hollywood stars from the '20s and '30s, who would dance naked in their gardens. It was still meant to be a book that helped people with sleep anxiety, but now I was in full blown insomnia mode, not sleeping at all. And so the book had to take it had to do a big pivot. But knowing that all these women had these really lengthy periods of very bad insomnia, and just got up and created art, I thought, I don't need to lie in my bed. The first three or four months I did just lay there, and cried and thought and reflected.

That's when I started also to think, "This is a really nice time and a really peaceful space." It was my time, and I didn't have to worry about my two mothers or my children or whatever. But then as time went on, I thought, "Okay, I'm going to to try what these women tried," because some of them had successfully been able to sleep. Famously, Louise Bourgeois conquered her insomnia by drawing; Lee Krasner conquered her three years of insomnia by painting. I thought, maybe this is the way forward. I then embarked on this series of night journeys, and month by month, I went through picking off these different types of night adventures. And then I just became obsessed. 

I went on an astronomy course, and learned about the stars and started sleeping out on the roof terrace. I think people thought I was a little bit odd, but it was so beautiful. All our ancestors, once upon a time, all slept like that. I thought, "God, I'm sleeping like people, who I'm genetically derived from, slept for thousands of years." It felt incredibly soothing and comforting and quite spiritual. 

Then I graduated from my roof terrace, and I started going for little walks. I started off just looking out the window, then onto the roof terrace, them around the garden. I started edging out, because I've always been quite scared of the dark. But by this time, I was really quite okay in the dark. I started looking for glow worms and moths and reading about Rachel Carson at the beach in the middle of the night. Just so many women. A lot of them were, I suspect, [were] menopausal. They wouldn't have known that, because it was never spoken about. But they were all out and about, seemingly quite unafraid of the dark and never mentioning the concerns that we have a bit about being out. 

I also found some contemporary women that I write about in the book, who are also incredibly brave, going out and doing astrophotography and walking. That changed my relationship with night. It changed the whole grieving process, really, because it became something that was much bigger than just grieving.

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What I discovered from my science reading was that the brain is wired differently at night. Knowing that was also quite helpful, because instead of thinking, "There's something wrong with me wanting to do this or thinking this," I was like, "No, this is just my brain. This is just my night self." I had the neuroscientists and the sleep researchers on one side, and then I had all these women that I called the "night spinners" on the other side, who had been getting up and finding their creative, reflective, spiritual side. It all came together.

You write about Virginia Woolf, and this book made me realize that for a lot of women, that "A Room of One's Own" is actually a time, less so a space. It's women claiming a time where they are not obliged, they're not tethered to their daily obligations.

Yes, and it's not clock time. It's a different sort of time and it moves, it dilates. I started to think of night as as not as a time but a country. I didn't know how much is going on at night. I had no idea. We sleep and we think everyone else is sleeping, but actually lots of things aren't sleeping — insects and birds and wildlife. 

There's a sense that wakefulness must be tied to productivity. This is a book that is definitely about women being productive, but it is in a very creative way. It's not in service, necessarily, of capitalism or of others. For women, that time can be so sacred and precious and liberating. 

It's very interesting. If you live with other people sleeping in your house, there's really no chance that you're going to start Hoovering, baking and emptying the dishwasher. You have to do something that's very quiet because you don't you really don't want to wake people up. You don't want them coming downstairs and asking for food. You have to do something very quiet. 

Talk to me about the science about this and the way that your your brain works differently at night, particularly, the female brain works differently. 

This is tied to light and dark, which fascinated me because I always assumed that it must be tied to sleep. The hormones start changing with the shift from light to dark. Melatonin starts to rise. Another hormone is leptin. Leptin starts to swish around us. That's the one that stops us wanting to eat, which is why we don't feel so hungry at night — an evolutionary adaptation. If we woke up at night feeling hungry a few millennia back and were tempted to go outside, we would have been at risk. A lot of these hormones seem to have been imprinted on us over thousands of years as a means of keeping us safe.

At the same time, other hormones start to slip away. Serotonin, which is a hormone that makes us feel happy and cheerful, just slips away, which is why I've never met anyone who wakes at night and is really happy and cheerful. It can be downright ruminative. It's always got that edge of sadness and contemplation and reflection. That is probably because cortisol, a hormone that makes us feel alert and energetic, is absolute at its lowest point at about midnight. So hormonally, we are quite different. 

What I found really interesting is about the prefrontal cortex, which is the most evolved part of the brain, which makes sure we think rationally and sensibly and can weigh up risk versus reward. I didn't know until I did my research that in women, it is both larger and it's more active. The prefrontal cortex is also really tied up within the inner critic, that little voice in your head that says, "You're not good enough. Don't do that; that's not your thing."

At night, the prefrontal cortex goes into partial hibernation, which researchers think is because it just needs to rest and repair itself for the following day. I thought, maybe that's an opportunity for women. Perhaps that is why Virginia Woolf produced her most outrageous book ["Orlando"] when she wrote it at night and why Lee Krasner's paintings were so different at night. Perhaps that is the loosening of the prefrontal cortex that sleep scientists think may be responsible for men's reckless behavior at night. Maybe what is detrimental for them is actually possibly of benefit to women. 

Talk to me about DMT, because this was very revelatory and a little confusing for me. Our brains produce these psychedelics.

Endogenous dimethyltryptamine [DMT], the kind that we produce ourselves, is really hard to study. It stays in our brain for such a short period of time, around for about 20 minutes, and it comes in these little lightning bolts. It's bound up with dreaming. I noticed from reading all of these letters and journals from women in the past who were out in the dark, they often would see things. I wondered why people thought so much about ghosts and phantoms in the past. I've experienced it myself out night walking with no torch. You often you see things and you don't know where they've come from. My main experience of it really was in the hypnagogic hallucinations.

They're more common in women, more common in people who don't sleep very well. I think they're also more common in people who are grieving. It's all part of the same thing, and flitting between wakefulness and sleepfulness. That seems to be the space where you can switch into these odd visions, which for me, came as like a cinematic still. That's one theory. Other people may have different views. Another researcher, Christopher Timmermann Slater, describes endogenous DMT as dreaming while you're awake.

This is a book about some of the beautiful upsides of our wakefulness, But we also know that sleep deprivation is terrible for us. Sleep deprivation ages us, it wears out our bodies. And there is a price to be paid, as Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath would have told you, for those nocturnal creations. We may make friends with the night self, but then the alarm still is going to go off and "day self" has still got to do our jobs and take care of our families. How do we reckon with all of this, especially as women who are doing so much of the caregiving? 

You're absolutely right. And I really don't want anyone to start setting their alarm for the middle of the night. A good night's sleep is still the most fantastic thing ever.

I did discover a few things quite early on, and they were game changers. Otherwise, I would have been completely crushed by the fatigue. The first thing was the anxiety of not sleeping. When I got rid of that, the next morning, I still felt a bit weary, but I didn't feel as tired as when I spent the night really stressed about not being asleep. When I got up and embraced it, and when I went for a walk, for example, I would quite often come back and and fall back to sleep. Whereas if I'm tossing and turning, it can be for hours.

The second thing is I realized was that the getting rid of the anxiety made the next day much less tired. On the nights where I had gone out by itself or felt really proud of myself for spotting stars, I didn't feel nearly as tired as on those angst-ridden days.