As a chronic overthinker, I often make connections to things that aren’t obviously related. This is reflected in the media I consume. I’ve never been particularly concerned with whether a song, book, or show is considered “good”. I’m moreso interested in its ability to make people feel less alone– how it introduces new meanings, contexts, or solutions to our lives.
Here is an essay (hopefully the first of many) that is an all-in-one music review, book review, and a reflection on personal experience:
On Insomnia, Part 1
As the anniversary rolls around, I remember February 2024 as the beginning of a mental health crisis lasting about two months. During that time, I struggled with relentless insomnia.
At the worst of it, I could not for the life of me stay asleep for more than two hours. I had taken about three different types of sleep aids with the hopes it would serve as the solution. The sedatives worked to shut down my already sleep-deprived body, but my hyperaroused mind refused to follow, leaving me stranded in hypnagogia. I found myself in a state of sleep paralysis limbo where my body had “fallen asleep” but my mind had experienced all 6 hours of the night. I felt like a commuter who had missed the last late-night bus until the next morning, stuck in the limbo of night. It was reminiscent of the stories I would hear of people experiencing sensory deprivation chambers. Eyes grow bored of the darkness and hallucinate shapes behind the eyelids. The ears uncomfortable with the silence start to whisper to itself in the form of blood flowing through the artery, the heartbeat slowly grows louder until it is at a volume that is maddening. I was trapped within my own mind, a place that no longer felt safe.
This prison of awareness isn’t just a medical condition—it’s a state that artists have explored to reveal deeper truths about consciousness itself. The following works explore different aspects of the same horror: what happens when we cannot escape ourselves.
The Eternal Night of Stephen King’s The Jaunt
Stephen King’s The Jaunt– my personal favorite feature in his short story collection Skeleton Crew– explores humanity reaching the capacity of teleportation as a mode of travel (which they call “jaunting”). It is as commonplace as taking a bus. You take a seat, take a quick nap courtesy of some anesthesia, and almost instantly you wake up on Mars.
The meat of the story is a lot of background, with the horror comes completely from implications. The plot opens with a lengthy recount of the discovery of the technology, with scientist in his garage in a very “Jeff Goldblum in The Fly” fashion. Mad with discovery, the scientist is in glee with the successful transportation of various inanimate objects: a pencil emerges able to write, a set of keys successfully starts his car, a wristwatch still kept time (King always had a fascination with watches in his stories), and a calculator functions perfectly. The machine is able to recreate these items to near physical perfection, however the challenge lies in transporting conscious creatures. Increasing in complexity, the scientist tries a mouse. Squirming with desire of escape, the mouse is thrown in, but emerges a husk. Its body is flawlessly replicated and alive as it aspirates, but its eyes devoid of sentience. It almost immediately collapses in death.
While the idea of teleportation is often explored whimsically in other sci-fi media, it becomes more disturbing the more you think about it! The more tame mechanism of action involves breaking space– the bending of spacetime by creating a wormhole to join two locations together that a subject can pass through, completely intact. Pretty harmless. The second mechanism is more nefarious, and involves breaking us– the deconstruction of living tissue, atom by atom, and delivering the pieces to the destination where the body is reassembled. Metaphysically, one could theorize that this process effectively kills the original and recreates a discontinuous copy with neurons that only happen to make up an identical but unrelated consciousness. But we can never know for sure– what if conscious continuity is maintained? What does the consciousness perceive when it is disconnected from a body?
Rudy Foggia was the first living human to experience jaunting fully conscious and without anesthetics. He was a death row inmate that was promised full pardon after taking part in this experiment. He essentially had nothing to lose. Shuffling out of the portal, his hair immediately bleeds into a shade of white with immense stress and eyes bulging blankly with the impression of great age. “What happened?” a scientist asks. Rudy could only answer: “It’s eternity in there…” before collapsing from a heart attack.
Sleep is famously a process that runs independent of time. In many video games, interacting with a bed serves as a form of time travel that brings the player to the next day almost instantly. In real life, you can take a late afternoon nap, and wake up without a sense of what day it is. Dreams can stretch for what seems like hours, only to have taken a few minutes in reality. In the Jaunt, it is unconsciousness that shields the observer from experiencing the full length of perceived time. What if the way consciousness flickers out in sleep hints at something fundamental about our perception of time? The unsettling question about teleportation isn’t whether the person that emerges on the other side is you or not. It’s about what happens in during the journey itself.
To the scientists, Rudy’s jaunt of a two mile distance was nearly instantaneous– almost 0.000000000067 of a second. However, to a mind of pure awareness experiencing the infinite void without the buffer of bodily or sensory input, Rudy perceived the journey to last an incomprehensible amount of time. This is what makes The Jaunt so chilling—not just the idea of losing one’s body, but the possibility of being left alone with one’s own mind, forever.
When reading the Jaunt, I was misled into different ideas of where King was taking the story. As the scientist seemingly amputates his fingers, or when he observes the cross section of a mouse he would only insert half-way, I was expecting body horror. Afterwards, my rumination on the incomprehensible creature Rudy was possibly seeing in the spatial in-between drew me to cosmic horror. There is no blood or monsters, the true horror of this story is simply time–consciousness trapped in its own awareness, forever, without the relief of sleep or death.
Andrew Birds’ Toxic Perfectionism
Suzuki-method, whistling virtuoso, and violinist Andrew Bird has never been an artist bounded by genre. The storytelling lyricism and fingerstyled violin and guitar of Pulaski and Night and Sisyphus gives a folksy, troubadour-like quality. His experimental early work in Thrills feature influences in Americana-laced swing and gypsy jazz. And his complex arrangement in many choruses and his instrumental works like Echolocations or Outside Problems are reminiscent of Baroque or Romantic-era classical music. Beyond his technical prowess, Bird’s songwriting often wrestles the mind’ contradiction, for instance, his 2022 album Inside Problem delves into inner turmoil and late-night anxieties. However, these themes have sat ruminating in Bird’s repository in the decade prior.
This fixation on self-reflection and mental loops is central to Eyeoneye from the 2012 album Break it Yourself, a song that dissects toxic perfectionism, emotional resilience, and the self-destructive nature of excessive introspection. It’s a song notable enough that Bird did a TedTalk about it. He describes overt self-awareness as “an eye trying to see itself, or an ear trying to hear itself”, and demonstrates live by purposefully bringing the mic close to the speaker, creating a high-pitched feedback loop that leaves the audience unnerved, yet intrigued. He humorously adds “this is the sound of self-destruction”.
Like audio looping back into a mic, weird things happen when you get too close to your source. In medicine, mad cow disease happens when you feed cows their own brains– there are similar neurodegenerative diseases that can also occur in humans in the form of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease or fatal familial insomnia. In genetics, offspring from incestual breeding increases the chances of harmful recessive genes, leading to genetic disorders. In quantum mechanics, trying to “see” reality too closely alters it in odd ways, like in double-slit experiments, electrons paradoxically act as waves when unobserved, and particles otherwise.
A more personal example: when making mistakes that hurt others, a particularly growth-orientated individual can often retreat into introspection. It can easily spiral into a sort of fantastic voyage/ redemption fantasy where you journey within yourself to eliminate the causing “disease”, as a means to never repeat the mistake again. It is a noble cause! But the danger lies when mistakes become integrated into your self-worth instead of your actions. Like an autoimmune disease or a cancer, in attempting to fix yourself from within, you can unintentionally eliminate and destroy the healthy cells that make up you.
The song’s lyrics reveal how doing this can be deeply unpleasant. Bird sings about the process of helping yourself in: “give yourself a hand, the hand is your hand”, in which the repetition reinforces the recursive loops that can occur in isolation. When describing what happens to this hand, Bird continues with disturbing physicality: “And you go ahead and wring it out / You go ahead and stretch it out / You go ahead and wear it inside out”. It’s a gruesome image that suggests an endless, labored, and exhaustive process to achieve an elusive and impossible standard of perfection. Like insomnia’s desperation of sleep, attempts to summon it only pushes it away. This self-improvement loop becomes its own form of torment.
Bird critiques the modern capitalist obsession with self-improvement– the world of self-help books, never-ending professional development, and therapy without application. These are all great tools in moderation, but the unending drive to constantly better oneself can lead to internal self-destruction. The song illustrates how these ideas can, when taken too far, become counterproductive and harmful. To be introspective is like staring into the hole that is your inner world, in hopes to find the root cause of a problem. In many cases, the hole is a great place to do work, but be wary of not getting too comfortable.
To grow requires your heart to be broken. When in isolation, you must do the unpleasant thing of breaking it yourself. The healthier path is to grow by letting people in, allowing them to challenge you, help you, and sometimes even hurt you. Love is labor, but unlike Bird’s exhaustive self-improvement loop, it’s labor shared. The vulnerability of connection offers what introspection alone cannot—a way out of the feedback loop. It is a bridge from the isolated mind back to the real world. It is our connections to others that rescues us from the eternity of our own thoughts.
On Insomnia, Part 2
Anxiety-induced insomnia can be a vicious cycle. Stress can cause a poor night’s sleep, which causes sleep deprivation, creating poor emotional regulation, creating anxiety, that spirals into another sleepless night… and so on. I laid in bed, trying to will slumber into existence, as if there was an instruction manual somewhere in my brain that I misplaced.
After a few days, I went to a dismissive ER doctor, who gave me an “honestly pretty crazy” off-label antipsychotic (the quotes are word for word how a different doctor described it). It’s a choice so odd, the first result on google brings you to likely the darkest and most dangerous pit of the internet: the user reviews section of drugs.com, a venting ground for people who are convinced their doctors had given them poison disguised as pills. Horrible reading material for someone who was deeply sleep deprived and deeply concerned about it.
This is where I came across a description of a rare and lethal genetic condition– fatal familial insomnia, which destructively has the exact symptoms list of someone with plain old anxiety. “Difficulty sleeping that gets worse over time”? That’s exactly my problem! “Nervous system overactivity, including faster-than-normal heart rate”? Super relatable! “Involuntary muscle twitching” ? My eye is twitching right now while reading that. “Hallucinations”? Sounds scary! I’ll be sure to keep a real careful look out, every hour of the clock. If I see something, I’ll be sure to call my doctor at 3AM to let her know I’m probably dying. Hello, health anxiety, hope you enjoy your stay!
These were the spirals of thought that consumed every moment I was awake– which for an insomniac was all the damn time. It was a form of personal hell to have a problem that is recursive. Anxiety-induced insomnia causes anxiety-induced insomnia. A problem where staying awake only gives you more time to ruminate about the problem. Trying to force a solution that seems to get worse the more you try. An eternity of consciousness with no relief?
No. The thing about recursive loops is the false perception of reaching a goal. Running towards what looks to be the answer only keeps the wheel turning. The issue is not the problem itself– its the desire for control that leads you down what you think is the most obvious solution, when the actual solution is to just walk away.
Sleep wasn’t something to be conquered. There was no process to be learned, or a magic pill to be prescribed. The answer was to just surrender– walking away from the problem unsolved to reconnect with the rest of the world. Taking time off, I biked with my dad through landscapes that expected nothing from me. I went on walks with my mom, where value is measured in footsteps, rather than hours of sleep. Returning to Madison, I finally found a therapist. I joined the club I was too afraid of joining. I accepted that I will never be the perfect communicator, or be the one that will fix everyone, or atone for what I’ve broken. But loving and seeing the value of myself regardless. At some point, I stopped taking the pills and blaming diseases I never had. And eventually, on the most ordinary of days, I fell asleep.
Brought to you by…
Thank you for reading! I had an idea of ending my posts with a section for further reading, resources, and recommendations. These are not actual paid sponsorships, just a fun way to present these!
For those struggling with similar challenges, here are some earnest (and some lighthearted) suggestions of things that helped me. I hope they help you as well!
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The Sleep Coach School: Based in Eugene, Oregon, a city near and dear to my heart. The Sleep Coach School is run by sleep physician Daniel Erichsen, who offers a unique approach of addressing insomnia by alleviating sleep-related anxiety, rather than using often-prescribed tools like “sleep restriction” or “sleep-hygiene” practices. Daniel’s philosophy centers around insomnia being a sort of “phobia” or “OCD” around sleep, rather than a medical condition, and works to dismantle that fear so that sleep can reoccur naturally. They have a few paid services, but there is SO much value in the countless interviews with survivors that he has posted on Youtube for free. These videos offered me so much comfort during those sleepless nights.
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Open Path Collective: It seems like insurance is designed to fail when you actually need it. This was my case when I was going through the worst of it and I found out I hadn’t had insurance for months, when I thought I did. The Open Path Collective is a nonprofit dedicated to providing affordable mental health services to individuals uninsured or underinsured. Once the one-time membership fee of $65 is paid, you are allowed regular sessions priced between $30 to $70, which is often the copay for many insurance holders. Many therapists offer free consultation to see if you are a good fit, even before paying the $65. I want to emphasize the quality of their network. The therapist I ended up finding through their network is STILL my therapist today, even though I am no longer using the service!
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Diet A&W: We all have our vices: alcohol, smoking, weed, sex… Mine is sugary drinks! Diet A&W is notable because it’s one of the only diet sodas without caffeine. A bit of canned joy that’s perfect for anyone neurotic about their sleep quality!