The sleepless write under the long arm of the voiceless.

The dreams of the sleepless are not really dreams; they are nightshades, purple and

retrograde, passed up and fibrous.

The sleepless know the house has no windows.

I do not mean to make this transcendent, though we are so transcendent at core it terrifies.

We are so faint and ubiquitous that when I enter a room I am implicated like a root

system that is affected by the water shortage across twelve meadows.

The sleepless are sleepless because the world at night is the answer to the world at day.

The sleepless are envious of the sleeping. They are tall and shrill, like bird song at dawn.

Their ears hear the stars and planets on the other side.

It is a cruel state, each limb stretched and splayed between past and future.

A myrtle state, a fetal state, a state below the state.

It is difficult to remain lucid, my beautiful infantile world. What I notice most walking

the streets of my birth, Berlin, are sheets upon terror upon crumbs upon flattened pigeon

bodies upon tree roots upon sand upon children's voices upon rubble upon rubble upon

echoes upon silence.

The Book of the Sleepless is a book I began to write a year ago, after not sleeping for over

a month. Everyone in that book suffers from a lack of sleep, from war, love, fathers,

cemeteries. But initially I did not call it The Book of the Sleepless. I did not write about

insomniacs. I wrote about Berlin before World War I. I wrote about women artists in

Berlin before World War I, and then Berlin in 2016, dentists, wisdom teeth, libraries and

axe attacks in regional trains.

What would a manifesto of the sleepless read like?

Why must we sleep?

This is how it would start.

In a circle, in a taunt.

Sometimes it appears that oppression comes not from sleeplessness but from the sleeping

who assume sovereignty at night. Everyone must sleep!

I am here turning slowly in the scales of my skin for the night knows us like nothing else

can.

To not sleep is a form of slow dying, except death here is a kind of wakefulness, the

bones in broth, discolored.

Sometimes I dream a little to avoid sleeplessness. I dream of the real images that swim in

the body.

A man with his face colored in red paint sits by the window and watches me. As already

mentioned the house has no windows just holes.

I sit and paint my eyelashes, which are tiny veins. No, wait. They are dead coral reef.

The wolves come by; I offer them my arm as a way to soothe the attack. Here, chew on

my arm for a while. The wolves lock their jaws and I have no choice but to bring them

into the house, their angry faces hanging sideways from my body.

In dreams I can also hear the voices that are otherwise turned away from me, the secret

passages exchanged once I am no longer in the room, of the group, by the table.

Of course the dead are there, emaciated and with bulging eyes. Some sickly and with fake

Russian accents. I tell them I must be with something else first, before I can give them

my attention, and then, quickly, turn toward the white walls, lie down in the center and

call on all mothers to protect me.

We, the sleepless, can be in multiple places at once, have a conversation with livers and

make an appearance in a war scene, concurrent and without consequence centuries

collapse in our skulls.

In other words, I am wondering how the simultaneity of the world is affecting my

orientation.

My therapist says, “Your intention for rest is sincere, and so everything in its way will

come to the surface.”

Some say the sleepless eventually go insane, which is another way of saying that they

already are. They are no longer fully human, no longer of identifiable relation.

The sleepless are also called insomniacs. An insomniac can be a person who is not

sleepless but thinks that they are.

Some say sleeplessness or insomnia is a symptom of another cause. It is not the actual

problem, but shows the sleepless what they keep from themselves by sleeping through it.

Sleeplessness is as old as Ancient Greece, I read. I think sleeplessness is as old as death

or birth. It is as old as the vaginal sky opening its lips at midnight.

I am obsessed with the aorta and was born postwar. There is research now that suggests

my generation of postwarlings, who were “surrounded by lions,” show epidemic degrees

of hyper vigilance. It is expressed through apocalyptic states of mind, night terrors,

insomnia. The amygdala posturing with detritus. Here shine the expulsed bodies—

nothing is candlelight. The length of its wisdom is the tail of a fox running across the

city at dawn. The condition undiagnosable. These descendants grew up in “peace,”

a privilege, they were told, they better not trouble.

The orchid has dropped a petal, or is it blossom?

Unlike the aorta it does not search for tone—without voice or sound it drowns out colors—

communicating something akin to a swallow’s descent.

I track it, track it down into the heavenly hole.

When I moved to North America eight years ago, I lived in a room big enough for one

mattress. I lived on the mattress surrounded by ship-like windows. It is there that I began

seeing floods, a falling atom bomb, a huge wave. No one surviving. Everyone surviving

somehow. Absent analysis.

I am third generation after the first war, second generation after the second war, first

generation born into a walled city, first daughter in three generations.

A sleepless book cannot fully locate itself. Jolted by hormonal crusades and fetal

memories the sleepless book finds its title at 4 a.m.

Pronouncements.

Immediately the bedroom of the sleepless turns into a scroll, and the blankets the next

morning reveal an ancient battle between the crossing and the crossed.

Nelly Sachs's Flucht und Verwandlung stares at me from the wall.

My flattened arms inside a castle of grief. Why marching?

All recent dreams spell attack.

I never read anymore.

Perpetually waiting to shut off, down, up.

At night the mind atrophies and the heart becomes a fugitive.

Stefano Harney relays a statement made by the prime minister of Singapore: “Only the

paranoid survive.”

Living is vertigo.

Sleeplessness is the state of the universe.

Controversy is the currency of this time.

At some point what kept running stands still, or, alternatively, what hid comes to the

surface wearing bells.

All roads eventually lead to sleep. Eventually you sleep. Eventually you drop away.

Eventually the key turns. Why exactly and through what magical acts or alchemy remains

unknown.

My tongue is wrapped between nothing and nothing more. I will refuse the narrative of

accumulation, of winning, even tough intermittently it can look bloated.

The sleepless are spades, constantly burying one disaster only to find another covered in

soil.

I will not write of statistics, but it is true that there is an increase of sleep disorders I’ve

eavesdropped on.

Once I heard all those awake at night singing hymnals.

My hand is shaking from writing, from not sleeping.

2018 is the year of the dog according to the Chinese calendar. Dogs are watchful. They

are pretend sleepers. One eye closed one open, their snouts live on thresholds.

Ultimately the sleepless are alone. Nobody can stand to stay up with them.

Nobody can follow their paralysis and rummage.

The sleepless exist among the sleeping like the only survivor of a genocide, lying on a

field at the end of a day, surrounded by dreamy faces turned toward the sky or mud.

Yes, it is a futile form of resistance and nothing is reached or repaired.

Though some will say that sleeplessness purifies.

Like long stares into candlelight.

Pinecones whisper, the trees’ saliva drips to the ground.

Supposedly women are more affected than men.

I want to call to you. The call is more like a croak.

You know how language suddenly turns glassy at night. A stubborn singular

reoccurrence. Despite myself. Shatters, then reforms, comes flying by the windows,

which are covered holes.

There are lineages. Places, states, and voices that precede sleeplessness.

We live with a very particular moon. Struggling hands.

Paper is always too far away and the writing illegible. That is, language, here, does not

hold.

How can a manifesto of the sleepless conclude?

How could it have been written in the first place?

It is already beyond sleeplessness, composed the day after, pale and sloshy the mind takes

up the task it knows it must and duly records.

As yet, I cannot perceive what the real writing of sleeplessness may look like, though I

know we are upon it. I know it is pressing up against the walls.

It is 1916 and war. The various cities disentangle and shrink, the populated crowded

alleys empty. What is that terrible notion to not look back so as to forego turning into

pillars of snow? I will stare at you with my neck twisted. Then I will look again, this time

when you expect it least. The molecules fly toward each other, cooling and mingling.