Insomnia? Sleep on it

The film8217;s title can be puzzling unless taken ironically. Yet there8217;s another possible reading. Working as a creative artist, Fields might be hinting that a condition most of us would regard as a curse can actually be a help. Virtually nobody rejoices in sleeplessness and it can be a sign of more serious problems, like depression.

But could it be that for some people, like WC Fields, insomnia is something to profit from rather than to fight and suppress?

Fields wasn8217;t the only creative person who regularly had trouble sleeping.

A website lists 10 famous insomniacs 8212; Fields, Marlene Dietrich, Amy Lowell, Alexandre Dumas, Judy Garland, Tallulah Bankhead, Franz Kafka, Theodore Roosevelt, Groucho Marx and Mark Twain 8212; it could have stretched more.

As an insomniac myself, I often go to bed with drooping eyelids, only to find a few minutes later that my brain is on the boil with ideas for articles I might pitch to editors. Sometimes the boil churns up other subjects, such as the perfect reply to the salesclerk who was rude to me that day. I take melatonin, but lately I8217;ve been wondering if I should bother taking anything at all.

Apart from the rest

The notion that insomnia might have a use is counterintuitive.

Conventional wisdom insists that to perform at your best 8212; for a test, a game, a day in office 8212; you need a good night8217;s sleep. All this harping on sleep only compounds the problem: How in blazes can you sleep when you8217;re worried about getting a good night8217;s sleep and doing your best in that exam? The common-sense view got some scientific validation in 2004, when researchers at the University of Luebeck in Germany gave two sets of subjects a math problem to solve. As reported in Nature, one group was allowed to sleep for eight hours before the test, the other was kept awake. The problem had a mathematical shortcut, which 59 per cent of the rested subjects spotted while only about 25 per cent of the tired ones did.

Other studies, according to Kevin Quinn, head of the sleep-research programme at the National Institute of Mental Health, show that a good night8217;s sleep is important for consolidating what you8217;ve already learned.

Common sense might also tell us that those lucky people who don8217;t need a lot of Z8217;s get more done than 8220;greedy8221; sleepers by virtue of having a longer day. Not necessarily so, according to Mark Mahowald, director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis. 8220;The total sleep requirement for humans varies from four hours a night on the short end to 10 hours on the long end,8221; he said. 8220;This is genetically determined. Researchers tried to correlate the short-enders with productivity and discovered that there are no differences between them and long-enders.8221;

Could common sense fail us again when we try to discern a relationship between insomnia and creativity rather than solving prepared problems?

Here the scientific literature is skimpy, but one recent study suggests that insomnia and originality might go hand in hand.

Its authors, Dione Healey of the University of Canterbury and Mark A Runco of California State University at Fullerton, worked with 60 New Zealand children between the ages of 10 and 12, half of whom scored in the 90th percentile or better on a standard creativity test, while the other half fell short of that mark. 8220;Seventeen of the 30 highly creative children showed signs of sleep disturbance,8221; Healey and Runco reported last year in the Creativity Research Journal, 8220;while only eight of the control children showed signs of sleep disturbance.8221;

This is a tantalising result, but as the authors themselves note, it leaves certain key questions unanswered. Is insomnia the price some creative people must pay to activate their muse 8212; no insomnia, no brainstorms? Or does insomnia keep them from being even more creative by depriving them of sleep8217;s full refreshment 8212; no insomnia, more and better brainstorms? And in real life, as opposed to the psych lab, is insomnia perhaps more often neither a cause of nor a penalty for the onset of creativity but simply a side effect of getting too wrapped up in the process once it has started 8212; being, like Evelyn Waugh8217;s Pinfold, unable to turn off the mental valves flipped on earlier in the day?

Warped perception?

The answers to such questions could make a big difference, for insomnia tends to feed on itself. The more you worry about it, that is, the more power it can exert over you. But if insomnia is an outlet for connections not made during our upright hours, a dredging-up process for ideas we didn8217;t realise we had in us, then we probably shouldn8217;t fight it, or at least not so vehemently.

Insomnia may be not only what we make of it, but also what we tell ourselves about it. And we may have a lot of freedom in that regard, for it8217;s hard to imagine where researchers might go next.

How would you design an experiment to show whether sleep-starved Novelist X would write better books if he started sinking into sleep every night? Or, conversely, whether Ad Executive Y is squandering her potential because she falls asleep easily?

A fellow like Fields might want to be protective of his insomnia, which likely gave that sublime scene in It8217;s a Gift. And he8217;s not the only one for whom sleeplessness has been a golden goose. Last year, Alan Berliner made Wide Awake, a documentary about his 40-year battle with insomnia. Also last year, BBC broadcast a play, The Verb, by Janice Kerbel, about 8220;insomnia, and how love, wakefulness and sleep are intertwined.8221; But the question is a harder one for insomniacs who don8217;t exploit their condition professionally: whether to risk hobbling their muse by seeking treatment or just endure. When I put it to Carolyn See, a veteran of sleep wars who has written several novels, she didn8217;t have to think. 8220;If not sleeping would give me a chance to meet Jesus Christ for lunch, I8217;d have to pass on that lunch.8221; For myself, I hesitate to call my insomnia an out-and-out gift, but I suspect it8217;s come to my aid enough and I8217;m not ready to beat it into submission just yet.

8211;Dennis Drabelle