Chloe Aridjis has a conflicted relationship with sleep:
There’s a term in German, Kopfkino, which means the imagination left to run wild, often magnifying the disturbing, unpleasant thoughts best kept at the mind’s edge. The image offered by its literal translation, mental cinema, is what I envision takes place each time I lay my head on the pillow: the projector switches on and the reel starts its endless loops, a whirring machine that comes alive just as I feel ready to shut down.
Faced with the prospects of a cure from a top sleep clinic, Aridjis refused, finding comfort in her condition:
I remember a Hungarian writer friend being astonished when I told him I had never found myself entirely alone in a forest – how could one fully become a writer, or any kind of thinker, without this experience he seemed to suggest, for this represented the ultimate confrontation with the self – and I suppose I feel similarly about insomnia.
The friendship between Goethe and Friedrich apparently suffered when Goethe asked Friedrich whether he would help him in the classification of clouds. Friedrich promptly answered no, explaining that this would signify the death of landscape.
For me, likewise, night would be disenchanted by the scientific explanation of phenomena that may instead be felt as magical, mystical or simply mysterious. And I can’t help thinking, finally, of Kafka’s aphorism, ‘A cage went in search of a bird.’ Free up a space in the mind, and another obsession will come occupy it. We are, to a large extent, our own jail keepers. Our conditions define us, add contours, accents, drama to our lives. And the longer they accompany us, our so-called afflictions, the more years we spend together, the harder it is to part ways.
(“Eagle Nebula” by photographer Bill McDowell, from his series “Ashes in the Night Sky,” made entirely of ashes, via Rosecrans Baldwin)
The Dish 