The night self is creative, curious, vulnerable, enchanted and courageous.

In the winter of 2020, Annabel Abbs in the aftermath of her father’s death, not long after Abbs stepfather had also passed away  in a nursing home where not visiting was possible thanks to Covid restrictions.  This double bereavement in a  dreadful time.,. and her wild  monstrous grief rendered her sleepless.

As the night transformed into a place of creativity and liberation, Annabel found she wasn’t alone, women have long found sanctuary, inspiration and courage in darkness.

As long nights bore down, Abby began to discover a strange new freedom, The darkness around became “a downy protective skin, a soft pelt in which I could lose myself… It gave me space and secrecy, silence and anonymity”. She began to interrogate how others, writers, artists, scientists, but most especially women- had entered their insomnia made use of it, investigated it. Sleepless follows her journey from midnight hikes to starlit swims, from Singapore, the brightest city on Earth, to the darkest corner of the Artic Circle, and finally to that most elusive of places sleep. A moving but revelatory voyaged into the dark, encourages us to embrace the possibilities of the night.

Our obsession with a solid eight hours may be relatively recent: Abby points to research by historical  A Roger Ekirch, who discovered patterns of “biphasic sleep” in texts that predate the advent of electric light. People would go to sleep at dusk, wake in the middle of night, do a bit of this or that, and then happily go back to sleep. Virginia Woolf had insomnia, but she made creative profit  of those nights able to complete her final novel , The Years, “ owing to the sudden rush of 2 wakeful nights”, as she wrote her diary in August 1934.

Abbs gives us Louise Bourgeois and her “ insomnia drawings” and Sylvia Plath with her penchant for that still, blue, almost eternal hour … before the glassy music of the milkman, settling his bottles”, as the poet wrote not long before her death.

Research indicates  that the chemicals that wash the brain in the hours of darkness release inhibition, and the dysregulation from the ordered daylight world creates what Abbs dubs the Night Self: freer, wilder, less inclined to follow the rules.

Sleepless is a multi-faceted book featuring part memoir, part cultural history, part popular science. “ Grief is like an eclipse’, she writes  as she finds a way to deal with the pain of losing those you love.

Sleepless: Discovering the Power of the Night Self by Annabel Abbs, John Murray £16.99, 2443 pages/ Penguin $28, 272 pages.