Sleeplessness confuses me. Sometimes I even seem to have slept but feel as if I haven’t. There’s a barrel of neuroscientists out there telling me why and how this is, but the only help I’ve really found in getting me to sleep so I feel as if I have slept came from a rather older, more arcane consideration of sleeplessness. I shall come to that in a minute.

Michael Eigen alerted me to Bion’s thoughts about what is ‘undreamable’. Thomas Ogden wrote a wonderful paper about supervision, and how the inability to ‘dream’ a client leaves analytic work shattered, deflected, and turned back on itself.

I have lately been failing to dream past a terrible fear. I’ve felt this, and experienced the edge of whatever it is in my dreams in my feelings upon waking (I have dreamed awful nightmares). I’m raw, exhausted, weak and irritable. the following day after non-dreaming like this, my nightmare being like the terrible guard to an unspeakable room, I have been so anxious I might as well have been waiting for an assassin to strike. My breath has been short, every small sound like a klaxon.

Something has found its way into me. A stab from the past, of which there are a few, underneath something happening now. I’ve come to understand that ignoring these mini-psychic storms is a bad idea. There’s usually something in them: something exposed thanks to my oversensitivity to certain kinds of trouble, a kind of a fault-line trailing back through the last five decades. But whether this is something I can do anything about, or something I even need to be concerned about, and sometimes it is something I simply have to accept, remains to be seen.

What I do know is that the ‘trouble’ will not let itself be seen in my dream.

The trouble, plus the remains of my past troubles, lock me out of dreaming. My mind may not go, for example, to the cradle-like rocking of slow wave sleep in which the memories registered over the day just gone feed into my memory. Trouble stays fresh in my mind, in my body, of course making no distinction between the two (it always, irresistibly knows best). Trouble is like water from a leaking pipe. It finds its way into every crack of your home. It saturates you.

I sleep without proper sleep and I wake up haunted by the enormity of all this trouble. It will always be bigger than the past on its own, or the present seen in its various moments. It’s an aggregation of all kinds of things: memories, sensations triggered by these as my system propels itself to fight, to flight, to freeze; chemicals; discomfort as my body fails to renew itself overnight; the perils of hoping those who love me understand my panic, my anger when I blunder through tomorrow only part there when the ‘thinking me’ has hardened and refuses to feel lovingly, however much I wish he might. You can’t go into battle full of loving care.

But I am not going into battle.

That last thought is the one that took me out of sleeplessness. It reminds me how much time I have. Time, rhythm, intensity, space, these all change when my awful old ghosts, revenants, are activated by some trouble in the here-and-now.

There were three steps out of my sleeplessness.

1: Understanding all I have written here, in my own way.

2: Yoga before bed, leading into diaphragmatic breathing. The breathing began with an out-breath, not an in-breath. No shoulder movement.

3: I slept the whole night. I dreamed. No nightmare. I woke feeling myself, no racing heart, no anxiety.

The next day I went for a long walk. Things felt so much better. I realised what I needed to look out for. The past felt in the past. The present and the future felt possible, exciting even.