Can you go crazy from sleep deprivation? I type into Google. The answer is a very clear yes. Irritability, delusions, paranoia, psychosis and parasomnia are on the list. | By Anna Snoekstra, Sunday Life special reading issue
This story is part of the June 19 edition of Sunday Life, which is a special reading issue.Anna Snoekstra: It’s a strange irony: the book I wrote while sleeping eight hours a night is about an insomniac.I’m not loving it. I open up the Word document and stare at the margins of my manuscript that are now red and blue from track changes, like my story has had the shit kicked out of it.The sleepiness was there; Jo could feel it. The tiredness a rising tide, ready to pull her under.
Now my set-up is very different. It’s the middle of Victoria’s lockdown number … six? I’m too tired to keep track, so I’m sitting at my dining room table using my mum’s old laptop.I’ve recently fractured my tailbone and am balancing on a lumbar cushion to try and stop myself from putting any weight on my coccyx.
I type into Google. The answer is a very clear yes. Irritability, delusions, paranoia, psychosis and parasomnia are on the list. Google tells me that sleep paralysis is temporarily being unable to move as you fall asleep or wake up. It’s a strange slip in the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness in which your dreams become waking hallucinations. Your body thinks you’re asleep, so you’re unable to move. Apparently intruder hallucinations are the most common during sleep paralysis. It’s something that carries across cultures, a kind of shared primal fear.
The farmer’s pre-teen son has put a snake in her bed as payback for an earlier incident in the book. I gape at the page. Was my own waking nightmare not a shared, primal, consciousness-collective experience, but rather my own imagination from when I wrote that scene two years ago? Is my own book literally giving me the worst nightmares of my life? I add an apostrophe, delete a comma and then add it back.