apart from three hours last night i have been continuously awake since 10 in the morning of saturday. i may be turning into a character in that most beautiful and terrifying of robert aickman stories, the one about the swedish asylum for insomniacs.

“Sleepers cannot live for long with an insomniac. It is like living with something supernatural: people who are normal come to feel it as a shadow on their own lives. And they come to feel it quite soon. The man or woman who in the true sense cannot sleep is a kind of troll, as they call it here. Life is so made that without sleep only a troll can endure it. The sleepers have no alternative to driving us out.” Robert Aickman, “Into The Wood”