Mental Hyperactivity and the Hematologies of Sleep

Abstract

In the previous chapter we reminded the reader that in this study the body in question is an insomniac one, before which all other determinations—of sex, age, race, and questions of non-insomniac “disability”—must take a back seat or no seat at all. Insomnia’s paradoxes and vicious cycles are rich, interesting, and important enough on their own to warrant a book-length focus, and that is what we intend to give. Yet one must not therefore conclude that corporeal matters in general are superfluous to this discussion. On the contrary, we rather maintain that the deeper we go into human physiology, whether as imagined by Victorians or by us today, the more fertile ground we find for precisely these insomniac paradoxes and vicious cycles. Thus, the patterns that were conceived thermodynamically in the previous chapter will reassert themselves here in a more material anatomical form, but to no less effect: biomorphic energy must manifest itself in matter, in body stuff: bone, sinew, fat, blood, feces, skin, and mucus.