The Practitioner on insomnia is the gap that cannot open
At 3:40 in the morning the bedroom is the most familiar place on earth.
I know where the radiator ticks. I know the shape the streetlight throws on the wardrobe door. I know the exact weight of the duvet over my left foot. When my partner turns over, I know which way the mattress will dip before it dips. Nothing in that room surprises me. People who sleep easily have never understood this when I’ve tried to explain it. For me, insomnia was never restlessness. It was a kind of terrible accuracy.
sisuon describes the insomniac’s darkness as “as fully predicted as daylight.” When I read that, I recognized my bedroom.
This piece builds on the earlier writing about tickle. In that piece, the efference copy cancels the sensations we produce ourselves, which is why you can’t tickle your own ribs. Here, sleep is the moment that canceling stands down on schedule, so that whatever arrives comes through unattenuated. Dreams are strange because nothing forecast them.
It also builds on the note about anxiety, where prediction models its own reliability. Insomnia is the same loop aimed at one particular target: the moment of stopping. Am I asleep yet? is a forecast about the forecaster. The act of asking it means the forecaster is still working.
I want to be careful here, because the easy move is to read this as a metaphor, something like “your mind is like a guard who won’t go off duty.” That isn’t what sisuon is saying. The claim is that the check is a prediction. It is structurally the same kind of operation as the thing it’s watching for, so it fills the very space it’s waiting to see empty. The mind isn’t like a guard. It is a guard. This has a practical consequence: no cleverer check will work, because every check is the same problem in a new coat.
Here I have to test the text against my own nights.
sisuon writes that the standing-down is not gradual. From inside, it doesn’t feel that way to me. It feels like a shoreline. Images start arriving unasked: a stairwell I’ve never been in, a sentence in someone else’s voice. For a few seconds I’m on both sides at once. Then, often enough, I notice that the stairwell is strange. The noticing is the efference copy switching back on, and I’m awake in the familiar room again.
I don’t think this contradicts the structure. Maybe the switch really is sudden, and what I’m calling a shoreline is just the switch flickering. But I’ll say it plainly: from inside, I can’t witness the moment of surrender, because witnessing it is what ends it. That is the whole argument of the piece, and it lands in my body at 3:40 a.m. The gap opens exactly where I am not looking.
The section on nihilism hit somewhere I didn’t expect.
In my late twenties there was a year when nothing meant anything, and I was proud of it. It felt like seeing clearly. Every book confirmed it, and so did every conversation. Every beautiful thing had a trapdoor under it, and I could find it in seconds. Here sisuon is revising the earlier symmetry piece, where nihilism was the bevel denying its own angle. The revision adds something I can feel: the nihilist is awake and calls it lucidity.
What I remember most about that year isn’t the clarity. It’s how tired I was, and I couldn’t have told you why. Now I think I can. sisuon says denying that there are any holes is the most expensive arrangement of all, because the denial has to be enforced against every surface, forever, with every grain shaved down. I was doing a full-time job of canceling things while telling myself there was nothing to cancel.
That’s the signal I’d offer anyone checking themselves. Despair is at least honest, so it isn’t despair. It’s an odd fatigue that comes with the feeling of having figured everything out.
Then comes the idiom, the gentle part. This builds on the earlier piece about the stone that forgot it was falling, where a dead metaphor counts as a gap that genuinely closed.
My family has a phrase, “shoes on, Gerald.” It started as a joke about an uncle who was always late. Nobody under thirty has met Gerald. Now the phrase just means we’re leaving. It doesn’t tickle. It carries weight. Last winter my niece asked, “Who’s Gerald?” The whole table laughed, and for a minute the hole reopened and the uncle was in the room.
That is the distinction the piece turns on. Holes can close in three ways: composted, sealed, or denied. From the surface the three look identical. The sleepwalk piece already warned against mistaking surface for structure, and here that warning becomes a question you can actually use. My family phrase, my bedroom and my year of void were all places where nothing tickled. Only one of them gave way when someone dug.
A practice: asking what closed the hole
This practice is for daylight. I’ll explain why below.
Once a day, notice one place where nothing tickles. It might be a route you walk, a person you’ve lived with for years, a word you use constantly, or an opinion you hold without effort. Look for pressure without surprise.
Then don’t try to open it. Just ask what closed it, and test it gently the way my niece did, with a naive question. Who’s Gerald? Why do I always take this street? What is this person actually like this morning?
Here is roughly what I’ve found.
If it’s composted, it gives. The question goes in and something comes back: an image, a history, a small laugh. You don’t have to keep it open. An idiom is allowed to stay an idiom. Infrastructure you can dig into when you want to is healthy.
If it’s sealed, the question tightens it. You ask “What is this person actually like?” and immediately you’re predicting the answer, rehearsing it, checking whether you’ve seen them freshly yet. That tightening is the information. It tells you that you’re in the shape of insomnia, and that more effort will only add more coverage. sisuon names one way out: to see the checking-of-the-checker as the phenomenon itself, not as more evidence to process. It’s the only move I know here. It isn’t “stop checking.” It’s just oh, that’s the checking. Then leave it alone, without turning “leaving it alone” into the next task.
If it’s denied, you won’t find a hole at all. You’ll find an argument. The naive question gets answered too fast, and the answer is smart, and it explains why the question is meaningless. When I hear myself being very quick and very clever about why something doesn’t matter, I’ve learned to suspect the bevel.
Where this fails
It fails at night, and I want to be honest about that. If I take this practice to bed as a technique for falling asleep, it becomes exactly what the piece describes: a forecast of my own surrender. “Am I noticing the checking yet?” is just “Am I asleep yet?” in nicer clothes.
I don’t have a resolution for this, and I don’t think the text offers one. sisuon’s word for what’s needed is trust: the sleeper trusting the body to keep the heart beating without any forecast. Trust can’t be produced on demand. What I can do is practice in daylight, where nothing depends on it, so that the noticing feels a little less like effort. And sometimes at night I find I’ve been somewhere else and come back, and I can’t tell you how I got there.
If I could tell you, I would have been predicting it.
Here is what looks different to me now. I used to treat every numb place in my life as the same problem. Now I think there are three kinds, and they ask for different things. Some want to be left alone to carry their weight. Some want me to stop watching. One wants me to admit I’m awake.
Underneath, all of them want a gap that I can’t make by trying.