The conditions for sleep

May 01, 2026

Anyone with insomnia will know the feeling of being possessed by a relentless waking mind—and how irrational the rational mind becomes, and how there really is no place for it here in the middle of the night.

My desperate mind at 3 a.m. searched for positive thoughts, even asked God to weigh in, and finally landed on one: creativity.

Creativity is generative. A never-ending fountain that cleanses. It is salvation. It goes beyond a mere positive thought—it is the thing that is always lit up with light. A place of peace. And it occurred to me: I could simply begin creating until those creations became dreams, until my mind goes under until morning.

I ran the experiment and watched as everything became art and I became the witness. The shape of the night could be seen—the shape of blankets and bed: a black cotton dress with lace trim, a garden of flowers recessed in shadow. Everything has a texture—sound, light, tone—only noticed just now because I am so fully present without straying.

The silence has a sound, the blankets hold like hands to lull me to sleep, and my chest ache seems like an echo of yesterday, of the illness and fever. Everything has a feeling. Every sound. Everything has a voice, a tone, a quality—and the voice of things says so much more than words.

These are the conditions for sleep.

Build something rather than tearing everything down (fretting). Learn things, like birds sing all night, and it’s started to rain. (You’re not walking quite straight, but you walked to your car to get provisions for low blood sugar because you’ve been lying here for five hours and all your protein bars are outside.)

The bed is your drafting table. The only rule is no instruments—no pen, no paper. You are free to create but have to do so with your mind only, which is boundless and where all form begins anyway.

Will it be lost if not recorded? Nothing is ever lost, but it might go to someone else, somewhere else.

Ultimately you surrender it all. It’s God’s. You help to shape it, but it was never yours or yours to control. Just watch it being shaped and join in. This is your art. This is your life. This is your life’s work.

It’s now 4:25 a.m.

This post came from my typing into my phone’s notes app one night a few weeks ago. Suffice it to say, I’m not in the desert, still in Pittsburgh, but feeling much better and I finally sat down (for 4-5 hours!) to figure out a timeline that should work to make the big trip. At this point I’m not posting it here for fear of jinxing it ;)