Samantha Harvey: “The Year Without Sleep” – Writing can be like dreaming

Author Samantha Harvey has published four novels. However, the British woman’s work is weighed down by a very heavy burden: she often cannot sleep.

To escape the heavy thoughts of those periods of insomnia, she started writing at night: “Now I could do something constructive with it by writing sentences and transforming what was happening in my head into something coherent and beautiful,” says the author of her last book “The year without sleep”.

In the book, Harvey describes how he deals with insomnia. In doing so, he put together short dialogues, long reflections and descriptions that she wrote in these phases.

“I wrote freely”, describes the origin of the lyrics. Although he always thinks about the structure and dramaturgy of the text when he writes stories and novels, he didn’t write the night notes as a novel or a narrative.

“If you don’t sleep, you don’t even dream,” he stresses. “And that’s what’s missing.” According to Harvey, his impression of her was that the writing had taken over the dream function and that her subconscious was much more active than it normally was when she was awake.

For her, writing during insomniac phases was a dream substitute: “When I first started writing, I didn’t always know what I was going to write. There was no plan.”

While reading the fragments, she was surprised to find that the lyrics followed a narrative structure: “All I changed then was to sort these fragments into an order, creating a structure that runs from midnight to seven in the morning.”

The worst thing about insomnia is that you suffer alone, says the writer: “It seems to you that the whole world is asleep, except yourself.” Helping people cope with the book makes things easier for them, says Harvey: If others now know they’re not alone, then that’s a consolation for her.