Here’s an original piece about somnia — inspired by what I learned and imagined, blending sleep, disturbance, and what it means to be caught between waking and dreaming.
Somnia begins as a quiet doubt: the soft invasion of restlessness just before sleep, when the mind, eager to close, instead opens to shadows. There is that moment — eyelids heavy, breaths slow — where everything should calm, yet nothing does.
They say somnia comes from ancient words for sleep and dreams. It isn’t simply the absence of rest, but a disturbance in the way sleep should be ordered. It turns nights into long wanderings, time into a shifting corridor where memories, fears, desires flicker like lanterns in twilight. �
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In the early hours, I lie still, feeling everything. My ribs rise and fall, but sleep is elusive. A whisper in the corner of the room, the rustle of curtains—some nights these sounds are real; other nights they are dreams calling me back from the edge. Somnia tugs at the edge of consciousness, asking: what of the grief you believed buried? What of the hopes that turned away and left scars?
In somnia, I visit places I know and places I don’t. Old houses half-lit, corridors leading nowhere. Faces I loved, or feared, drift in half-light; sometimes they look at me, sometimes past me. Words that were spoken, unsaid; moments stretched thin by regret or longing. Time folds: fifteen minutes feel like hours, hours compress to breaths.
There is a kind of violence in somnia— not the loud kind, but the weight of being unable to rest, of holding too much while the world sleeps. The body may still, but the mind doesn’t. It races through images, loops back on itself, fixates on what could’ve been done differently, what might be lost. Sleep is the ground you expect to walk on, but somnia pulls it away: ground slipping, horizon tilting.
And yet, there are gifts. In the dark, small lights flicker: insight, memory, compassion. I see dreams not just as escapes, but as mirrors. I realize the fullness of things: love when it was kind, fear when it was sharp, regrets when silence spoke louder than words. Somnia forces you to face the unspoken, the buried, the moments you tried to forget.
Then morning comes inevitably. The dawn’s pale light slides in. I awaken, body heavy, heart crowded with fragments. Some images cling: the echo of voices, shapes at the corner of vision, the taste of longing. I reach for comfort: a cup of tea, daylight, breath. Sleep returns in ordinary things.
Somnia does not end at dawn. It follows in the day’s worn edges: fatigue, sharpened sensitivity, a whisper of sadness or longing. But it also leaves something gentle: clarity. The things you carried in darkness become visible; the weight you felt becomes something to carry with intention.
Somnia is more than sleeplessness. It is the liminal space where loss and desire and fear and hope all whisper together. And even though it is painful, even though nights in somnia are long, it is where I learn: what I fear, what I love, how deeply I ache—and that perhaps, in that ache, I am more alive than I knew.
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