There is nothing meaningful about failing to sleep. I went to a talk by a novelist where he read a short piece about his wife, a poet, how she never slept, how he would write dozens of pages a day and set the thick stack on the table and drift into a soundless, deep, peaceful sleep while she agonized over a word and watched the world turn dark and then light again. The world needs a poet to be awake at all times, he had said. Yet my inability to sleep is the first, most immediate trait I would change about myself—second only to, when I reached my thirties, a thinning hairline, and today, older and more accepting of the way of things, which is entropy, I’d take the sleep instead of the hair.

Nothing meaningful about dreams either, or so I try to convince myself whenever I have one and science says this is often and experience says this is rarely. It makes the ones I remember a little more mobile, a little stickier. Like you wake up stuck. Like you wake up having to peel yourself from the bed until there is enough surface area of your body exposed to the non-dream world. But even then, those few slips into the other world are better than the near misses, the moments before the cycle kicks in, when the book I am reading—The Palace of Dreams, by Ismail Kadaré—starts to twirl into the tired eyes and you are awake and you are something else and also asleep or close to it.

For a non-sleeper, the moment of almost-sleep is a special horror. I try to imagine life as my brother, who falls asleep when he lies down, maybe even as he begins the descent. On holiday visits he explains away his midday hour-long naps as jetlag, but I hear it as pride, which is the other side of jealousy, and so I do what one must and call it a moral failure, in this making mine what the novelist implied, that not sleeping is a kind of ethics. By this I mean a Protestant kind of ethics, woven into industry and self-realization, the lassitude of the soul and the opportunities for action that you will miss lying there placidly on the couch as the rest of us watch a Christmas special. Get up man! Look at the day passing you by, and the night for that matter! How much longer I have lived than you, how many more experiences I have accumulated! I am the oldest person in the family because by the time I became the age I am now, I was doubled: you give up the ghost for a third of every day, while here I am at two in the morning reviewing my life for the ways in which I could have heralded my most significant energies for the perfectly calibrated movement that would have demolished all obstacles, and now that I know I know, I can do differently later, I am prepared: I enter the next day with an attunement of the past, unlike you, wobbling like a foal, learning anew what is edible and what is poison, forfeit to the world’s forces.

So I would think, and sometimes say, aloud, during the commercial break, the family making popcorn and my intended conversation partner blithely unaware, clutching a pillow to his chest to keep afloat on the crest of a sleep I will never have access to. Even when I am dead I imagine there will remain a low level of awareness, feeling the coffin just a degree or two too warm, the position of my body not quite right, the need to shift to my side. I don’t, of course, believe my moral lesson. I know what it is and that it is desire. Maybe that is the case for all, or most, moral lessons. You let a desire go unmet long enough and it accrues the weight of having been wronged. That’s how I used to see unrequited love, and it is tempting to think that that is what I am writing about, that this is a metaphor for something more—but no, I am writing about sleep. Sleep, then hairline, then love, that is the order of my longings.

I began reading The Palace of Dreams during, but not because of, a particularly rough period of my insomnia. Acute insomnia, to be specific: I have better and worse stretches and weeks. I know the rules—no phones or caffeine, don’t sit on the bed in the daylight—and have done the therapies, have spent long hours on edge staring at blank paper at midnight as I tried to stay awake to “build sleep pressure” by teaching myself how to draw. I didn’t. Learn to draw, that is: I did build pressure. But then the pressure was never let out, just dribbled into the bright sun and left me a sharper tongue and a shorter temper. The insomniac, I was told, believes he can get by on less sleep, that he is still operating at full capacity when he very much isn’t.

The Palace of Dreams doesn’t say much about sleep. The protagonist, Mark-Alem, works at the eponymous institution, which exists to take in and sort and interpret the dreams of a nation, searching for the Master Dreams that will predict major events or seditious plots. The 1981 novel is one of many lanterns shining Kadaré’s long track where he traveled around, in order to go through, strict censorship laws of authoritarian Albania. You write about a thing without writing about it, and even then, as with The Palace of Dreams, sometimes the expression is muted, the book banned, what you said without saying still clear and loud enough because of the loudness of the unsaid thing.

I took to the book immediately, its strange humor, the interactions just turned so as to catch an awkward light and throw shadows that didn’t look like their referents. One of those books you end up thinking about during the day, but I didn’t read it during the day. I waited until I crawled under the open edge of the mosquito net—for I was living in such a place—then tucking the edge beneath the mattress to seal the space. The bed was cooled like an empty egg. The light let blue-white light on the white sheets and trimmed the darkness. I would turn on my side and hold the book with the free hand, the arm akimbo until sore, baby bird arm flexed, hand holding the pages open from the top, fingers behind the book, thumb pressing across the center.

Much of the book tracks Mark-Alem’s increasingly troubled wanderings through hallways that expand out and out, making the Palace much bigger than I had imagined previously. He keeps walking, lost, listening for footsteps, sometimes hearing someone and sometimes understanding it is the echo of himself that he hears. I adopted my nighttime position so that I too could travel the nondescript passages through the Palace, walking and listening and looking for any sign of person or just a warm light to stand beneath. It was during these passages that I would first start to drift off each night, the desire to continue jolting me back awake, a voice calling out to me from either inside myself or the book to wait a little longer. The text began to blur then. I mean that I began to blur. I would read and the line on the page would double but also in my mind the significance would double, fork, and split from the story, I would begin a sort of waking dream taking off from the hallways to my own paths, to mountains I had recently hiked through, to airports, to friends I had not thought of, to scenes that looked like the videos on my phone, and then the voice would sound and I would be pulled back to Mark-Alem, always frightened of something, frightened in a resigned way, and I wouldn’t be sure exactly what had happened in the interval between when he had been walking and the moment, now, when he was still walking—was it Mark-Alem who came across the room he tried to enter but could not loosen the handle of? Was it he who watched the body of a girl hanging from a wall? Was it he who saw a stranger and knew the stranger was family, was loved, or was just another human with whom to share selap and a friendly word?

When you start living parallel to yourself you know that it’s time to sleep. I put the book away and tried. The room was cool, the newly flipped pillow was cool, the hum of an air conditioning unit made even the air into a blanket. I did not want to be in the Palace of Dreams, nor in my own waking dreams that had taken occasion from the book, but only in a thick drift without memory, like sticking your head into a snowbank. I have a few methods I can resort to at this point.

As a child the first was to say goodnight, in my head, to each stuffed or toy animal in my room in a specific order, and if I forgot one I’d have to start over, and I even reserved space at the end of the list for the possibility of supernatural, evil creatures beneath the bed or in some other dark corner whom I would with beneficence and grace extend my wishes for a good night, though they be plotting my destruction over an orange flame just out of my sight. I don’t do that now.

The second method is still a kind of imagining, however: I try to think about the great beds or environments of sleep in my past. These beds are no longer mine. I could try to recreate them but they are gone now, no longer destinations. Not that they have been destroyed, though some beds are, beds belonging to others, now beneath rubble and stone, some blasted across what would have been a room in what would have been a house for what would have been a family. Mine probably still exist, somewhere, but they support another body.

One of my favorite beds was when I joined a friend and his friends on a catamaran for a few days. The actual rooms were taken, but there were two little hollows at the front end of the prows, called forepeaks, usually reserved for crew or storage. I took one of these, large enough only for a single mattress and a cubby, and there was a tiny circular window in the side facing the other forepeak. It was a nest, but better than a nest, because it bobbed in the waves and I could hear the water lap against the sides. I have never slept more soundly than those three nights. When things are bad, such as they were as I read The Palace of Dreams, I return often to this memory. When things are a little worse, such as they were, also, then it is not enough. The memory fractures into silvery shards, the bed escapes, plot comes in. Story kills sleep.

That’s what it is like in The Palace of Dreams,anyway. A group of Albanian minstrels, singing a tale about an illustrious Albanian family (which so happens to be that of hapless Mark-Alem) that has long had a conflictual relationship with the Empire, is murdered by the state. They’ve crossed a line, singing in the capital. You can’t assert the threat of a nation when you are inside of an empire. As it happens, Mark-Alem had previously read and failed to interpret the dream that predicted the minstrels and their deaths. Another interpreter in the Palace snagged it and drew out the meaning. Mark-Alem grows concerned that he will be found out, that his mistake will be read as intentional, and what if it was? The always-lost fail-son of a powerful name, whose failures only seem to push him higher in the administrative ranks of the Palace—could he have strategy and cunning? What is the difference, from the perspective of Empire, between resistance and the surfaces of conquered lives? Between a military base and a school in another language?

There is no third method, though I had been told, when I decided once to actually do something and made an appointment with a sleep therapist, attending a few sessions before I skipped town, that it should be reading. Just not while in bed. You should get up and out of the little world and find a chair—not too comfortable—to sit in, upright, and you should read a book—not too stimulating—until sleep feels safe enough to pad back into your brain and stretch its long body across it. Here is book. There is sleep. The dividing line is you slithering from the chair back to the bed. I don’t see myself giving it a go. I’ve reconciled to this part of the self that continues on into the times when it shouldn’t be conscious, reading news from time zones bathed in sunlight, covered in dust, shaken by the shaking world.

When the minstrels are killed all of Albania falls into insomnia. Albania stops sleeping and so stops dreaming. I wanted the content of their disquiet. I wanted my sandy eyes to be red for a reason. Then I could join the poet in the predawn hours, standing at the window to survey the gloom and hold in my eyes a torch of recognition, of witness. I am watching, I would say, I am still watching, even now, even after the eyes should be full, and nothing more can enter them, nothing more is possible to see after what they have seen, still I am watching what no one should have to watch, the burning body on the hospital bed, what no one can possibly watch. I would say that! But there is nothing meaningful about failing to sleep. Or failing to dream. When the lines of text blurred and my half-waking existence split like the crack in the wall above my bed I would enter a reality that I was not sure was real, the dream of a dream, which is reality from another vantage. I began confusing my steps with the steps of the text, with Mark-Alem’s, with the steps of strangers seeking shelter and safety. I would wake from waking with a start, not wanting anymore to see these other lives. And still you wake and still you see them, but not clearly, in a warped way, where everything is “distorted and iridescent,” and you think that the glass through which you see them is dirty, you rub it and it does not help, ah, well, you see anyway, and you do not sleep.

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Timothy DeMay is a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh, where he teaches literature and film courses. He is working on an article on correspondence art and the US postal system and has other writing listed on timothydemay.com. He can also be found on Twitter at @timdemay