The Age of Insomnia

Something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones.
—Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man“

As PJM columnist Athena Thorne confides in a fascinating article, committed journalists and truth seekers can be subject to anxiety-laden dreams. “We know too much. And no matter how much we want to turn away from the frightening, the violent, the bigoted, and the corrupt, we can’t. We are called to immerse ourselves in it… As one friend phrased it, we reporters and editors earn our living basically by doom scrolling.” Sleeplessness and nightmares, twin conditions of “doom scrolling,” come with the territory. “We have to seek out the disturbing things that are happening,” Athena writes, “dig into them, understand them, and tell the world about them.” That’s the job, and like much industrial work, it can be hazardous to one’s health.

Athena recounts several traumatic dreams stemming directly from the harrowing experience of staring evil directly in the face for a living, of contending daily with corrupt political actors, decadent intellectuals, economic illiterates, feminist viragos, totalitarian oligarchs, suborned journalists, and the teeming imbeciles of Woke. My writings on Islam, in books like The Big Lie and Hear, O Israel!, as well as in innumerable articles and essays, have earned me the coin of death threats — real, not counterfeit, unlike those claimed by many on the Left when they are criticized or put to shame.

Related: Telling the Truth Takes a Toll

I sometimes think that dreams have an independent life, that they colonize our waking experience to speak occasionally unfathomable or often disturbing truths. Night is the real world, day is just the granary that enables the Dream Lords to fulfill their visionary mission. We are their servants. It’s a fanciful speculation but carries a certain resonance.

It has been years since I enjoyed a good night’s sleep, thanks to the constant study of and writing about the declining and possibly suicidal civilization that is ours, the weakness and betrayals of our leaders, the gathering momentum of a totalitarian dispensation, the vast conspiracy of societal control represented by fictions like “climate change” (aka “global warming”) and one of the greatest scams of all time, the COVID-and-vaccination tandem that has deluded and harmed untold numbers of people the world over. And often, I can’t help thinking, as I know many of my readers must, of the prophecies of John of Patmos in the Book of Revelation. Books like A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Revelation of St. John by R.H. Charles tend to offer consolation, foretelling the doom of the demonic powers by which we are beset, but the Dream Lords are having none of it.

Like Athena’s, my dreams are intensely troubling, leading to bouts of insomnia, their dark aura lasting for days at a time. I would like to trade one of these with Athena’s nocturnal disruptions, which I suspect many readers will empathize with, as they have with hers.

I was visiting a small seaside town in a foreign land where I had taken my family, a wife and an infant daughter. In the first part of the dream, I was strolling with the child along the portside and passed a shop whose windows were piled high with chocolate bars. I promised one to the child later in the day, after she had eaten, to which she replied “I guess that’s the rule.” Abruptly, as it occurs in dreams, it was late in the evening and I found myself at the other end of the town, lying on the ground and studying the heavens. Suddenly a cross appeared in the sky, not imprinted upon it like the constellations we see, but as an actual rent or fissure in the fabric of space, a few stars twinkling behind it at the level of the crosspiece, with only darkness below along the stipe.

It was as if behind the heavens there was a second heaven, dark and largely empty, which one could see into, penetrate visibly, through a hole in the shape of the cross. The two or three stars I could see buried behind that cruciform hollow or crater filled me with wonder, and as I rose to return to the inn where we were presumably staying, I noticed another one or two dim stars lower down the stave, which gave me a sense of flickering hope along with a feeling of tribulation. That great wrench in the sky remained in place, a portion of the sky torn like a curtain in the shape of a cross to reveal something alien and vaguely stellar within.

What struck me was that, unlike the Emperor Constantine before the Milvian Bridge, about whom so much has been written, I was not observing the sign of the cross in the heavens. Rather, a part of the heavens had actually opened in the shape of a cross to disclose what lay behind and within. To this day, only a few weeks later, the strange feeling that came over me has not faded and, as I expected, it has kept me awake at night.

Whatever the dream may have portended, I suspect that many people who have examined the major questions of our times, and certainly those who do so as part of the job description, are equally distraught by a premonition that we are living in cataclysmic times, that they, too, may have trouble sleeping, and that we are living in what I call the Age of Insomnia. My wife Janice, who has spent years writing and producing videos on feminist issues as one of the distressing convulsions of the modern era, also finds that the night offers little in the way of restfulness. It is, at least, a shared dilemma.

One does not have to be an ascetic millenarian seer recording his visions in order to intuit that we inhabit a decisive historic moment full of portents. As Hamlet said, “O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”