Insomnia

“The unconscious is a vast, unexplored ocean. And what is the night, if not the sea in which we sail blindly?” — Carl Jung

What keeps us awake at night?

That is the question that hammers away at 2:25 a.m. We turn one way, then the other. We try counting clouds, projecting ourselves onto a beach—anything. But instead of peace, we are hit by flashbacks of unbearable thoughts, or worse, irrelevant ones: Did I forget to send that email? What will we cook tomorrow? Did the credit card hit its limit halfway through the month? Did I eat too much... or too little?

It is a cruel irony: just when we try to relax, surrender control, and give ourselves over to the possibility of letting go of consciousness, the opposite happens. The mind becomes an internal alarm that refuses to turn off.

Matías (a pseudonym), a 48-year-old man in a high-level administrative position, came to

my office feeling tortured. An unbearable insomnia had prevented him from sleeping deeply for months, with no apparent reason. After some time in therapy, his soul opened up and sleep returned. But two weeks ago—boom! The torture came back. The dark circles under his eyes were prominent, as were his irritability, clumsiness, and forgetfulness. Along with them came the "bad habits" he no longer cared to resist: red wine, dark chocolate, black coffee, and a cigarette. Matías arrived desperate and angry, unable to explain the return of such uncomfortable symptoms.

Like any symptom, insomnia raises a major question: What function is it serving in Matías's mental and emotional needs? Why does it appear, reinforce itself, and insist on staying?

The answers are usually slow to arrive; they are indirect, contradictory, and often leak out in fragments. As we open the doors to the anxiety that prevents sleep, we encounter unconscious, unelaborated themes that fear appearing precisely when we relax—when we "let go."

Freud taught us that the dream is the "royal road to the unconscious," where our repressed conflicts and desires disguise themselves. We dream of that which we cannot touch directly due to fear, shame, trauma, or parts of our personality we deny or do not recognize.

Wilfred Bion took this further: the problem is not just what we dream, but our capacity to dream. Bion tells us that the mind needs to process raw emotions—what he called Beta-elements—and transform them into Alpha-elements, or "thinkable" thoughts. Insomnia is the signal that the mind is flooded with undigested Beta material. We cannot sleep because we cannot "dream" our fears. The psyche prefers anxious wakefulness over facing material it hasn't been able to metabolize. This happens because we cannot "mentalize" that sea of confused and unknown emotions alone. We need someone to help us decipher and, crucially, contain them.

Analyst Thomas Ogden also highlights the capacity to dream as the primary function of the psyche. If we cannot dream, experience feels too real, too literal, and too dangerous. Insomnia is the result of an anxiety that fears what the unconscious might release, keeping us in a literal wakefulness to avoid the "symbolic work" of dreaming.

I remember when I was 11 years old, in that pre-adolescent stage where many anxieties begin. A friend of mine stopped sleeping. She would come to my house and ask me to stay with her until the sun came up. We would eat chips with cream cheese and stay awake talking until she saw the first rays of sunlight; only then could she fall asleep.

Back then, she said she was afraid of burglars. But over the years, we understood that her mother’s departure from the country (due to her grandfather’s illness) and his subsequent death had triggered other unconscious fears: her relationship with her mother, her developing femininity, and the fear of death.

Ogden would say that, for her, the mother’s absence wasn't yet a feeling of "being sad because Mom is gone." Instead, it remained a concrete and dangerous sensation that "the night is an unprotected place." Her mind was in a state of literal vigilance, fearing not burglars, but that the emotional reality of loss and abandonment would flood her if she let her guard down.

Consider Matías: instead of "dreaming" his frustration over not being happy, he had flashbacks about his credit card. His mind was dealing with a profound identity crisis by transforming it into practical, real-world worries. The anguish—the unprocessed Beta-element—of his existential regret manifested as insomnia and literal anxiety over finances.

In time, his insomnia allowed him to speak of this deep identity crisis he hadn't given weight to: "Am I happy as I am? What do I actually like? What fills me?" The insomnia was the sentry guarding those feared truths.

It is difficult to do this emotional labor alone—to put into words what prevents us from sleeping. Therapy performs this vital work, acting as the "container" that Bion described.

Symbolically, imagine our unprocessed emotions as a glass of boiling water. If we try to hold it alone, we get burned. Anxiety is that burn. The therapeutic space functions as a solid "clay vessel": a place where we can pour that boiling emotion. The vessel doesn't burn; it contains it, allowing it to cool, settle, and become "drinkable." By sharing that anxious material with the therapist, they help return it to us transformed into something meaningful.

The visceral fear becomes a thought.

Therapy doesn't try to convince us there is "no reason to fear" so we can sleep like babies. Rather, by understanding and naming the anxious material, we gain the strength and resilience to face our world.

When sleep finally welcomes us, it isn't an escape. It is our psyche doing its job: transforming anguish into something that can be dreamed.