For Franz Kafka, insomnia was a literary method

Abstract

"3 As Aaron Mishara notes, for Kafka, writing is a trance-like Dionysian activity at night, opening the endless inner darkness of self as an abyss without an end.4 Kafka, writing about one of his sleepless nights, mentions a great fire in which everything appears and disappears, which Mishara suggests represents a state of cortical excitability after his withdrawal from social stimuli with sleep deprivation.