It happens to us all. Nodding off at the keyboard mid-sentence. Eyes drooping during a show, reopening on a completely different episode (or worse, the credits). You weren’t sleeping. You were resting your eyes. Sure. Whatever helps.
And it only gets more complicated with age, doesn’t it? That surplus of energy we once took completely for granted has quietly negotiated itself down. Then factor in circumstances: tossing and turning, unable to find a comfortable position, a body and mind locked in high alert waiting for a call, running through a list, going past the point of no return out of sheer stubbornness and a flat refusal to admit there are limits.
There’s a word for the space where sleep and waking can’t agree on who’s in charge. Liminal, from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. Not in. Not out. Suspended at the door.
We spend more time there than we think.
Weekly Creative Prompt
The Five Stages of Sleepiness
(Or: You Weren’t Sleeping, You Were Just Resting Your Eyes)
“Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work and helps make something of the world.”
— Heraclitus
What if sleepiness had its own five stages: denial, bargaining, anger, the heavy-limbed surrender, and finally acceptance, whether you chose it or not?
You know them. Denial: you weren’t sleeping, you were resting your eyes. Bargaining: five more minutes, one more episode, just let me finish this paragraph. Anger: restless, irritable, inexplicably annoyed by the sound of absolutely everything. The surrender: head nodding, thoughts dissolving, the body quietly winning the argument. And acceptance, which rarely feels like a choice.
This Week’s Challenge
Write, sketch, or collage from inside one of those stages. Or map the whole arc. Where does your most honest thinking happen? In the bargaining, when you’re negotiating with yourself? In that threshold between waking and gone, where the strangest ideas surface uninvited?
Alternative Challenge
And if stages aren’t your entry point, go deeper into the why or the how it feels from the inside.
Sleep fragmentation lives in the liminal. You wake, drift back, wake again—somehow completely aware of your surroundings the entire time, aware enough to doubt you’re sleeping at all. And yet your exhausted brain is running a full theater in the back: the most vivid, surreal, wildly unhinged dreams it has ever conjured, while the front of you insists it’s still awake. Both things true simultaneously.
Or worse: sleep paralysis. The place where brain and body stop agreeing entirely. You are conscious. You know exactly where you are. And you cannot move a single thing. Trapped at the threshold, neither in nor out, while your mind does whatever it wants without you.
These liminal states (the in-between, the suspended, the not-quite-either) are some of the richest territory a creative can inhabit. And the causes of exhaustion are their own kind of portrait: sleep apnea, insomnia, a Vitamin D deficiency quietly dimming the lights from the inside, a blood sugar crash arriving right on schedule. Or consider the person who reaches for caffeine as a stimulant only to discover it works on them as a depressant, pulling them under instead of lifting them up.
What’s stealing your energy or your character’s? What does the body do when it’s running on borrowed time and borrowed wakefulness? What lives in the space where sleeping and waking can’t agree?
Write into the threshold. That’s where some of the strangest, most honest work happens.
Three Ways to Enter
The Stage
Pick one of the five stages of sleepiness and live inside it completely. Don’t rush to the next one. Write, draw, or collage the texture of just that stage: what it sounds like, what it does to time, what the body feels, what the mind insists on doing anyway.
The Cause
Explore exhaustion through its origin. Sleep fragmentation, apnea, insomnia, a body chemistry quietly working against you, give your character (or yourself) a specific, concrete reason for being this tired, and let the work follow what that particular kind of tired does to perception, relationship, decision-making.
The Threshold
Write from inside the liminal directly, that suspended state where sleep and waking overlap. A dream that knew exactly where you were. A thought that arrived only because the usual gatekeepers had clocked out. A moment of sleep paralysis rendered as poem, flash fiction, or visual piece. What do you see when you’re too tired to look away?
Helpful Tips
Not sure where to start? Think back to the last time you caught yourself doing something you didn’t realize you were doing: nodding, losing the thread of a sentence, watching your own hand do something you didn’t consciously direct. That moment of noticing is your opening line. Start there, before you explain anything.
The most interesting entry point here might not be exhaustion itself but what you were holding onto when sleep finally took you, or what your body was quietly trying to tell you all along. The liminal is generous to writers: it loosens the editorial grip, lets things through that the wide-awake brain would have stopped at the door. If you find yourself writing something surprising while working on this prompt, don’t correct it. That’s the threshold doing its job.
Enjoy prompts like this?
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