The woman is on his seventeenth straight day without sleep. She had had insomnia in college, but this is not what was keeping her up now. Her mind feels clearer than ever and she doesn’t feel tired. 

Her husband runs a successful dental practice and it’s a running joke that he does so well because he’s handsome; in fact, he is very strange looking with no distinctive features. One time, she tried to draw a picture of him but gave up after she couldn’t remember what he looked like. Despite his strange looks, he has a friendly personality that people connect to. 

Every morning, her husband drives away from their condo at 8:15 a.m. with their son, who he drops off at the elementary school on his way to the office. She drives to the supermarket and later cleans the house and does the laundry. Her husband comes home for lunch and she reminisces about the old days when they would catch up for hours during the work day. He returns to work and she goes for a swim at the neighborhood’s athletic club. 

The woman is thirty years old and prioritizes keeping in shape, so that she doesn’t end up looking like her mother. When her son comes home from school, she changes him into play clothes and feeds him a snack before he goes out to play with his friends. At dinner, the family sits around the table and talks about their day. After their son goes to bed, they sit on the couch quietly before turning in. 

This is what her life was like before she stopped sleeping. Now, she doesn’t keep a diary and feels more in tune with reality. The first night she lost sleep, she had been having a repulsive dream, the contents of which she can’t recall now. She woke up paralyzed and breathing heavily. At the foot of her bed, she saw a black shadow and she saw it belonged to a gaunt old man who stared at her and said nothing. The man had begun to pour a pitcher of water over her feet and she closed her eyes and tried to scream but could make no noise. When she opened her eyes, the man was gone and she felt as though something inside her had died. When she was able to move again, she had sat up and drank a full glass of brandy. 

She wonders if this incident had been part of a trance. She had known a friend in college who claimed an old man had appeared before her and told her to get out of her fiance’s house. Finding she wasn’t tired anymore, she began to read Anna Karenina and remembers how the book ends with the main character throwing herself onto the train tracks. All her life, she had been an avid reader and had even majored in English literature in college, but now she barely read at all. She wonders where this old version of herself has gone.  She had continued to read the novel that night with unbroken concentration until the sun came up. Her husband did not notice that she wasn’t sleeping and she continued on with her motherly duties as usual. After her son and husband left for the day, she continued to read, pausing every once in a while to eat a snack and think. She found crumbs of chocolate in between the pages from when she read the novel in high school, a treat she hasn’t eaten since her marriage, and she resolved to buy some to enjoy again. She walked to the nearby chocolate shop, instantly devouring the whole bar after making the purchase. She continued to read until her husband came home and she made him lunch. As her husband talks about a new piece of dental equipment he wants to buy, her mind drifted to the characters in the novel and she feigned interest in him. 

Her husband told her his afternoon appointment was canceled and that he can stay home with her, but she doesn’t find this exciting. He attempted to draw her into the bedroom but she resisted, lying that she had a headache. When her husband returned to the office, she marveled at how awake she still felt and continued to read on the sofa before going for a swim for forty-five minutes. She completed the rest of her motherly duties efficiently and continued to read. 

That night, she pretended to go to sleep next to her husband before she went into the living room, poured herself a glass of brandy, and read. Each day, she continued the same schedule, becoming increasingly antisocial and mechanical. Eventually, the connection between her emotions and her body breaks and she finds everything more endurable and still doesn’t feel tired. 

After a week, she began to feel concerned at her lack of sleep and wondered if she was going mad. But, she doesn’t feel tired or sick and she found that she appeared prettier than before, so she resolved to give up worrying. One afternoon, she visited the library and read about sleep. She learned that sleep keeps humans’ thoughts and drives in check and allows them to relax and that if someone evades sleep their ground of being would be threatened. She reflected that her only drives — cooking, shopping, and laundry — are all things she could do asleep without thought. She found that these drives were consuming her very being and left the library with a new positive perspective on her lack of sleep. For the first time in a long time, she felt alive, and she read Anna Karenina three times, making new discoveries with each reading. She continued onto new novels and found she never grew tired, and that by abandoning sleep she had expanded herself. 

Sometimes, when she got overexcited by a book, she would take breaks and drive aimlessly around her neighborhood. One day, she was stopped by a policeman at 2:30 a.m. who asked her for her license and informed her there had been a murder in the exact spot she was parked last month where three men killed a husband and raped his wife. When she got back home that night, she studied her husband’s face and remembered how she lost the feeling that he could protect her when he failed to intervene in an argument between her and his mother over their child’s name. She looked at him and found herself repulsed by his sleeping face and she wondered if he had always been so ugly and tired-looking. She then went to her son’s room and found herself annoyed at his sleeping face because it reminded her of her husband’s arrogance. She realized that it’s her husband’s lack of faults that bothered her and felt as though they are both strangers and felt sad. 

She closes her eyes and tries to imagine sleeping, but all she can feel is a wakeful darkness. She wonders if she is about to die and, if so, if her life would amount to anything. As she thinks about death, she becomes terrified at all that was unknown and she decides to go for a drive at 3 a.m. 

There are a surprising amount of cars on the road and she drives to the harbor, listening to the car radio. She parks in a lighted area next to another car and wonders if a couple is having sex in it. She fondly remembers getting intimate with her college boyfriend in a car, but stopping short of sex. She drifts off into thought before becoming aware of a presence outside her vehicle. She turns to find someone pounding on her window, and when she attempts to turn on the car the engine stalls. The men outside begin to shake her car until her head slams against the steering wheel. She realizes she will never get the key in time to try to drive again and she falls back in her seat crying and waiting to be flipped over.