Filmmaker Goes Deep Into Insomnia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdUvpEZvoEw
Alan Berliner hasn't slept well ... for the past 40 or so years. So he made a film about it. After a long festival tour, Wide Awake began a run last week (its premiere was at 1:30 a.m.) on HBO. Berliner's become well known in the art-doc world for his personal essay films – he made The Sweetest Sound about his name, by tracking down all the other Alan Berliners in the world and inviting them to dinner. In Nobody's Business, he dogged his stubborn father, trying to get him to talk about his past. And, in Wide Awake, Berliner spent a few years, mostly in the middle of the night, connecting his own sleeplessness with cultural-scientific-artistic trends. One of his theories of insomnia:

Some doctors say we're living through the greatest experiment in sleep deprivation in human history. You can go back to Edison's invention of the lightbulb, which completely changed our relationship to time. By blurring our distinction between day and night, it opened up the night as a time for work and for play. A full night's sleep has now become just one of many options. Now take that lightbulb and shrink it down to the size of a pixel, multiply it by whatever factor it takes to fill your computer screen, and now you have another far-reaching revolution in cultural sleep patterns. That computer can take you anywhere, anyplace, anytime, day or night. It's a portal to timelessness. And whether we live in cities or in rural areas, it's keeping us awake and away from our beds more than ever.