Distractions from Sleep can be considered the first of two volumes of the completed longer work of fiction Furtive and Bearable Cessation. At the opening of Distractions from Sleep, Stuart has become nihilistic and morbidly depressed and he moves into a psychotic break where he thinks he understands the world. He starts conceiving delusionally of towns and people he thinks he has known and loved idyllically before this life. At last, the scene shifts to a kind of limbo where his and others' struggle for survival is finally muted, as if painless. The book is self-negating fundamentally.