My problem, my central problem, is that I can’t sleep…. By turns comic and poignant, brutal and beautiful, Sleep follows an insomniac’s long journey to the light through a night of tormenting memories and lucid drunken speculation. A sequence of bizarre encounters with other lonely and despicable denizens of the night – worms, whores, toads, lantern jaws who wander aimlessly in an unnamed provincial place that it not quite city and not quite country – leads him to recover some meaning to his life: release from his dead mother’s incapacity for love, his yearning for the first whore,
for the unknown house,
for sleep.