...the novels and short stories of Franz Kakfa...dramatize an all-consuming anxiety created by the emotional isolation of a bureaucratic age.

  - e-notes

Sleep, quality of sleep, and insomnia are central themes in "Metamorphosis." Sleep appears to be both the cause of and solution to Gregor's transformation and alienation. The character’s irregular sleep marks the beginning of his dehumanization. Indeed, Gregor finds himself transformed into a vermin after a night of irregular sleep. Insomnia perpetuates this dehumanization, and makes a solution to Gregor's new condition impossible. "Metamorphosis" is a metaphor for social alienation, but we offer an alternative interpretative hypothesis: it may also represent a metaphor for the negative effects that poor quality sleep, short sleep duration, and insomnia may have on mental and physical health.

       - Perciaccante 

Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard.
I don’t know a thing.”
— Sylvia Plath

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge   

For the hearing of my heart——

It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge   

For a word or a touch   

Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.   

So, so, Herr Doktor.   

So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,

I am your valuable,   

The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.   

I turn and burn.

Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—

You poke and stir.

Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

A cake of soap,   

A wedding ring,   

A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer   

Beware...

— Sylvia Plath

“I am tired of having hands
she said

I want wings—
But what will you do without your hands
 to be human?
I am tired of human

she said

I want to live on the sun—”
— Louise Glück

encyclopedic knowledge is easy enough to come by these days but the capacity to register or appreciate the importance of that knowledge is altogether rarer; there is knowledge that exits as plentiful surface water and there are also wells that dig deeply into the world and our psyches