Movies about sleeping - how is insomnia represented in film?

The Machinist

Starring ​​Christian Bale as a factory worker who suffers from severe insomnia, The Machinist depicts its protagonist’s mental health suffering greatly due to his lack of sleep, resulting in extreme paranoia and an accident at work with serious consequences. This movie about sleep deprivation is a relatively good portrayal about how insomnia can impact a person's wellbeing and how having bad sleeping habits can negatively affect other aspects of a person's health, showing sleep’s importance for our work performance and general safety.

While Christan Bale famously lost lots of weight for this role, with his character being extremely underweight, decreased sleep duration is actually more often associated with weight gain than weight loss. Although this doesn’t chime with the film completely, it does show that insomnia and other sleep disorders can encourage unhealthy eating habits. 

Anyone suffering from insomnia should contact their GP, and can check out our resources for ways to improve your sleep health.

Inception

While more of a movie about sleep experiments and dreaming than actual sleep, Inception, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, gives us an interesting look at our subconscious in the dream state. The film follows DiCaprio’s character entering people’s dreams and locating their secrets to steal information from their subconsciousness, with the thief eventually getting one last seemingly impossible job. As far as films about dreams go, Inception is a good indicator of how crazy our dreams can often be, showing wild and unimaginable things that feel completely real while we are experiencing them.

While we obviously can’t enter other people’s dreams, some people do experience lucid dreaming, and there are even ways to intentionally get into this lucid state and be able to decide the direction of our own dreams. There are a variety of different ways to enter a lucid dream, such as ​​visualising the type of experience that you want while lying in bed, and waking for a while about 5 or 6 hours after sleeping to immerse yourself back into your dreams. There are even benefits to lucid dreaming such as relieving anxiety and dealing with trauma.

Sleepless in Seattle

Sleepless in Seattle is another film that gives a portrayal of insomnia. The 1993 film stars Tom Hanks as a recently widowed man who is grieving his wife Maggie’s death, which leaves him unable to sleep. While Sleepless in Seattle is undoubtedly a nineties classic, its depiction of a very serious sleep disorder can be interpreted as unsatisfactory, and doesn’t quite hit the mark.

Despite not being able to sleep, Hanks’ character maintains his job and stays in relatively good shape, seeming to deal well with his insomnia when it comes to day-to-day life. Despite his grief and insomnia, the film does have a happy ending, although it may not be a groundbreaking revelation for someone looking to learn more about sleep disorders. One thing the film does get right though is that traumatic events can often trigger disorders, including those around sleep. It is important to try and get control back of our sleep in order to better deal with the trauma itself.

​​The Science of Sleep

The Science of Sleep is a surrealistic science fantasy comedy film that originally stems from a bedtime story. Dreams in film are rarely this thoroughly represented, as The Science of Sleep follows a young man grieving the death of his father as he begins a new job as a graphic designer. Our protagonist’s dreams begin to take over his waking life and he becomes caught up in his imaginary world, which in turn interferes with his life. 

This film is an interesting depiction of sleep and dreaming, in that it takes place inside the protagonist's head, as he finds it difficult to differentiate the real world from dreams. While it is rare, people who suffer from insomnia sometimes report being unable to distinguish being awake and asleep, and it has been found that some insomnia sufferers believe they are to be awake when they are in fact asleep. This shows how much sleep deprivation impacts the brain and that a person’s grasp on reality can be severely impacted by too little sleep.

For sleep related films and more, find where to watch your favourites or browse for inspiration with Ready Steady Cut’s film discovery tool.