SLEEPLESS IN CRT

Some Notes on the Autoportraiture of Insomnia in Home Recorded VHS Tapes

Written for the Insomnia Jam 2025

It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that the era of VHS recordings, especially those made directly from TV, are a unique and probably irreplaceable resource not only for the ephemeral media they contain but for their reflection of the unique psychological states of the home recorders themselves.

The case of the insomniac is an extreme but illustrative example.

A common experience / trope in the representation of insomnia was the vision of the “late night TV watcher”. This era is sandwiched perhaps by the classical gothic image of the “late night reader” (Young’s Night Thoughts), and followed in subsequent years by the act of online doom scrolling… But for a long time, decades, the effective symbol of the insomniac was a person watching TV… (And then by a strange metonymy, maybe not even the person, maybe even the TV infomercial itself)...

SILENT IN CHAIR

Just a random example I came across by chance. In X-Files Season 1, Episode 13 (“Beyond the Sea”), FBI agent Dana Scully is experiencing insomnia due to the death of her father. She is staying up all night, lying on the couch and watching late night infomercials. Her state is one of dulled anti-thought, a kind of hypnotic trance. Neither entirely attentive nor dissociative, quasi-vegetal, she observes the advertisement for a pattern baldness hair product with complete detachment. The choice of informercial here is extremely well made. Dana herself is completely unaffected to the irrelevant cure on offer.  Why is she watching? The only answer can be subliminal... (Wasn't her father bald?) As she is reaching the nadir of her listlessness, a sudden intrusion—the vision of her dead father (played by the eternal mysterious father, Don S. Brigs) who is watching her from a nearby chair, wordlessly mouthing an inscrutable message.

Now this kind of late-night derangement is possibly equivalent, as we noted, in any number of activities from reading to doom scrolling. What is unique about the TV broadcast era is the opportunity to record the footage directly of what the insomniac is seeing on their home VCR.

In effect, this is the only mass medium where a live experience in the first person has been commonly captured, by chance or with intent, for later viewing.

POV COLLECTOR

As someone who collects and digitizes old TV broadcasts, I have a few of these late night overshoots in my collection. I can assume it was a common enough occurrence. You can certainly argue that not all or even most of these would represent actual live insomniac POVs—that just as likely somebody left the VCR running overnight. That is very possible indeed. But psychologically, it doesn’t matter. The VCR is in effect a stand-in for the viewer, a kind of remote insomniac on your behalf. If you forgot to set the timer to end, then it effectively overshoots your intentions, staying up later than you wanted, acting, in all respects, exactly like an insomniac. Is this a virtual offloading of sleeplessness, a kind of apotropaic fetish to ward off the affliction from oneself?

POV EXHIBITS

Insomnia POV A.1, A.2 - Late Night Media Feeds

These types of feeds contained various text blocks that looped through news, weather, sports, business, and other ephemeral bits of community information. Usually done in a kind of journalistic truncated headline speech, the text ran its slow course across a few colourblocked segments of screen. Some of the stranger elements included a kind of “game” section, with quiz questions, as well as timeless sayings, aphorisms etc. Some local stations used this as an opportunity to highlight community events, making it a kind of “classified” ad.

Different networks and services had different screen patterns. Perhaps these variations in colour / blocking could be treated as flags for various factions of insomniacs?

Insomnia POV B.1 - Infomercial Loop

The classic insomniac tv experience. Short or longer infomercials for now iconic, exaggerated products, oftentimes looped in an endless hell of enthusiasm.

Insomnia POV C.1 - BNRPLs - Business News Repetition Loops

A later phenomenon, slightly more sophisticated, involved a kind of framed broadcast. There would be a ticker with weather, news blurbs, time, date and advertising along the bottom and corner. The central screen was taken up by a looping video of some key news events. The insomniac element here is felt in the endless repetition of the same sequence of events. Since the news footage is fairly long duration, the effect is at first subtle but grows more weighty upon each loop around.

ON LOOPING

In all three examples of “autoportraits” we notice the phenomenon of the loop. Indicative of a certain automatism, the footage loop is set to run overnight, whether it is a single informercial, a cascade of news items, a series of text bulletins, etc. The loop is an inescapable aspect. Like the phenomenon of insomnia which the individual suffers, the loop has no clear ending and no clear beginning, always in the middle. The loop is a “giving up” of intentionality on the part of the programmer, a relief in a sense from consciousness, a kind of media dreaming. Likewise, in the part of the viewer, the loop takes the place of thought, criticism, intention. A self-removal, in a sense, a substitute for sleep. It would not surprise me if the experience of a loop mimicked in some profound and uncanny way the mechanics of human biorhythms, those strange secret rites perpetuated in normal times under the blankets of sleep, interrupted by insomniac experience.

ON SLEEP PARALYSIS

An overlapping phenomenon that coincides with Agent Scully’s experience is that of hypnopompic visions in sleep paralysis. A widely known and widely terrifying state that mimics a lot of the same beats as the “insomniac loop” described above. An inability to escape, a fixation, a numbness and/or complete terror. One can only imagine the riches of strange overlapping imaginative scenarios that would have emerged in the prime era of television insomnia among the minds of the sleepless.

OTHER STATES

This point-of-view VHS auto-portraiture idea goes well beyond just insomnia and can be applied to any number of psychological, critical, historical or otherwise analytical states of existence. The recording has long been a prosthesis for a mind, and continues to ripen for analysis.

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Footage Referenced:

X-Files Season 01 Episode 13 - “Beyond the Sea”

May 25th 1989 VHS recording of WNPE-WNPI - Skyline Cable News Broadcast:

https://archive.org/details/wnep-may-25-1989

March 27th 1994 VHS recording of Rogers overnight feed:

https://archive.org/details/vhs-tv-channel-surfing

Undated 1980s VHS home recording of an informercial loop:

 https://archive.org/details/vhs-tv-informercial-the-all-american-pop-collection

March 24th, 2003 VHS Home Recording of CTV Newsnet loop (not yet uploaded online, will eventually be uploaded to the address below).

https://archive.org/details/@mindape