Broken Sleep
Broken sleep is the night with no sleep in it, sleep that breaks, or rest too brief to restore the person who needs it. The conflict of the day can carry on where the speaker cannot control it, as with the fight that follows her into sleep in Would've, Could've, Should've. It shows up as twenty snatched minutes in epiphany, as the nightmare she wakes screaming from in Anti-Hero, and as the wakeful dark of Opalite. Darkness is a related motif.
Failed sleep removes any sense of respite. Conflict, fear or exhaustion carries on into the night, and the image measures its cost through the rest denied, interrupted or cut short.
Appears in 5 songs
“I wake up screaming from dreaming”
Sleep as a site of torment, the speaker's nights are filled with screaming nightmares that produce the fears catalogued throughout the song, including the bridge's imagined future betrayal.
“Only twenty minutes to sleep But you dream of some epiphany”
Sleep juxtaposes the caretaker's brief, exhausted rest with the permanent 'sleep' of death awaiting the patient. The twenty minutes marks how little respite exists, and the dreaming within that time shows how deep the exhaustion runs.
“Sleepless in the onyx night”
Wakeful suffering in the dark, the inability to rest during the period of romantic isolation and failed relationships, now resolved by the opalite dawn
“I fight with you in my sleep”
A second sleep image, separate from the death-as-sleep line elsewhere in the song. The fighting follows her past waking, the argument carrying on where she cannot control it.
“Sleep in half the day just for old times' sake”
Sleep represents the speaker's regression to her younger self when she returns home, the absence of adult responsibility and the return to childhood patterns.