For me, sleep has never come easy — perhaps because I’ve never let it.

I can trace my reluctance to succumb to unconsciousness as far back as kindergarten, when Mrs. Casterol inked a firm “X” in the box marked “NO” next to “Sleeps at Naptime.” On the floor, lined up alphabetically on our blankets in the dimmed classroom, I watched with horrified fascination as Bobby Rocca went lax, his eyes rolling slightly back into his skull before the lids came down and a dribble of drool collected at the corner of his mouth, from which emitted, after a brief, sucked intake, a steady, gargling drone.

I was appalled and jealous of the unabashed ease, the rapidity, with which Bobby lost control and fell away from us. I did not want this to happen to me. Instead, as Mrs. C. took a much-deserved respite, sipping water and shuffling through papers at her desk, I’d feign sleep while watching through half-cast eyes the ridge-line of little shoulders and murmuring bellies around me, the hamster spinning restlessly in his caged wheel in a haze of chalk dust and the odor of emptied shoes, a frieze of alphabet letters arrayed above us on the blackboard.

Like many insomniacs, I always feel a bit of bully pride in getting by on a few fractured hours each night while others complain if they don’t get a full, conked-out eight. For the insomniac Vladimir Nabokov, I think that sleep, which he called “the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals,” meant turning off, even for a few hours, his quicksilver, voracious consciousness. The daily nocturnal rest that presages the ultimate big sleep of mortality was for him a price both vexing and insulting, a “nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.”

As a poet, I like being the one who is awake while others sleep — the watcher, the one who courts by choice that liminal space between sleep and waking, where “reality” and inner vision blur, and all the big questions loom with heightened clarity.

Being a sleepless watcher, of course, is not all poetry. A mouth-breather and ferocious snorer myself, I have spent many a nocturnal cross-Atlantic flight in rigid discomfort as those around me doze, contorted and cramped under blankets in enviable Ambien-induced oblivion. I’ve stared for hours at the same page of a book until even my own hands become unfamiliar to me in the bedside lamp light. If all the big questions are more acute at night, that includes plenty of anxiety as well. As Philip Larkin wrote on the subject: “In time the curtain-edges will grow light./ Till then I see what’s really always there:/ Unresting death, a whole day nearer now.”

Lying awake, I worry about a daughter’s recent break-up with her boyfriend, the harassing colleague, an aging parent’s accelerating dementia, global warming — a loop of helpless navel gazing as passing headlights sketch the wall in a nada slideshow until dawn.

The insomniac is the one who, as sleet pelts the roof, is awake when, somewhere out there, a power line goes down and the humming house is extinguished to furnace-less cold and dark. She sees a mouse skittering along the baseboard toward the closet. Hears a groan from her child’s room, first signal of a night-long bout of vomiting. The insomniac stares at the ceiling as squirrels mate and scuttle in their mammalian attic lairs. Occasionally she witnesses the instant within herself when a latent suspicion suddenly takes shape as truth, palpable as the urn of light from the bathroom, and the mirror above the sink reveals a face that looks quite a lot like her mother’s.

But the sleepless night can also bring ecstatic visions. Once, standing at a window overlooking a cobbled alleyway in London hours past midnight, I saw two large men, one in a white dress and baby bonnet, holding hands and running, laughing, out into the restive, absolving city. In my own side yard, I once moved among a grazing clutch of moonlit deer undisturbed by my presence. Nursing my first-born in the wee hours of a Texas night, I watched a firefly dart about the room, and then beheld in grateful amazement my daughter arch back in my arms and smile for the first time.

Unlooked for, these gifts suggest to me that a lifelong habit of insomnia might be considered something akin to spiritual practice. Maybe to think so is just justification. True, most of the time, insomnia means hours of what can seem like futile waiting, thinking, listening, squinting into the murk. But sometimes, if I am lucky, I think I glimpse something important and redeeming beyond the self, the body, the light of day. Even if what I see is, simply, the light of day.

Lisa Russ Spaar is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Virginia. She is the author of several poetry collections and has edited two anthologies, including “Acquainted With the Night: Insomnia Poems.”