20 Things You Didn't Know About Fight Club

In many ways, insomnia is a character in Fight Club, continuing the theme of dissociation and alienation. Jack describes it as an unreal state: “everything’s far away, everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy”, just as a Subliminal Brad flickers on the screen.

An insomniac all his life, sleeplessness was key to Palahniuk’s creation of Fight Club. Writing in the Guardian in 2014, he recalls:

I wandered sleepless... exhausted, delirious, and inventing a story about a man who thought he had insomnia but was actually living a double life: whenever he thought he was asleep, his alter ego would venture forth to have all the adventures he, himself, could never consciously dare.

Tyler Durden is most alive when Jack is ‘asleep’, something Palahniuk was very familiar with, admitting that his zoned-out self had cleaned and tidied up without him being aware of it, once even doing his taxes for him.

Palahniuk obliquely refers to insomnia self-help techniques in the story. Some insomniacs open a window or drink iced water before bed: this led to Jack’s ‘ice cave’ meditational zone with its puffs of frozen breath. Tyler’s tinted shades can also be used to control sleep cycles.

This extends to the fights. The film’s exhortation to ‘pick a fight and lose’ is mirrored in studies showing that when a fighter loses, their testosterone levels drop and their metabolism slows, allowing them to sleep like babies. Supposedly this prevents him from starting a new fight before recovering from the last one.