unsleep

English

Etymology

un- +‎ sleep

Noun

unsleep (uncountable)

1. Sleeplessness; wakefulness.
   • 1893, Smith Baker, “Ocular Psychalgia”, in The American Journal of Insanity, volume 49, page 598:

     The more persisting condition, however, — the blueness of months, in which anything from shoe-buttons to hair fillet, from the morning kiss to the struggle in the world's arena, from the half satisfactory day's work to the dreaded night of unsleep, is colored —is not so readily elucidated or relieved; and it certainly leaves the sufferer, not elated, but genrally apprehensive of future attackes.

   • 1957, William Faulkner, The Town: A Novel of the Snopes Family:

     I hadn't even taken time to wonder what in hell she wanted with me: only the terror after the boy put the note in my hand and I found privacy to open and read it and still (the terror) in the courage, desperation, despair—call it whatever you like and whatever it was and wherever I found it — to cross to the door and open it and think as I always had each time I was near, either to dance with her or merely to challenge and give twenty or thirty pounds to an impugner of her honor: Why, she cant possibly be this small, this little, apparently standing only inches short of my own six feet yet small, little; too small to have displaced enough of my peace to contain this much unsleep, to have disarranged this much of what I had at least thought was peace.

   • 1970, Neon, page 65:

     Dreams tend to turn real in flint shadows and squint sunshine at morning when the promising young men appear slack jawed and drunk with unsleep and boredom: the young girls - how often young - are type tip tapping at bright lighted desks escaping, waking, some other kind of whoredom.

   • 2012, Richard Ford, Independence Day, page 210:

     And then a scant sleep comes, which is more sleep versus unsleep than true rest, but in which for reasons of proximity to death, I dream, half muse of Clair and our sweet-as-tea-cakes winter's romance, commencing four months after she joined our office and ending three months down the road, when she met the older, dignified Negro lawyer who was perfect for her and made my small excitations excess baggage.

2. A sleeplike state that is not true sleep.
   • 2004, Richard Burns, Richard Berengarten, For the Living: Longer Poems 1965-2000, page 149:

     Deeper than self entirely, made transparent, The dreamer enters unsleep, a new zone, And in so doing, climbs !

   • 2007, Matt Rothwell, Drunk in Charge of a Foreign Language, page 161:

     Rather than sleeping the sleep of a very drunk man, I sleep the unsleep of a wizzed out partygoer after a couple of gees too many in the company of Uncle Charles.

   • 2014, Matt Haig, Echo Boy, page 247:

     In Spain, whenever I recharged, I had descended into a dark blanket of nothingness. The empty unsleep of Echos.

Verb

unsleep (third-person singular simple present unsleeps, present participle unsleeping, simple past and past participle unslept)

1. To be wakeful.
   • 2002, Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet:

     In my own way I sleep, without slumber or repose, this vegetative life of imagining, and the distant reflection of the silent street lamps, like the quiet foam of a dirty sea, hovers behind my restless eyebrows. I sleep and unsleep.

   • 2012, Yuri Leving, Anatomy of a Short Story:

     ...the husband has not been able to learn to speak fluently the language ofhis new country; he has created a defense, as it were, against the corruption of his relief-giving memory: he reads “his Russian language newspaper”and wears over his nightgown “the old overcoat with astrakhan collar” which he much prefers to his new bathrobe; the wife unsleeps the night examining old photographs.

   • 2015, Subi Taba, Dear Bohemian Man:

     Nights in this dark bus ride where I unslept I take my time to think about everything- Because there is a place that I have to go and a thing that I have to accomplish.

2. (intransitive) To awaken; to become wakeful.
   • 1970, Rudyard Kipling, Limits and renewals. "Thy servant a dog.", page 410:

     I sat with, in case if he might unsleep.

   • 2001, Michael Burkard, Unsleeping: poems, page 80:

     And you also would unsleep to this, which is not quite like awakening because you were not quite sleeping yet, neither were you drifting.

3. (transitive) To cause someone or something to go from a sleeping state to a wakeful one, or to deprive of sleep.
   • 1974, Hugo Manning, This Room Before Sunrise, page 33:

     And into this chancy sphere we have come, into playtime of desires that destroy or unsleep us.

   • 2010, Derrick Brown, Born in the Year of the Butterfly Knife:

     I said I wanted what all guys want: to smack the beauty back into you with a light bulb revolver, to call down fire from the holy spirit and watch you incinerate in a cheap party gown, to rip you in two and make you notice how close we are to death when sleeping, to awaken that four-letter beast roaring like a fistfight in your throat that unsleeps the chaos inside you.

   • 2015, Jeffrey Lee Simons, Spirit In Realtime, page 19:

     If anyone else was around, especially her father, she unslept her computer the old fashioned way – by pressing any key and typing a password.

Anagrams

• unpeels