Once inside A Journal of Insomnia, users can follow the stories of one of four protagonists who share their own experiences with sleeplessness as well as access close to 2000 contributions from other insomniacs that have been collected since the fall of 2012.
The idea for the site was conceived by Sweeney, who is head of the NFB's French-language Digital Studio, when he became a father for the first time in the summer of 2009.
Sweeney was often up at night with his wife due to his infant daughter's irregular sleep patterns and found himself wondering about all the other people who also might be up at this hour, and the impact of sleeplessness on their lives.
[4] As one of NFB French Program's main areas of interest is works related to mental health, Sweeney began to imagine what a webdoc on insomnia might be like.
Visitors enter through a tilted doorway, then sit before a screen from which a disembodied female voice asks questions such as: "During the day, are you anxious about the coming night?"