10. Charles Dickens Suffered from Severe Insomnia and had Imaginary Friends
Charles Dickens worked like crazy at everything he undertook and rocketed to fame as a writer in his mid-twenties. Besides making a prodigious contribution to English Literature as a writer of fiction, he edited a weekly journal for twenty years and became an accomplished performer of his own works. When he didn’t work, he took night walks in the streets of London due to his inability to get any sleep during periods of extreme stress. Despite his greatness as a writer, experts suggest that he would almost certainly have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder if he was alive today.
Why? Well, let’s just say that other than fiercely driven and insomniac, Dickens was also a tearful man, stemming from when he was sent to work in a factory as a child when his father was thrown into a debtors’ prison. He denied talking about his time working in an ink factory, instead of bottling up this harrowing experience during which he would be working six days a week in squalid conditions, which he found humiliating. He found great joy and comfort in his characters and would talk about them as if they were real. And when we say real, we mean it.