In the proem to the Book of the Duchess, Chaucer's sleepless narrator does what no dream-vision narrator had done before: he seeks to relieve his insomnia by reading.

The narrator suggests that the stories contained in this book will be restorative, that they will bring a sense of balance back to his addled brain:

The book, the narrator reveals, will not simply ‘drive the night away’ but will put him ‘in minde’ of a time when ‘men loved the lawe of kinde’. The particular appeal of such a golden-age vision of peace and accord can be found in the narrator's account of his sleeplessness. At the outset of the proem (1–27) the narrator complains of his ongoing torment, a cycle of despair that combines disorientation and exhaustion with a frenetic listlessness:

Chaucer's use of ydel here plays on the several connotations of the word current in the late fourteenth century. The narrator's thoughts are ‘empty’ or ‘void’ (OED s.v. ‘idle’ [adj.] A.1; MED s.v. ‘idel’ [adj.] 2a): they are closely associated with nothingness or absence (repeated three times in 11 lines; four times if we include ‘noght’ in line three); the idle thoughts furthermore lead to his ‘felynge in nothyng’ (11).